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

out of me, because I didn't like formality. But I soon realized that the gowns were a great
advantage. Guys who were out playing tennis could rush into their room, grab their
academic gown, and put it on. They didn't have to take time off to change their clothes or
take a shower. So underneath the gowns there were bare arms, T­shirts, everything.
Furthermore, there was a rule that you never cleaned the gown, so you could tell a first­
year man from a second­year man, from a third­year man, from a pig! You never cleaned
the gown and you never repaired it, so the first­year men had very nice, relatively clean
gowns, but by the time you got to the third year or so, it was nothing but some kind of
cardboard thing on your shoulders with tatters hanging down from it.
So when I got to Princeton, I went to that tea on Sunday afternoon and had dinner
that evening in an academic gown at the "College." But on Monday, the first thing I
wanted to do was to see the cyclotron.
MIT had built a new cyclotron while I was a student there, and it was just
beautiful! The cyclotron itself was in one room, with the controls in another room. It was
beautifully engineered. The wires ran from the control room to the cyclotron underneath
in conduits, and there was a whole console of buttons and meters. It was what I would
call a gold­plated cyclotron.
Now I had read a lot of papers on cyclotron experiments, and there weren't many
from MIT. Maybe they were just starting. But there were lots of results from places like
Cornell, and Berkeley, and above all, Princeton. Therefore what I really wanted to see,
what I was looking forward to, was the PRINCETON CYCLOTRON. That must be
something.
So first thing on Monday, I go into the physics building and ask, "Where is the
cyclotron ­­ which building?"
"It's downstairs, in the basement ­­ at the end of the hall."
In the basement? It was an old building. There was no room in the basement for a
cyclotron. I walked down to the end of the hall, went through the door, and in ten seconds
I learned why Princeton was right for me ­­ the best place for me to go to school. In this
room there were wires strung all over the place! Switches were hanging from the wires,
cooling water was dripping from the valves, the room was full of stuff, all out in the open.
Tables piled with tools were everywhere; it was the most godawful mess you ever saw.
The whole cyclotron was there in one room, and it was complete, absolute chaos!
It reminded me of my lab at home. Nothing at MIT had ever reminded me of my
lab at home. I suddenly realized why Princeton was getting results. They were working
with the instrument. They built the instrument; they knew where everything was, they
knew how everything worked, there was no engineer involved, except maybe he was
working there too. It was much smaller than the cyclotron at MIT, and "gold­plated"? ­­ it
was the exact opposite. When they wanted to fix a vacuum, they'd drip glyptal on it, so
there were drops of glyptal on the floor. It was wonderful! Because they worked with it.
They didn't have to sit in another room and push buttons! (Incidentally, they had a fire in
that room, because of all the chaotic mess that they had ­­ too many wires ­­ and it
destroyed the cyclotron. But I'd better not tell about that!)
(When I got to Cornell I went to look at the cyclotron there. This cyclotron hardly
required a room: It was about a yard across ­­ the diameter of the whole thing. It was the
world's smallest cyclotron, but they had got fantastic results. They had all kinds of special
techniques and tricks. If they wanted to change something in the "D's" ­­ the D­shaped