Richard Feynman - “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” - Adventures of a Curious Character

The other guy’s afraid, so he says no. So I take the two girls in a taxi to the hotel, and discover that there’s a dance organized by the deaf and dumb, believe it or not. They all belonged to a club. It turns out many of them can feel the rhythm enough to dance to the music and applaud the band at the end of each number.

It was very, very interesting! I felt as if I was in a foreign country and couldn’t speak the language: I could speak, but nobody could hear me. Everybody was talking with signs to everybody else, and I couldn’t understand anything! I asked my girl to teach me some signs and I learned a few, like you learn a foreign language, just for fun.

Everyone was so happy and relaxed with each other, making jokes and smiling all the time; they didn’t seem to have any real difficulty of any kind communicating with each other. It was the same as with any other language, except for one thing: as they’re making signs to each other, their heads were always turning from one side to the other. I realized what that was. When someone wants to make a side remark or interrupt you, he can’t yell, “Hey, Jack!” He can only make a signal, which you won’t catch unless you’re in the habit of looking around all the time.

They were completely comfortable with each other. It was my problem to be comfortable. It was a wonderful experience.

The dance went on for a long time, and when it closed down we went to a cafeteria. They were all ordering things by pointing to them. I remember somebody asking in signs, “Where-are-you-from?” and my girl spelling out “N-e-w Y-o-r-k.” I still remember a guy signing to me “Good sport!”—he holds his thumb up, and then touches an imaginary lapel, for “sport.” It’s a nice system.

Everybody was sitting around, making jokes, and getting me into their world very nicely. I wanted to buy a bottle of milk, so I went up to the guy at the counter and mouthed the word “milk” without saying anything.

The guy didn’t understand.

I made the symbol for “milk,” which is two fists moving as if you’re milking a cow, and he didn’t catch that either.

I tried to point to the sign that showed the price of milk, but he still didn’t catch on.

Finally, some stranger nearby ordered milk, and I pointed to it.

“Oh! Milk!” he said, as I nodded my head yes.

He handed me the bottle, and I said, “Thank you very much!”

“You SON of a GUN!” he said, smiling.

I often liked to play tricks on people when I was at MIT. One time, in mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a piece of plastic for drawing smooth curves—a curly, funny-looking thing) and said, “I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?”

I thought for a moment and said, “Sure they do. The curves are very special curves. Lemme show ya,” and I picked up my French curve and began to turn it slowly. “The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal.”

All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is horizontal. They were all excited by this “discovery”—even though they had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already “learned” that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any curve is zero (horizontal). They didn’t put two and two together. They didn’t even know what they “knew.”

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

I did the same kind of trick four years later at Princeton when I was talking with an experienced character, an assistant of Einstein, who was surely working with gravity all the time. I gave him a problem: You blast off in a rocket which has a clock on board, and there’s a clock on the ground. The idea is that you have to be back when the clock on the ground says one hour has passed. Now you want it so that when you come back, your clock is as far ahead as possible. According to Einstein, if you go very high, your clock will go faster, because the higher something is in a gravitational field, the faster its clock goes. But if you try to go too high, since you’ve only got an hour, you have to go so fast to get there that the speed slows your clock down. So you can’t go too high. The question is, exactly what program of speed and height should you make so that you get the maximum time on your clock?

This assistant of Einstein worked on it for quite a bit before he realized that the answer is the real motion of matter. If you shoot something up in a normal way, so that the time it takes the shell to go up and come down is an hour, that’s the correct motion. It’s the fundamental principle of Einstein’s gravity—that is, what’s called the “proper time” is at a maximum for the actual curve. But when I put it to him, about a rocket with a clock, he didn’t recognize it. It was just like the guys in mechanical drawing class, but this time it wasn’t dumb freshmen. So this kind of fragility is, in fact, fairly common, even with more learned people.

When I was a junior or senior I used to eat at a certain restaurant in Boston. I went there by myself, often on successive evenings. People got to know me, and I had the same waitress all the time.

I noticed that they were always in a hurry, rushing around, so one day, just for fun, I left my tip, which was usually ten cents (normal for those days), in two nickels, under two glasses: I filled each glass to the very top, dropped a nickel in, and with a card over it, turned it over so it was upside down on the table. Then I slipped out the card (no water leaks out because no air can come in—the rim is too close to the table for that).

I put the tip under two glasses because I knew they were always in a hurry. If the tip was a dime in one glass, the waitress, in her haste to get the table ready for the next customer, would pick up the glass, the water would spill out, and that would be the end of it. But after she does that with the first glass, what the hell is she going to do with the second one? She can’t just have the nerve to lift it up now!

On the way out I said to my waitress, “Be careful, Sue. There’s something funny about the glasses you gave me—they’re filled in on the top, and there’s a hole on the bottom!”

The next day I came back, and I had a new waitress. My regular waitress wouldn’t have anything to do with me. “Sue’s very angry at you,” my new waitress said. “After she picked up the first glass and water went all over the place, she called the boss out. They studied it a little bit, but they couldn’t spend all day figuring out what to do, so they finally picked up the other one, and water went out again, all over the floor. It was a terrible mess; Sue slipped later in the water. They’re all mad at you.”

I laughed.

She said, “It’s not funny! How would you like it if someone did that to you—what would you do?”

“I’d get a soup plate and then slide the glass very carefully over to the edge of the table, and let the water run into the soup plate—it doesn’t have to run onto the floor. Then I’d take the nickel out.”

“Oh, that’s a goood idea,” she said.

That evening I left my tip under a coffee cup, which I left upside down on the table.

The next night I came and I had the same new waitress.

“What’s the idea of leaving the cup upside down last time?”

“Well, I thought that even though you were in a hurry, you’d have to go back into the kitchen and get a soup plate; then you’d have to sloooowly and carefully slide the cup over to the edge of the table …”