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

morning."­­ and I hung up.
My wife said, "Who was that?"
"They told me I won the Nobel Prize."
"Oh, Richard, who was it?" I often kid around and she is so smart that she never
gets fooled, but this time I caught her.
The phone rings again: "Professor Feynman, have you heard. . ."
(In a disappointed voice) "Yeah."
Then I began to think, "How can I turn this all off? I don't want any of this!" So
the first thing was to take the telephone off the hook, because calls were coming one right
after the other. I tried to go back to sleep, but found it was impossible.
I went down to the study to think: What am I going to do? Maybe I won't accept
the Prize. What would happen then? Maybe that's impossible.
I put the receiver back on the hook and the phone rang right away. It was a guy
from Time magazine. I said to him, "Listen, I've got a problem, so I want this off the
record. I don't know how to get out of this thing. Is there some way not to accept the
Prize?"
He said, "I'm afraid, sir, that there isn't any way you can do it without making
more of a fuss than if you leave it alone." It was obvious. We had quite a conversation,
about fifteen or twenty minutes, and the Time guy never published anything about it.
I said thank you very much to the Time guy and hung up. The phone rang
immediately: it was the newspaper.
"Yes, you can come up to the house. Yes, it's all right. Yes, Yes, Yes.. ."
One of the phone calls was a guy from the Swedish consulate. He was going to
have a reception in Los Angeles. I figured that since I decided to accept the Prize, I've got
to go through with all this stuff.
The consul said, "Make a list of the people you would like to invite, and we'll
make a list of the people we are inviting. Then I'll come to your office and we'll compare
the lists to see if there are any duplicates, and we'll make up the invitations. . ."
So I made up my list. It had about eight people ­­ my neighbor from across the
street, my artist friend Zorthian, and so on.
The consul came over to my office with his list: the Governor of the State of
California, the This, the That; Getty, the oilman; some actress ­­ it had three hundred
people! And, needless to say, there was no duplication whatsoever!
Then I began to get a little bit nervous. The idea of meeting all these dignitaries
frightened me.
The consul saw I was worried. "Oh, don't worry," he said. "Most of them don't
come."
Well, I had never arranged a party that I invited people to, and knew to expect
them not to come! I don't have to kowtow to anybody and give them the delight of being
honored with this invitation that they can refuse; it's stupid! By the time I got home I was
really upset with the whole thing. I called the consul back and said, "I've thought it over,
and I realize that I just can't go through with the reception." He was delighted. He said,
"You're perfectly right." I think he was in the same position ­­ having to set up a party for
this jerk was just a pain in the ass. It turned out, in the end, everybody was happy.
Nobody wanted to come, including the guest of honor! The host was much better off, too!
I had a certain psychological difficulty all the way through this period. You see, I