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

says, "We're not gonna wear suits at lectures!"
I took my coat off, loosened my tie, and said, "By the time I had been through
Sweden, I was beginning to like this stuff, but now that I'm back in the world,
everything's all right again. Thanks for straightening me out!" They didn't want me to
change. So it was very quick: at CERN they undid everything that they had done in
Sweden.
It's nice that I got some money ­­ I was able to buy a beach house ­­ but
altogether, I think it would have been much nicer not to have had the Prize ­­ because you
never, any longer, can be taken straightforwardly in any public situation.
In a way, the Nobel Prize has been something of a pain in the neck, though there
was at least one time that I got some fun out of it. Shortly after I won the Prize, Gweneth
and I received an invitation from the Brazilian government to be the guests of honor at
the Carnaval celebrations in Rio. We gladly accepted and had a great time. We went from
one dance to another and reviewed the big street parade that featured the famous samba
schools playing their wonderful rhythms and music. Photographers from newspapers and
magazines were taking pictures all the time ­­ "Here, the Professor from America is
dancing with Miss Brazil."
It was fun to be a "celebrity," but we were obviously the wrong celebrities.
Nobody was very excited about the guests of honor that year. I found out later how our
invitation had come about. Gina Lollobrigida was supposed to be the guest of honor, but
just before Carnaval, she said no. The Minister of Tourism, who was in charge of
organizing Carnaval, had some friends at the Center for Physical Research who knew I
had played in a samba band, and since I had recently won the Nobel Prize, I was briefly
in the news. In a moment of panic the Minister and his friends got this crazy idea to
replace Gina Lollobrigida with the professor of physics!
Needless to say, the Minister did such a bad job on that Carnaval that he lost his
position in the government.
Bringing Culture to the Physicists
Nina Byers, a professor at UCLA, became in charge of the physics colloquium
sometime in the early seventies. The colloquia are normally a place where physicists
from other universities come and talk pure technical stuff. But partly as a result of the
atmosphere of that particular period of time, she got the idea that the physicists needed
more culture, so she thought she would arrange something along those lines: Since Los
Angeles is near Mexico, she would have a colloquium on the mathematics and astronomy
of the Mayans ­­ the old civilization of Mexico.
(Remember my attitude to culture: This kind of thing would have driven me crazy
if it were in my university!)
She started looking for a professor to lecture on the subject, and couldn't find
anybody at UCLA who was quite an expert. She telephoned various places and still
couldn't find anybody.
Then she remembered Professor Otto Neugebauer, of Brown University, the great
expert on Babylonian mathematics.* She telephoned him in Rhode Island and asked if he
knew someone on the West Coast who could lecture on Mayan mathematics and