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

et Jerry that he wouldn't be able to teach me to draw.
"Of course you'll have to work," he said.
I promised to work, but still bet that he couldn't teach me to draw. I wanted very
much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: 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. It's a feeling of awe ­­ of scientific awe ­­ which I felt could
be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It could
remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.
Jerry turned out to be a very good teacher. He told me first to go home and draw
anything. So I tried to draw a shoe; then I tried to draw a flower in a pot. It was a mess!
The next time we met I showed him my attempts: "Oh, look!" he said. "You see,
around in back here, the line of the flower pot doesn't touch the leaf." (I had meant the
line to come up to the leaf.) "That's very good. It's a way of showing depth. That's very
clever of you."
"And the fact that you don't make all the lines the same thickness (which I didn't
mean to do) is good. A drawing with all the lines the same thickness is dull." It continued
like that: Everything that I thought was a mistake, he used to teach me something in a
positive way. He never said it was wrong; he never put me down. So I kept on trying, and
I gradually got a little bit better, but I was never satisfied.
To get more practice I also signed up for a correspondence school course, with
International Correspondence Schools, and I must say they were good. They started me
off drawing pyramids and cylinders, shading them and so on. We covered many areas:
drawing, pastels, watercolors, and paints. Near the end I petered out: I made an oil
painting for them, but I never sent it in. They kept sending me letters urging me to
continue. They were very good.
I practiced drawing all the time, and became very interested in it. If I was at a
meeting that wasn't getting anywhere ­­ like the one where Carl Rogers came to Caltech
to discuss with us whether Caltech should develop a psychology department ­­ I would
draw the other people. I had a little pad of paper I kept with me and I practiced drawing
wherever I went. So, as Jerry taught me, I worked very hard.
Jerry, on the other hand, didn't learn much physics. His mind wandered too easily.
I tried to teach him something about electricity and magnetism, but as soon as I
mentioned "electricity," he'd tell me about some motor he had that didn't work, and how
might he fix it. When I tried to show him how an electromagnet works by making a little
coil of wire and hanging a nail on a piece of string, I put the voltage on, the nail swung
into the coil, and Jerry said, "Ooh! It's just like fucking!" So that was the end of that.
So now we have a new argument­whether he's a better teacher than I was, or I'm a
better student than he was.
I gave up the idea of trying to get an artist to appreciate the feeling I had about
nature so he could portray it. I would now have to double my efforts in learning to draw