"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

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to the government to patent. Now, it's some dopey legal thing, but when you give the patent to the government, the document you sign is not a legal document unless there's some exchange, so the paper I signed said, "For the sum of one dollar, I, Richard P. <strong>Feynman</strong>, give this idea to the government. . ." I sign the paper. "Where's my dollar?" "That's just a formality," he says. "We haven't got any funds set up to give a dollar." "You've got it all set up that I'm signing for the dollar," I say. "I want my dollar!" "This is silly," Smith protests. "No, it's not," I say. "It's a legal document. You made me sign it, and I'm an honest man. There's no fooling around about it." "All right, all right!" he says, exasperated. "I'll give you a dollar, from my pocket!" "OK." I take the dollar, and I realize what I'm going to do. I go down to the grocery store, and I buy a dollar's worth which was pretty good, then of cookies and goodies, those chocolate goodies with marshmallow inside, a whole lot of stuff. I come back to the theoretical laboratory, and I give them out: "I got a prize, everybody! Have a cookie! I got a prize! A dollar for my patent! I got a dollar for my patent!" Everybody who had one of those patents a lot of people had been sending them in everybody comes down to Captain Smith: they want their dollar! He starts shelling them out of his pocket, but soon realizes that it's going to be a hemorrhage! He went crazy trying to set up a fund where he could get the dollars these guys were insisting on. I don't know how he settled up. You Just AskThem? When I was first at Cornell I corresponded with a girl I had met in New Mexico while I was working on the bomb. I got to thinking, when she mentioned some other fella she knew, that I had better go out there quickly at the end of the school year and try to save the situation. But when I got out there, I found it was too late, so I ended up in a motel in Albuquerque with a free summer and nothing to do. The Casa Grande Motel was on Route 66, the main highway through town. About three places further down the road there was a little nightclub that had entertainment. Since I had nothing to do, and since I enjoyed watching and meeting people in bars, I very often went to this nightclub. When I first went there I was talking with some guy at the bar, and we noticed a whole table full of nice young ladies TWA hostesses, I think they were who were having some sort of birthday party. The other guy said, "Come on, let's get up our nerve and ask them to dance." So we asked two of them to dance, and afterwards they invited us to sit with the other girls at the table. After a few drinks, the waiter came around: "Anybody want anything?"
I liked to imitate being drunk, so although I was completely sober, I turned to the girl I'd been dancing with and asked her in a drunken voice, "YaWANanything?" "What can we have?" she asks. "Annnnnnnnnnnnything you want ANYTHING!" "All right! We'll have champagne!" she says happily. So I say in a loud voice that everybody in the bar can hear, "OK! Chch champagne for evvverybody!" Then I hear my friend talking to my girl, saying what a dirty trick it is to "take all that dough from him because he's drunk," and I'm beginning to think maybe I made a mistake. Well, nicely enough, the waiter comes over to me, leans down, and says in a low voice, "Sir, that's sixteen dollars a bottle." I decide to drop the idea of champagne for everybody, so I say in an even louder voice than before, "NEVER MIND!" I was therefore quite surprised when, a few moments later, the waiter came back to the table with all his fancy stuff a white towel over his arm, a tray full of glasses, an ice bucket full of ice, and a bottle of champagne. He thought I meant, "Never mind the price," when I meant, "Never mind the champagne!" The waiter served champagne to everybody, I paid out the sixteen dollars, and my friend was mad at my girl because he thought she had got me to pay all this dough. But as far as I was concerned, that was the end of it though it turned out later to be the beginning of a new adventure. I went to that nightclub quite often and as the weeks went by, the entertainment changed. The performers were on a circuit that went through Amarillo and a lot of other places in Texas, and God knows where else. There was also a permanent singer who was at the nightclub, whose name was Tamara. Every time a new group of performers came to the club, Tamara would introduce me to one of the girls from the group. The girl would come and sit down with me at my table, I would buy her a drink, and we'd talk. Of course I would have liked to do more than just talk, but there was always something the matter at the last minute. So I could never understand why Tamara always went to the trouble of introducing me to all these nice girls, and then, even though things would start out all right, I would always end up buying drinks, spending the evening talking, but that was it. My friend, who didn't have the advantage of Tamara's introductions, wasn't getting anywhere either we were both clunks. After a few weeks of different shows and different girls, a new show came, and as usual Tamara introduced me to a girl from the group, and we went through the usual thing I'm buying her drinks, we're talking, and she's being very nice. She went and did her show, and afterwards she came back to me at my table, and I felt pretty good. People would look around and think, "What's he got that makes this girl come to him?" But then, at some stage near the close of the evening, she said something that by this time I had heard many times before: "I'd like to have you come over to my room tonight, but we're having a party, so perhaps tomorrow night. . ." and I knew what this "perhaps tomorrow night" meant: NOTHING. Well, I noticed throughout the evening that this girl her name was Gloria talked quite often with the master of ceremonies, during the show, and on her way to and from the ladies' room. So one time, when she was in the ladies' room and the master of
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
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Preface The stories in this book we
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He Fixes Radios by Thinking! Part 1
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could act like a microphone, and yo
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whole afternoon to find a burnedo
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For logarithms it was a big L exten
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very sharp knife into the table at
