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

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 one­man 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 art­lovers 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