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

In the Princeton cyclotron lab they had a big carboy ­­ a monster bottle of water. I
thought this was just great for the experiment. I got a piece of copper tubing and bent it
into an S­shape. Then in the middle I drilled a hole, stuck in a piece of rubber hose, and
led it up through a hole in a cork I had put in the top of the bottle. The cork had another
hole, into which I put another piece of rubber hose, and connected it to the air pressure
supply of the lab. By blowing air into the bottle, I could force water into the copper
tubing exactly as if I were sucking it in. Now, the S­shaped tubing wouldn't turn around,
but it would twist (because of the flexible rubber hose), and I was going to measure the
speed of the water flow by measuring how far it squirted out of the top of the bottle.
I got it all set up, turned on the air supply, and it went "Puup!" The air pressure
blew the cork out of the bottle. I wired it in very well, so it wouldn't jump out. Now the
experiment was going pretty good. The water was coming out, and the hose was twisting,
so I put a little more pressure on it, because with a higher speed, the measurements would
be more accurate. I measured the angle very carefully, and measured the distance, and
increased the pressure again, and suddenly the whole thing just blew glass and water in
all directions throughout the laboratory. A guy who had come to watch got all wet and
had to go home and change his clothes (it's a miracle he didn't get cut by the glass), and
lots of cloud chamber pictures that had been taken patiently using the cyclotron were all
wet, but for some reason I was far enough away, or in some such position that I didn't get
very wet. But I'll always remember how the great Professor Del Sasso, who was in charge
of the cyclotron, came over to me and said sternly, "The freshman experiments should be
done in the freshman laboratory!"
Meeeeeeeeeee!
On Wednesdays at the Princeton Graduate College, various people would come in
to give talks. The speakers were often interesting, and in the discussions after the talks we
used to have a lot of fun. For instance, one guy in our school was very strongly anti­
Catholic, so he passed out questions in advance for people to ask a religious speaker, and
we gave the speaker a hard time.
Another time somebody gave a talk about poetry. He talked about the structure of
the poem and the emotions that come with it; he divided everything up into certain kinds
of classes. In the discussion that came afterwards, he said, "Isn't that the same as in
mathematics, Dr. Eisenhart?"
Dr. Eisenhart was the dean of the graduate school and a great professor of
mathematics. He was also very clever. He said, "I'd like to know what Dick Feynman
thinks about it in reference to theoretical physics." He was always putting me on in this
kind of situation.
I got up and said, "Yes, it's very closely related. In theoretical physics, the analog
of the word is the mathematical formula, the analog of the structure of the poem is the
interrelationship of the theoretical bling­bling with the so­and­so" ­­ and I went through
the whole thing, making a perfect analogy. The speaker's eyes were beaming with
happiness.
Then I said, "It seems to me that no matter what you say about poetry, I could find
a way of making up an analog with any subject, just as I did for theoretical physics. I