Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (37 page)

“Five, six times a week.” (That got into the papers: The Caltech professor of physics goes to see topless dancing six times a week.)

“What sections of the community were represented at Gianonni’s?”

“Nearly every section: there were guys from the real estate business, a guy from the city governing board, workmen from the gas station, guys from engineering firms, a professor of physics

“So would you say that topless entertainment is acceptable to the community, given that so many sections of it are watching it and enjoying it?”

“I need to know what you mean by ‘acceptable to the community.’ Nothing is accepted by _everybody_, so what _percentage_ of the community must accept something in order for it to be ‘acceptable to the community’?”

The lawyer suggests a figure. The other lawyer objects. The judge calls a recess, and they all go into chambers for 15 minutes before they can decide that “acceptable to the community” means accepted by 50% of the community.

In spite of the fact that I made them be precise, I had no precise numbers as evidence, so I said, “I believe that topless dancing is accepted by more than 50% of the community, and is therefore acceptable to the community.”

Gianonni temporarily lost the case, and his, or another one very similar to it, went ultimately to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, his place stayed open, and I got still more free 7-Ups.

Around that time there were some attempts to develop an interest in art at Caltech. Somebody contributed the money to convert an old plant sciences building into some art studios. Equipment and supplies were bought and provided for the students, and they hired an artist from South Africa to coordinate and support the art activities around Caltech.

Various people came in to teach classes. I got Jerry Zorthian to teach a drawing class, and some guy came in to teach lithography, which I tried to learn.

The South African artist came over to my house one time to look at my drawings. He said he thought it would be fun to have a one-man show. This time I was cheating: If I hadn’t been a professor at Caltech, they would have never thought my pictures were worth it.

“Some of my better drawings have been sold, and I feel uncomfortable calling the people,” I said.

“You don’t have to worry, Mr. Feynman,” he reassured me. “You won’t have to call them up. We will make all the arrangements and operate the exhibit officially and correctly.”

I gave him a list of people who had bought my drawings, and they soon received a telephone call from him: “We understand that you have an Ofey.”

“Oh, yes!”

“We are planning to have an exhibition of Ofeys, and we’re wondering if you would consider lending it to us.” Of course they were delighted.

The exhibition was held in the basement of the Athenaeum, the Caltech faculty club. Everything was like the real thing: All the pictures had titles, and those that had been taken on consignment from their owners had due recognition: “Lent by Mr. Gianonni,” for instance.

One drawing was a portrait of the beautiful blonde model from the art class, which I had originally intended to be a study of shading: I put a light at the level of her legs a bit to the side and pointed it upwards. As she sat, I tried to draw the shadows as they were–her nose cast its shadow rather unnaturally across her face–so they wouldn’t look so bad. I drew her torso as well, so you could also see her breasts and the shadows they made. I stuck it in with the other drawings in the exhibit and called it “Madame Curie Observing the Radiations from Radium.” The message I intended to convey was, nobody thinks of Madame Curie as a woman, as feminine, with beautiful hair, bare breasts, and all that. They only think of the radium part.

A prominent industrial designer named Henry Dreyfuss invited various people to a reception at his home after the exhibition–the woman who had contributed money to support the arts, the president of Caltech and his wife, and so on.

One of these art-lovers came over and started up a conversation with me: “Tell me, Professor Feynman, do you draw from photographs or from models?”

“I always draw directly from a posed model.”

“Well, how did you get Madame Curie to pose for you?”

Around that time the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a similar idea to the one I had, that artists are far away from an understanding of science. My idea was that artists don’t understand the underlying generality and beauty of nature and her laws (and therefore cannot portray this in their art). The museum’s idea was that artists should know more about technology: they should become more familiar with machines and other applications of science.

The art museum organized a scheme in which they would get some of the really good artists of the day to go to various companies which volunteered some time and money to the project. The artists would visit these companies and snoop around until they saw something interesting that they could use in their work. The museum thought it might help if someone who knew something about technology could be a sort of liaison with the artists from time to time as they visited the companies. Since they knew I was fairly good at explaining things to people and I wasn’t a complete jackass when it came to art (actually, I think they knew I was trying to learn to draw)–at any rate, they asked me if I would do that, and I agreed.

It was lots of fun visiting the companies with the artists. What typically happened was, some guy would show us a tube that discharged sparks in beautiful blue, twisting patterns. The artists would get all excited and ask me how they could use it in an exhibit. What were the necessary conditions to make it work?

The artists were very interesting people. Some of them were absolute fakes: they would claim to be an artist, and everybody agreed they were an artist, hut when you’d sit and talk to them, they’d make no sense whatsoever! One guy in particular, the biggest faker, always dressed ftmny; he had a big black bowler hat. He would answer your questions in an incomprehensible way, and when you’d try to find out more about what he said by asking him about some of the words he used, off we’d be in another direction! The only thing he contributed, ultimately, to the exhibit for art and technology was a portrait of himself.

Other artists I talked to would say things that made no sense at first, but they would go to great lengths to explain their ideas to me. One time I went somewhere, as a part of this scheme, with Robert Irwin. It was a two-day trip, and after a great effort of discussing back and forth, I finally understood what he was trying to explain to me, and I thought it was quite interesting and wonderful.

Then there were the artists who had absolutely no idea about the real world. They thought that scientists were some kind of grand magicians who could make anything, and would say things like, “I want to make a picture in three dimensions where the figure is suspended in space and it glows and flickers.” They made up the world they wanted, and had no idea what was reasonable or unreasonable to make.

