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

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who knew that printer knew I was trying to get jobs fixing radios, so he sent a fellow around to the print shop to pick me up. The guy is obviously poor his car is a complete wreck and we go to his house which is in a cheap part of town. On the way, I say, "What's the trouble with the radio?" He says, "When I turn it on it makes a noise, and after a while the noise stops and everything's all right, but I don't like the noise at the beginning." I think to myself: "What the hell! If he hasn't got any money, you'd think he could stand a little noise for a while." And all the time, on the way to his house, he's saying things like, "Do you know anything about radios? How do you know about radios you're just a little boy!" He's putting me down the whole way, and I'm thinking, "So what's the matter with him? So it makes a little noise." But when we got there I went over to the radio and turned it on. Little noise? My God! No wonder the poor guy couldn't stand it. The thing began to roar and wobble WUH BUH BUH BUH BUH A tremendous amount of noise. Then it quieted down and played correctly. So I started to think: "How can that happen?" I start walking back and forth, thinking, and I realize that one way it can happen is that the tubes are heating up in the wrong order that is, the amplifier's all hot, the tubes are ready to go, and there's nothing feeding in, or there's some back circuit feeding in, or something wrong in the beginning part the RF part and therefore it's making a lot of noise, picking up something. And when the RF circuit's finally going, and the grid voltages are adjusted, everything's all right. So the guy says, "What are you doing? You come to fix the radio, but you're only walking back and forth!" I say, "I'm thinking!" Then I said to myself, "All right, take the tubes out, and reverse the order completely in the set." (Many radio sets in those days used the same tubes in different places 212's, I think they were, or 212A's.) So I changed the tubes around, stepped to the front of the radio, turned the thing on, and it's as quiet as a lamb: it waits until it heats up, and then plays perfectly no noise. When a person has been negative to you, and then you do something like that, they're usually a hundred percent the other way, kind of to compensate. He got me other jobs, and kept telling everybody what a tremendous genius I was, saying, "He fixes radios by thinking!" The whole idea of thinking, to fix a radio a little boy stops and thinks, and figures out how to do it he never thought that was possible. Radio circuits were much easier to understand in those days because everything was out in the open. After you took the set apart (it was a big problem to find the right screws), you could see this was a resistor, that's a condenser, here's a this, there's a that; they were all labeled. And if wax had been dripping from the condenser, it was too hot and you could tell that the condenser was burned out. If there was charcoal on one of the resistors you knew where the trouble was. Or, if you couldn't tell what was the matter by looking at it, you'd test it with your voltmeter and see whether voltage was coming through. The sets were simple, the circuits were not complicated. The voltage on the grids was always about one and a half or two volts and the voltages on the plates were one hundred or two hundred, DC. So it wasn't hard for me to fix a radio by understanding what was going on inside, noticing that something wasn't working right, and fixing it. Sometimes it took quite a while. I remember one particular time when it took the
whole afternoon to find a burnedout resistor that was not apparent. That particular time it happened to be a friend of my mother, so I had time there was nobody on my back saying, "What are you doing?" Instead, they were saying, "Would you like a little milk, or some cake?" I finally fixed it because I had, and still have, persistence. Once I get on a puzzle, I can't get off. If my mother's friend had said, "Never mind, it's too much work," I'd have blown my top, because I want to beat this damn thing, as long as I've gone this far. I can't just leave it after I've found out so much about it. I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end. That's a puzzle drive. It's what accounts for my wanting to decipher Mayan hieroglyphics, for trying to open safes. I remember in high school, during first period a guy would come to me with a puzzle in geometry, or something which had been assigned in his advanced math class. I wouldn't stop until I figured the damn thing out it would take me fifteen or twenty minutes. But during the day, other guys would come to me with the same problem, and I'd do it for them in a flash. So for one guy, to do it took me twenty minutes, while there were five guys who thought I was a supergenius. So I got a fancy reputation. During high school every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew. So when I got to MIT there was a dance, and one of the seniors had his girlfriend there, and she knew a lot of puzzles, and he was telling her that I was pretty good at them. So during the dance she came over to me and said, "They say you're a smart guy, so here's one for you: A man has eight cords of wood to chop. . ." And I said, "He starts by chopping every other one in three parts," because I had heard that one. Then she'd go away and come back with another one, and I'd always know it. This went on for quite a while, and finally, near the end of the dance, she came over, looking as if she was going to get me for sure this time, and she said, "A mother and daughter are traveling to Europe. . ." "The daughter got the bubonic plague." She collapsed! That was hardly enough clues to get the answer to that one: It was the long story about how a mother and daughter stop at a hotel and stay in separate rooms, and the next day the mother goes to the daughter's room and there's nobody there, or somebody else is there, and she says, "Where's my daughter?" and the hotel keeper says, "What daughter?" and the register's got only the mother's name, and so on, and so on, and there's a big mystery as to what happened. The answer is, the daughter got bubonic plague, and the hotel, not wanting to have to close up, spirits the daughter away, cleans up the room, and erases all evidence of her having been there. It was a long tale, but I had heard it, so when the girl started out with, "A mother and daughter are traveling to Europe," I knew one thing that started that way, so I took a flying guess, and got it. We had a thing at high school called the algebra team, which consisted of five kids, and we would travel to different schools as a team and have competitions. We would sit in one row of seats and the other team would sit in another row. A teacher, who was running the contest, would take out an envelope, and on the envelope it says "forty five seconds." She opens it up, writes the problem on the blackboard, and says, "Go!" so you really have more than fortyfive seconds because while she's writing you can think. Now the game was this: You have a piece of paper, and on it you can write anything, you can do anything. The only thing that counted was the answer. If the answer
Page 1 and 2: "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Page 3 and 4: Preface The stories in this book we
Page 5 and 6: He Fixes Radios by Thinking! Part 1
Page 7: could act like a microphone, and yo
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
Page 57 and 58: the fuse won't burn! I decided that
Page 59 and 60:
that he wanted to try to develop. H
Page 61 and 62:
Mexico," the man says, "Oh, so all
Page 63 and 64:
meantime, what instructions go down
Page 65 and 66:
said, "No codes." So I wrote back t
Page 67 and 68:
I looked at it and said, "That look
Page 69 and 70:
people that I wanted were there, an
Page 71 and 72:
different where you go first t
Page 73 and 74:
concentrate on this one. So they st
Page 75 and 76:
it was very difficult. Now, us
Page 77 and 78:
was radioactive. It was plutonium.
Page 79 and 80:
One guy tries to make something to
Page 81 and 82:
Everybody was amazed. It was comple
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it appeared, depends on the same li
Page 85 and 86:
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
Page 95 and 96:
partly in the strength of our futur
Page 97 and 98:
have any room either. I say to the
Page 99 and 100:
answered the questions. Everything
Page 101 and 102:
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,
Page 107 and 108:
I liked to imitate being drunk, so
Page 109 and 110:
you been?" At this moment the guy t
Page 111 and 112:
"What?" "That's right," he said con
Page 113 and 114:
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
Page 121 and 122:
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
Page 127 and 128:
y first learning to pronounce the l
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Certainly, Mr. Big! I used to cross
Page 131 and 132:
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
Page 139 and 140:
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
Page 157 and 158:
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
Page 169 and 170:
families all the time, so that if a
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that they called "new math," and si
Page 173 and 174:
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
Page 179 and 180:
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
Page 185 and 186:
astronomy. *When I was a young prof
Page 187 and 188:
After the colloquium at UCLA Profes
Page 189 and 190:
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
Page 197 and 198:
my way down again. At first it took
Page 199 and 200:
external to the internal psychologi
Page 201 and 202:
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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