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

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paying out one hundred! So I finally understood how he could do that. This process went on for a few days. He would invent some scheme that sounded like a terrific deal at first, but after I thought about it for a while I'd slowly figure out how it worked. Finally, in some sort of desperation he says, "All right, I'll tell you what: You pay me fifty dollars for the advice, and if you lose, I'll pay you back all your money." Now I can't lose on that! So I say, "All right, you've got a deal!" "Fine," he says. "But unfortunately, I have to go to San Francisco this weekend, so you just mail me the results, and if you lose your four hundred dollars, I'll send you the money." The first schemes were designed to make him money by honest arithmetic. Now, he's going to be out of town. The only way he's going to make money on this scheme is not to send it to be a real cheat. So I never accepted any of his offers. But it was very entertaining to see how he operated. The other thing that was fun in Las Vegas was meeting show girls. I guess they were supposed to hang around the bar between shows to attract customers. I met several of them that way, and talked to them, and found them to be nice people. People who say, "Show girls, eh?" have already made up their mind what they are! But in any group, if you look at it, there's all kinds of variety. For example, there was the daughter of a dean of an Eastern university. She had a talent for dancing and liked to dance; she had the summer off and dancing jobs were hard to find, so she worked as a chorus girl in Las Vegas. Most of the show girls were very nice, friendly people. They were all beautiful, and I just love beautiful girls. In fact, show girls were my real reason for liking Las Vegas so much. At first I was a little bit afraid: the girls were so beautiful, they had such a reputation, and so forth. I would try to meet them, and I'd choke a little bit when I talked. It was difficult at first, but gradually it got easier, and finally I had enough confidence that I wasn't afraid of anybody. I had a way of having adventures which is hard to explain: it's like fishing, where you put a line out and then you have to have patience. When I would tell someone about some of my adventures, they might say, "Oh, come on let's do that!" So we would go to a bar to see if something will happen, and they would lose patience after twenty minutes or so. You have to spend a couple of days before something happens, on average. I spent a lot of time talking to show girls. One would introduce me to another, and after a while, something interesting would often happen. I remember one girl who liked to drink Gibsons. She danced at the Flamingo Hotel, and I got to know her rather well. When I'd come into town, I'd order a Gibson put at her table before she sat down, to announce my arrival. One time I went over and sat next to her and she said, "I'm with a man tonight a highroller from Texas." (I had already heard about this guy. Whenever he'd play at the craps table, everybody would gather around to see him gamble.) He came back to the table where we were sitting, and my show girl friend introduced me to him. The first thing he said to me was, "You know somethin'? I lost sixty thousand dollars here last night." I knew what to do: I turned to him, completely unimpressed, and I said, "Is that supposed to be smart, or stupid?"
We were eating breakfast in the dining room. He said, "Here, let me sign your check. They don't charge me for all these things because I gamble so much here." "I've got enough money that I don't need to worry about who pays for my breakfast, thank you." I kept putting him down each time he tried to impress me. He tried everything: how rich he was, how much oil he had in Texas, and nothing worked, because I knew the formula! We ended up having quite a bit of fun together. One time when we were sitting at the bar he said to me, "You see those girls at the table over there? They're whores from Los Angeles." They looked very nice; they had a certain amount of class. He said, "Tell you what I'll do: I'll introduce them to you, and then I'll pay for the one you want." I didn't feel like meeting the girls, and I knew he was saying that to impress me, so I began to tell him no. But then I thought, "This is something! This guy is trying so hard to impress me, he's willing to buy this for me. If I'm ever going to tell the story. . ." So I said to him, "Well, OK, introduce me." We went over to their table and he introduced me to the girls and then went off for a moment. A waitress came around and asked us what we wanted to drink. I ordered some water, and the girl next to me said, "Is it all right if I have a champagne?" "You can have whatever you want," I replied, coolly, " 'cause you're payin' for it." "What's the matter with you?" she said. "Cheapskate, or something?" "That's right." "<strong>You're</strong> certainly not a gentleman!" she said indignantly. "You figured me out immediately!" I replied. I had learned in New Mexico many years before not to be a gentleman. Pretty soon they were offering to buy me drinks the tables were turned completely! (By the way, the Texas oilman never came back.) After a while, one of the girls said, "Let's go over to the El Rancho. Maybe things are livelier over there." We got in their car. It was a nice car, and they were nice people. On the way, they asked me my name. "Dick <strong>Feynman</strong>." "Where are you from, Dick? What do you do?" "I'm from Pasadena; I work at Caltech." One of the girls said, "Oh, isn't that the place where that scientist Pauling conies from?" I had been in Las Vegas many times, over and over, and there was nobody who ever knew anything about science. I had talked to businessmen of all kinds, and to them, a scientist was a nobody. "Yeah!" I said, astonished. "And there's a fella named Gellan, or something like that a physicist." I couldn't believe it. I was riding in a car full of prostitutes and they know all this stuff! "Yeah! His name is GellMann! How did you happen to know that?" "Your pictures were in Time magazine." It's true, they had pictures often U.S. scientists in Time magazine, for some reason. I was in it, and so were Pauling and Gell Mann. "How did you remember the names?" I asked. "Well, we were looking through the pictures, and we picked out the youngest and
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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
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I asked the Bell Labs if they would
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the fuse won't burn! I decided that
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that he wanted to try to develop. H
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Mexico," the man says, "Oh, so all
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meantime, what instructions go down
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said, "No codes." So I wrote back t
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I looked at it and said, "That look
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people that I wanted were there, an
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different where you go first t
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concentrate on this one. So they st
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it was very difficult. Now, us
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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 and 106: level. . . "Excuse me, sir," I say,
Page 107 and 108: I liked to imitate being drunk, so
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: Certainly, Mr. Big! I used to cross
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
Page 157 and 158: She told me this story: She and her
Page 159 and 160: were these fluorescent colors on bl
Page 161 and 162: they came back and bought it. So th
Page 163 and 164: with the artists from time to time
Page 165 and 166: understand," and everybody else wou
Page 167 and 168: way to understand ethical problems
Page 169 and 170: families all the time, so that if a
Page 171 and 172: that they called "new math," and si
Page 173 and 174: awful! All it was was a game to get
Page 175 and 176: then there was something else. And
Page 177 and 178: one. Then the question came up, "Wi
Page 179 and 180: 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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