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

concentrate on this one. So they started to work.
My wife, Arlene, was ill with tuberculosis ­­ very ill indeed. It looked as if
something might happen at any minute, so I arranged ahead of time with a friend of mine
in the dormitory to borrow his car in an emergency so I could get to Albuquerque
quickly. His name was Klaus Fuchs. He was the spy, and he used his automobile to take
the atomic secrets away from Los Alamos down to Santa Fe. But nobody knew that.
The emergency arrived. I borrowed Fuchs's car and picked up a couple of
hitchhikers, in case something happened with the car on the way to Albuquerque. Sure
enough, just as we were driving into Santa Fe, we got a flat tire. The two guys helped me
change the tire, and just as we were leaving Santa Fe, another tire went flat. We pushed
the car into a nearby gas station.
The gas station guy was repairing somebody else's car, and it was going to take a
while before he could help us. I didn't even think to say anything, but the two hitchhikers
went over to the gas station man and told him the situation. Soon we had a new tire (but
no spare ­­ tires were hard to get during the war).
About thirty niiles outside Albuquerque a third tire went flat, so I left the car on
the road and we hitchhiked the rest of the way. I phoned a garage to go out and get the
car while I went to the hospital to see my wife.
Arlene died a few hours after I got there. A nurse came in to fill out the death
certificate, and went out again. I spent a little more time with my wife. Then I looked at
the clock I had given her seven years before, when she had first become sick with
tuberculosis. It was something which in those days was very nice: a digital clock whose
numbers would change by turning around mechanically. The clock was very delicate and
often stopped for one reason or another ­­ I had to repair it from time to time ­­ but I kept
it going for all those years. Now, it had stopped once more ­­ at 9:22, the time on the
death certificate!
I remembered the time I was in my fraternity house at MIT when the idea came
into my head completely out of the blue that my grandmother was dead. Right after that
there was a telephone call, just like that. It was for Pete Bernays ­­ my grandmother
wasn't dead. So I remembered that, in case somebody told me a story that ended the other
way. I figured that such things can sometimes happen by luck ­­ after all, my
grandmother was very old ­­ although people might think they happened by some sort of
supernatural phenomenon.
Arlene had kept this clock by her bedside all the time she was sick, and now it
stopped the moment she died. I can understand how a person who half believes in the
possibility of such things, and who hasn't got a doubting mind ­­ especially in a
circumstance like that ­­ doesn't immediately try to figure out what happened, but instead
explains that no one touched the clock, and there was no possibility of explanation by
normal phenomena. The clock simply stopped. It would become a dramatic example of
these fantastic phenomena.
I saw that the light in the room was low, and then I remembered that the nurse had
picked up the clock and turned it toward the light to see the face better. That could easily
have stopped it.
I went for a walk outside. Maybe I was fooling myself, but I was surprised how I
didn't feel what I thought people would expect to feel under the circumstances. I wasn't
delighted, but I didn't feel terribly upset, perhaps because I had known for seven years