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

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Some facts about my timing: I was born in 1918 in a small town called Far Rockaway, right on the outskirts of New York, near the sea. I lived there until 1935, when I was seventeen. I went to MIT for four years, and then I went to Princeton, in about 1939. During the time I was at Princeton I started to work on the Manhattan Project, and I ultimately went to Los Alamos in April 1943, until something like October or November 1946, when I went to Cornell. I got married to Arlene in 1941, and she died of tuberculosis while I was at Los Alamos, in 1946. I was at Cornell until about 1951. I visited Brazil in the summer of 1949 and spent half a year there in 1951, and then went to Caltech, where I've been ever since. I went to Japan at the end of 1951 for a couple of weeks, and then again, a year or two later, just after I married my second wife, Mary Lou. I am now married to Gweneth, who is English, and we have two children, Carl and Michelle. R. P. F.
He Fixes Radios by Thinking! Part 1 From Far Rockaway to MIT When I was about eleven or twelve I set up a lab in my house. It consisted of an old wooden packing box that I put shelves in. I had a heater, and I'd put in fat and cook frenchfried potatoes all the time. I also had a storage battery, and a lamp bank. To build the lamp bank I went down to the fiveandten and got some sockets you can screw down to a wooden base, and connected them with pieces of bell wire. By making different combinations of switches in series or parallel I knew I could get different voltages. But what I hadn't realized was that a bulb's resistance depends on its temperature, so the results of my calculations weren't the same as the stuff that came out of the circuit. But it was all right, and when the bulbs were in series, all halflit, they would gloooooooooow, very pretty it was great! I had a fuse in the system so if I shorted anything, the fuse would blow. Now I had to have a fuse that was weaker than the fuse in the house, so I made my own fuses by taking tin foil and wrapping it around an old burntout fuse. Across my fuse I had a five watt bulb, so when my fuse blew, the load from the trickle charger that was always charging the storage battery would light up the bulb. The bulb was on the switchboard behind a piece of brown candy paper (it looks red when a light's behind it) so if something went off, I'd look up to the switchboard and there would be a big red spot where the fuse went. It was fun! I enjoyed radios. I started with a crystal set that I bought at the store, and I used to listen to it at night in bed while I was going to sleep, through a pair of earphones. When my mother and father went out until late at night, they would come into my room and take the earphones off and worry about what was going into my head while I was asleep. About that time I invented a burglar alarm, which was a very simpleminded thing: it was just a big battery and a bell connected with some wire. When the door to my room opened, it pushed the wire against the battery and closed the circuit, and the bell would go off. One night my mother and father came home from a night out and very, very quietly, so as not to disturb the child, opened the door to come into my room to take my earphones off. All of a sudden this tremendous bell went off with a helluva racket BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG!!! I jumped out of bed yelling, "It worked! It worked!" I had a Ford coil a spark coil from an automobile and I had the spark terminals at the top of my switchboard. I would put a Raytheon RH tube, which had argon gas in it, across the terminals, and the spark would make a purple glow inside the vacuum it was just great! One day I was playing with the Ford coil, punching holes in paper with the sparks, and the paper caught on fire. Soon I couldn't hold it any more because it was burning near my fingers, so I dropped it in a metal wastebasket which had a lot of newspapers in it. Newspapers burn fast, you know, and the flame looked pretty big inside
Page 1 and 2: "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Page 3: Preface The stories in this book we
Page 7 and 8: could act like a microphone, and yo
Page 9 and 10: whole afternoon to find a burnedo
Page 11 and 12: For logarithms it was a big L exten
Page 13 and 14: very sharp knife into the table at
Page 15 and 16: and be more relaxed, and vice versa
Page 17 and 18: One time I danced with a certain gi
Page 19 and 20: same waitress all the time. I notic
Page 21 and 22: "Cut it out, Feynman; this is seri
Page 23 and 24: could find. Before I tell you what
Page 25 and 26: observations were made while I was
Page 27 and 28: I decided there must be an "interpr
Page 29 and 30: company. His father was the one who
Page 31 and 32: we could do. Our process was pretty
Page 33 and 34: out of me, because I didn't like fo
Page 35 and 36: In the Princeton cyclotron lab they
Page 37 and 38: When it was time to get up and go o
Page 39 and 40: and animal, are made of little bric
Page 41 and 42: some other experiment. I said, "Hel
Page 43 and 44: We figured if we could get rid of t
Page 45 and 46: do?" I said I didn't know, and he s
Page 47 and 48: always something I could find in th
Page 49 and 50: Atlantic City, where they had vario
Page 51 and 52: though it was a microscope of forty
Page 53 and 54: lowing" it occurred. I followed eig
Page 55 and 56:
I asked the Bell Labs if they would
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the fuse won't burn! I decided that
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that he wanted to try to develop. H
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Mexico," the man says, "Oh, so all
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meantime, what instructions go down
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said, "No codes." So I wrote back t
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I looked at it and said, "That look
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people that I wanted were there, an
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different where you go first t
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concentrate on this one. So they st
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it was very difficult. Now, us
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was radioactive. It was plutonium.
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One guy tries to make something to
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Everybody was amazed. It was comple
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it appeared, depends on the same li
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Hoffman is just the kind of guy to
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mathematical constant?" "Oh, no!" d
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of little cubbyholes that contained
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himself! So I turn around, and sure
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"No. Do you?" "Well, I'm keeping an
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partly in the strength of our futur
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have any room either. I say to the
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answered the questions. Everything
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around faster than the wobbling. I
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ar, with all its "temptations," and
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level. . . "Excuse me, sir," I say,
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I liked to imitate being drunk, so
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you been?" At this moment the guy t
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"What?" "That's right," he said con
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After that, I tried to do those thi
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He was completely washed out, and l
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Monday, at the latest. I got all up
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The people from the airlines were s
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The boss said, "Where're you from?"
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eaches, where most people felt thei
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super: He answered everything nifty
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y first learning to pronounce the l
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Certainly, Mr. Big! I used to cross
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We were eating breakfast in the din
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"That must have been it," I said. I
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some kind of big pain, and it start
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the two piles of hay, with the extr
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I must refuse. The reason I have to
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hotel. I pushed open the doors and
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"Well, yes. . ." "Hoompf." And that
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something like, "May I observe your
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in fact, a prediction on top of wha
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"The one from SoandSo's book."
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government, or else I can't talk in
Page 153 and 154:
et Jerry that he wouldn't be able t
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at the paper. Don't take your eyes
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She told me this story: She and her
Page 159 and 160:
were these fluorescent colors on bl
Page 161 and 162:
they came back and bought it. So th
Page 163 and 164:
with the artists from time to time
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understand," and everybody else wou
Page 167 and 168:
way to understand ethical problems
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families all the time, so that if a
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that they called "new math," and si
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awful! All it was was a game to get
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then there was something else. And
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one. Then the question came up, "Wi
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I got that shock about three or fou
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had been brought up by my father ag
Page 183 and 184:
She turned to me and said, "Oh! You
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astronomy. *When I was a young prof
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After the colloquium at UCLA Profes
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So the fella who'd been talking to
Page 191 and 192:
andleader said, "Geez! Who was that
Page 193 and 194:
who had come out at the beginning o
Page 195 and 196:
"This is the place," the receptioni
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my way down again. At first it took
Page 199 and 200:
external to the internal psychologi
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people with commonsense ideas are i
Page 203 and 204:
think to laymen. For example, I was
Page 205:
to have such a policy in teaching
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

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