What a guy! One of the smartest persons in the world, ever, and one who never shied away from any kind of adventure, from playing the drums professionally, to drawing well enough to put on a one-man show, to picking locks and safes, to figuring out techniques for picking up show-girls in Vegas. He did everything, and anything he cared for, he worked on it until he did it well.
Quotes:
It was no secret joke that brought the smile and the sparkle in his eye, it was physics. The joy of physics!
People often think I’m a faker, but I’m usually honest, in a certain way—in such a way that often nobody believes me!
(I often had this problem of demonstrating to these fellas something that they didn’t believe—like the time we got into an argument as to whether urine just ran out of you by gravity, and I had to demonstrate that that wasn’t the case by showing them that you can pee standing on your head. Or the time when somebody claimed that if you took aspirin and Coca-Cola you’d fall over in a dead faint directly. I told them I thought it was a lot of baloney, and offered to take aspirin and Coca-Cola together. Then they got into an argument whether you should have the aspirin before the Coke, just after the Coke, or mixed in the Coke. So I had six aspirin and three Cokes, one right after the other. First, I took two aspirins and then a Coke, then we dissolved two aspirins in a Coke and I took that, and then I took a Coke and two aspirins. Each time the idiots who believed it were standing around me, waiting to catch me when I fainted. But nothing happened. I do remember that I didn’t sleep very well that night, so I got up and did a lot of figuring, and worked out some of the formulas for what is called the Riemann-Zeta function.)
The electron is a theory that we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real.
Another guy got up, and another, and I tell you I have never heard such ingenious different ways of looking at a brick before. And, just like it should in all stories about philosophers, it ended up in complete chaos.
They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
That’s the trouble with not being in your own field: You don’t take it seriously.
I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I’m trying to understand: I keep making up examples.
I thought to myself, “I’ve gotta be brave. I’ve gotta eat an oyster.”
All science stopped during the war except the little bit that was done at Los Alamos. And that was not much science; it was mostly engineering.
(About the military:) That’s what they’re very good at—making decisions. I thought it was very remarkable how a problem of whether or not information as to how the bomb works should be in the Oak Ridge plant had to be decided and could be decided in five minutes.
The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful.
And Von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of Von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since. But it was Von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility!
I’d be in there alone and I’d open the safe in a few minutes. All I had to do was try the first number at most twenty times, then sit around, reading a magazine or something, for fifteen or twenty minutes. There was no use trying to make it look too easy
And then I thought to myself, “You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it’s impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!” It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing. [...] I am what I am, and if they expected me to be good and they’re offering me some money for it, it’s their hard luck.
I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, “Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is…” and I showed him the accelerations. He says, “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?” “Hah!” I say. “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.”
I noticed a difference: When we’d dig a hole, there’d be all kinds of detour signs and flashing lights to protect us. There [(Brazil)], they dig the hole, and when they’re finished for the day, they just leave.
After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. [...] One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions.
Since then I never pay any attention to anything by “experts.” I calculate everything myself. ... I’ll never make that mistake again, reading the experts’ opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that’s the end of you.
I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion. It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run “behind the scenes” by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is.
I knew it was impossible to draw well that way, and therefore it didn’t have to be good—and that’s really what the loosening up was all about. I had thought that “loosen up” meant “make sloppy drawings,” but it really meant to relax and not worry about how the drawing is going to come out.
It’s a funny thing which must make artists, generally, unhappy—how much improved a drawing gets when you put a frame around it.
In the early fifties I suffered temporarily from a disease of middle age: I used to give philosophical talks about science.
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.”
There were a lot of fools at that conference—pompous fools—and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools—guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus—THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!
I know that’s the way the government works; well, screw the government! I feel that human beings should treat human beings like human beings.
For me, who had never had any “culture,” to end up as a professional musician for a ballet was the height of achievement, as it were.
I think that, perhaps, the interpretation of hallucinations and dreams is a self-propagating process: you’ll have a general, more or less, success at it, especially if you discuss it carefully ahead of time.
Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going, but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly. But fifteen minutes was fast enough for me.
One time I sat down in a bath [in Esalen] where there was a beautiful girl sitting with a guy who didn’t seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, “Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude babe?”
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