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and be more relaxed, and vice versa
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One time I danced with a certain gi
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same waitress all the time. I notic
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"Cut it out, Feynman; this is seri
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could find. Before I tell you what
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observations were made while I was
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I decided there must be an "interpr
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company. His father was the one who
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we could do. Our process was pretty
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out of me, because I didn't like fo
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In the Princeton cyclotron lab they
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When it was time to get up and go o
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and animal, are made of little bric
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some other experiment. I said, "Hel
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We figured if we could get rid of t
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do?" I said I didn't know, and he s
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always something I could find in th
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Atlantic City, where they had vario
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though it was a microscope of forty
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lowing" it occurred. I followed eig
Page 55 and 56: I asked the Bell Labs if they would
Page 57 and 58: the fuse won't burn! I decided that
Page 59 and 60: that he wanted to try to develop. H
Page 61 and 62: Mexico," the man says, "Oh, so all
Page 63 and 64: meantime, what instructions go down
Page 65 and 66: said, "No codes." So I wrote back t
Page 67 and 68: I looked at it and said, "That look
Page 69 and 70: people that I wanted were there, an
Page 71 and 72: different where you go first t
Page 73 and 74: concentrate on this one. So they st
Page 75 and 76: it was very difficult. Now, us
Page 77 and 78: was radioactive. It was plutonium.
Page 79 and 80: One guy tries to make something to
Page 81 and 82: Everybody was amazed. It was comple
Page 83 and 84: it appeared, depends on the same li
Page 85 and 86: Hoffman is just the kind of guy to
Page 87 and 88: mathematical constant?" "Oh, no!" d
Page 89 and 90: of little cubbyholes that contained
Page 91 and 92: himself! So I turn around, and sure
Page 93 and 94: "No. Do you?" "Well, I'm keeping an
Page 95 and 96: partly in the strength of our futur
Page 97 and 98: have any room either. I say to the
Page 99 and 100: answered the questions. Everything
Page 101 and 102: around faster than the wobbling. I
Page 103 and 104: ar, with all its "temptations," and
Page 105: level. . . "Excuse me, sir," I say,
Page 109 and 110: you been?" At this moment the guy t
Page 111 and 112: "What?" "That's right," he said con
Page 113 and 114: After that, I tried to do those thi
Page 115 and 116: He was completely washed out, and l
Page 117 and 118: Monday, at the latest. I got all up
Page 119 and 120: The people from the airlines were s
Page 121 and 122: The boss said, "Where're you from?"
Page 123 and 124: eaches, where most people felt thei
Page 125 and 126: super: He answered everything nifty
Page 127 and 128: y first learning to pronounce the l
Page 129 and 130: Certainly, Mr. Big! I used to cross
Page 131 and 132: We were eating breakfast in the din
Page 133 and 134: "That must have been it," I said. I
Page 135 and 136: some kind of big pain, and it start
Page 137 and 138: the two piles of hay, with the extr
Page 139 and 140: I must refuse. The reason I have to
Page 141 and 142: hotel. I pushed open the doors and
Page 143 and 144: "Well, yes. . ." "Hoompf." And that
Page 145 and 146: something like, "May I observe your
Page 147 and 148: in fact, a prediction on top of wha
Page 149 and 150: "The one from SoandSo's book."
Page 151 and 152: government, or else I can't talk in
Page 153 and 154: et Jerry that he wouldn't be able t
Page 155 and 156: at the paper. Don't take your eyes
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She told me this story: She and her
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were these fluorescent colors on bl
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they came back and bought it. So th
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with the artists from time to time
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understand," and everybody else wou
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way to understand ethical problems
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families all the time, so that if a
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that they called "new math," and si
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awful! All it was was a game to get
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then there was something else. And
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one. Then the question came up, "Wi
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I got that shock about three or fou
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had been brought up by my father ag
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She turned to me and said, "Oh! You
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astronomy. *When I was a young prof
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After the colloquium at UCLA Profes
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So the fella who'd been talking to
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andleader said, "Geez! Who was that
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who had come out at the beginning o
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"This is the place," the receptioni
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my way down again. At first it took
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external to the internal psychologi
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people with commonsense ideas are i
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think to laymen. For example, I was
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to have such a policy in teaching
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

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