Finally there was an exhibit, and I was asked to be on a panel which judged the works of art. Although there was some good stuff that was inspired by the artists’ visiting the companies, I thought that most of the good works of art were things that were turned in at the last minute out of desperation, and didn’t really have anything to do with technology. All of the other members of the panel disagreed, and I found myself in some difficulty. I’m no good at criticizing art, and I shouldn’t have been on the panel in the first place.

There was a guy there at the county art museum named Maurice Tuchman who really knew what he was talking about when it came to art. He knew that I had had this one-man show at Caltech. He said, “You know, you’re never going to draw again.”

“What? That’s ridiculous! Why should I never.

“Because you’ve had a one-man show, and you’re only an amateur.”

Although I did draw after that, I never worked as hard, with the same energy and intensity, as I did before. I never sold a drawing after that, either. He was a smart fella, and I learned a lot from him. I could have learned a lot more, if I weren’t so stubborn!

——————–
Is Electricity Fire?
——————–

In the early fifties I suffered temporarily from a disease of middle age: I used to give philosophical talks about science–how science satisfies curiosity, how it gives you a new world view, how it gives man the ability to do things, how it gives him power–and the question is, in view of the recent development of the atomic bomb, is it a good idea to give man that much power? I also thought about the relation of science and religion, and it was about this time when I was invited to a conference in New York that was going to discuss “the ethics of equality.”

There had already been a conference among the older people, somewhere on Long Island, and this year they decided to have some younger people come in and discuss the position papers they had worked out in the other conference.

Before I got there, they sent around a list of “books you might find interesting to read, and please send us any books you want others to read, and we will store them in the library so that others may read them.”

So here comes this wonderful list of books. I start down the first page: I haven’t read a single one of the books, and I feel very uneasy–I hardly belong. I look at the second page: I haven’t read a single one. I found out, after looking through the whole list, that I haven’t read _any_ of the books. I must be an idiot, an illiterate! There were wonderful books there, like Thomas Jefferson _On Freedom_, or something like that, and there were a few _authors_ I had read. There was a book by Heisenberg, one by Schrodinger, and one by Einstein, but they were something like Einstein, _My Later Years_ and Schrodinger, _What Is Life_–different from what I had read. So I had a feeling that I was out of my depth, and that I shouldn’t be _in_ this. Maybe I could just sit quietly and listen.

I go to the first big introductory meeting, and a guy gets up and explains that we have two problems to discuss. The first one is fogged up a little bit–something about ethics and equality, but I don’t understand what the problem _exactly_ is. And the second one is, “We are going to demonstrate by our efforts a way that we can have a dialogue among people of different fields.” There was an international lawyer, a historian, a Jesuit priest, a rabbi, a scientist (me), and so on.

Well, right away my logical mind goes like this: The second problem I don’t have to pay any attention to, because if it works, it works; and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work– we don’t have to prove that we can have a dialogue, and _discuss_ that we can have a dialogue, if we haven’t got any dialogue to talk about! So the primary problem is the first one, which I didn’t understand.

I was ready to put my hand up and say, “Would you please define the problem better,” but then I thought, “No, _I’m_ the ignoramus; I’d better listen. I don’t want to start trouble right away.”

The subgroup I was in was supposed to discuss the “ethics of equality in education.” In the meetings of our subgroup the Jesuit priest was always talking about “the fragmentation of knowledge.” He would say, “The real problem in the ethics of equality in education is the fragmentation of knowledge.” This Jesuit was looking back into the thirteenth century when the Catholic Church was in charge of all education, and the whole world was simple. There was God, and everything came from God; it was all organized. But today, it’s not so easy to understand everything. So knowledge has become fragmented. I felt that “the fragmentation of knowledge” had nothing to do with “it,” but “it” had never been defined, so there was no way for me to prove that.

Finally I said, “What is the ethical problem associated with the fragmentation of knowledge?” He would only answer me with great clouds of fog, and I’d say, “I don’t understand,” and everybody else would say they _did_ understand, and _they_ tried to explain it to me, but they couldn’t explain it to me!

So the others in the group told me to write down why I thought the fragmentation of knowledge was not a problem of ethics. I went back to my dormitory room and I wrote out carefully, as best I could, what I thought the subject of “the ethics of equality in education” might be, and I gave some examples of the kinds of problems I thought we might be talking about, For instance, in education, you increase differences. If someone’s good at something, you try to develop his ability, which results in differences, or inequalities. So if education increases inequality, is this ethical? Then, after giving some more examples, I went on to say that while “the fragmentation of knowledge” is a difficulty because the complexity of the world makes it hard to learn things, in light of my definition of the _realm_ of the subject, I couldn’t see how the fragmentation of knowledge had anything to do with anything _approximating_ what the ethics of equality in education might more or less be.

The next day I brought my paper into the meeting, and the guy said, “Yes, Mr. Feynman has brought up some very interesting questions we ought to discuss, and we’ll put them aside for some possible future discussion.” They completely missed the point. I was trying to define the problem, and then show how “the fragmentation of knowledge” didn’t have anything to do with it. And the reason that nobody got anywhere in that conference was that they hadn’t clearly defined the subject of “the ethics of equality in education,” and therefore no one knew exactly what they were supposed to talk about.

There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read–something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself, “I’m gonna stop, and read _one sentence_ slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means.”

So I stopped–at random–and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”