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

expansion, they would have found it. Then I come along and try differentiating under the
integral sign, and often it worked. So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only
because my box of tools was different from everybody else's, and they had tried all their
tools on it before giving the problem to me.
Mindreaders
My father was always interested in magic and carnival tricks, and wanting to see
how they worked. One of the things he knew about was mindreaders. When he was a
little boy, growing up in a small town called Patchogue, in the middle of Long Island, it
was announced on advertisements posted all over that a mindreader was coming next
Wednesday. The posters said that some respected citizens ­­ the mayor, a judge, a banker
­­ should take a five­dollar bill and hide it somewhere, and when the mindreader came to
town, he would find it.
When he came, the people gathered around to watch him do his work. He takes
the hands of the banker and the judge, who had hidden the five­dollar bill, and starts to
walk down the street. He gets to an intersection, turns the corner, walks down another
street, then another, to the correct house. He goes with them, always holding their hands,
into the house, up to the second floor, into the right room, walks up to a bureau, lets go of
their hands, opens the correct drawer, and there's the five­dollar bill. Very dramatic!
In those days it was difficult to get a good education, so the mindreader was hired
as a tutor for my father. Well, my father, after one of his lessons, asked the mindreader
how he was able to find the money without anyone telling him where it was.
The mindreader explained that you hold onto their hands, loosely, and as you
move, you jiggle a little bit. You come to an intersection, where you can go forward, to
the left, or to the right. You jiggle a little bit to the left, and if it's incorrect, you feel a
certain amount of resistance, because they don't expect you to move that way. But when
you move in the right direction, because they think you might be able to do it, they give
way more easily, and there's no resistance. So you must always be jiggling a little bit,
testing out which seems to be the easiest way.
My father told me the story and said he thought it would still take a lot of practice.
He never tried it himself.
Later, when I was doing graduate work at Princeton, I decided to try it on a fellow
named Bill Woodward. I suddenly announced that I was a mindreader, and could read his
mind. I told him to go into the "laboratory" ­­ a big room with rows of tables covered
with equipment of various kinds, with electric circuits, tools, and junk all over the place ­
­ pick out a certain object, somewhere, and come out. I explained, "Now I'll read your
mind and take you right up to the object."
He went into the lab, noted a particular object, and came out. I took his hand and
started jiggling. We went down this aisle, then that one, right to the object. We tried it
three times. One time I got the object right on ­­ and it was in the middle of a whole
bunch of stuff. Another time I went to the right place but missed the object by a few
inches ­­ wrong object. The third time, something went wrong. But it worked better than I
thought. It was very easy.
Some time after that, when I was about twenty­six or so, my father and I went to