Ebook rtf mathematics Feynman, Richard Surely You’…

Hayaku! Hayaku! Ikimasho! Ikimasho!
"--which means, "Let's go! Let's go! Hurry! Hurry!" 
I realized my Japanese was out of control. I had learned these phrases from a military phrase book, and they must have been very rude, because 
everyone at the hotel began to scurry like mice, saying, "Yes, sir! Yes sir!" and the bus left right away. 
The meeting in Japan was in two parts: one was in Tokyo, and the other was in Kyoto. In the bus on the way to Kyoto I told my friend Abraham 
Pais about the Japanese-style hotel, and he wanted to try it. We stayed at the Hotel Miyako, which had both American-style and Japanese-style rooms, 
and Pais shared a Japanese-style room with me. 
The next morning the young woman taking care of our room fixes the bath, which was right in our room. Sometime later she returns with a tray 
to deliver breakfast. I'm partly dressed. She turns to me and says, politely, "
Ohayo, gozai masu
," which means, "Good morning." 
Pais is just coming out of the bath, sopping wet and completely nude. She turns to him and with equal composure says, "
Ohayo, gozai masu
," 
and puts the tray down for us. 
Pais looks at me and says, "God, are we uncivilized!" 

---

We realized that in America if the maid was delivering breakfast and the guy's standing there, stark naked, there would be little screams and a 
big fuss. But in Japan they were completely used to it, and we felt that they were much more advanced and civilized about those things than we were. 
I had been working at that time on the theory of liquid helium, and had figured out how the laws of quantum dynamics explain the strange 
phenomena of super-fluidity. I was very proud of this achievement, and was going to give a talk about my work at the Kyoto meeting. 
The night before I gave my talk there was a dinner, and the man who sat down next to me was none other than Professor Onsager, a topnotch 
expert in solid-state physics and the problems of liquid helium. He was one of these guys who doesn't say very much, but any time he said anything, 
it was significant. 
"Well, Feynman," he said in a gruff voice, "I hear you think you have understood liquid helium." 
"Well, yes.. 
"Hoompf." And that's all he said to me during the whole dinner! So that wasn't much encouragement. 
The next day I gave my talk and explained all about liquid helium. At the end, I complained that there was still something I hadn't been able to 
figure out: that is, whether the transition between one phase and the other phase of liquid helium was first-order (like when a solid melts or a liquid 
boils--the temperature is constant) or second-order (like you see sometimes in magnetism, in which the temperature keeps changing). 
Then Professor Onsager got up and said in a dour voice, "Well, Professor Feynman is new in our field, and I think he needs to be educated. 
There's something he ought to know, and we should tell him." 
I thought, "Geesus! What did I do wrong?" 
Onsager said, "We should tell Feynman that 
nobody
has ever figured out the order of 
any
transition correctly from first principles, so the fact that 
his theory does not allow him to work out the order correctly does 
not
mean that he hasn't understood all the other aspects of liquid helium 
satisfactorily." It turned out to be a compliment, but from the way he started out, I thought I was really going to get it! 
It wasn't more than a day later when I was in my room and the telephone rang. It was 
Time
magazine. The guy on the line said, "We're very 
interested in your work. Do you have a copy of it you could send us?" 
I had never been in 
Time
and was very excited. I was proud of my work, which had been received well at the meeting, so I said, "Sure!" 
"Fine. Please send it to our Tokyo bureau." The guy gave me the address. I was feeling great. 
I repeated the address, and the guy said, "That's right. Thank you very much, Mr. Pais." 
"Oh, no!" I said, startled. "I'm not Pais; it's Pais you want? Excuse me, I'll tell him that you want to speak to him when he comes back." 
A few hours later Pais came in: "Hey, Pais! Pais!" I said, in an excited voice. "
Time
magazine called! They want you to send 'em a copy of the 
paper you're giving." 
"Aw!" he says. "Publicity is a whore!" 
I was doubly taken aback. 
I've since found out that Pais was right, but in those days, I thought it would be wonderful to have my name in 
Time
magazine. 
That was the first time I was in Japan. I was eager to go back, and said I would go to any university they wanted me to. So the Japanese arranged 
a whole series of places to visit for a few days at a time. 
By this time I was married to Mary Lou, and we were entertained wherever we went. At one place they put on a whole ceremony with dancing, 
usually performed only for larger groups of tourists, especially for us. At another place we were met right at the boat by all the students. At another 
place, the mayor met us. 
One particular place we stayed was a little, modest place in the woods, where the emperor would stay when he came by. It was a very lovely 
place, surrounded by woods, just beautiful, the stream selected with care. It had a certain calmness, a quiet elegance. That the emperor would go to 
such a place to stay showed a greater sensitivity to nature, I think, than what we were used to in the West. 
At all these places everybody working in physics would tell me what they were doing and I'd discuss it with them. They would tell me the 
general problem they were working on, and would begin to write a bunch of equations. 
"Wait a minute," I would say. "Is there a particular example of this general problem?" 
"Why yes; of course." 
"Good. Give me one example." That was for me: I can't understand anything in general unless I'm carrying along in my mind a specific example 
and watching it go. Some people think in the beginning that I'm kind of slow and I don't understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these "dumb" 
questions: "Is a cathode plus or minus? Is an an-ion this way, or that way?" 
But later, when the guy's in the middle of a bunch of equations, he'll say something and I'll say, "Wait a minute! There's an error! That can't be 
right!" 
The guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after a while, he finds the mistake and wonders, "How the hell did this guy, who hardly 
understood at the beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these equations?" 
He thinks I'm following the steps mathematically, but that's not what I'm doing. I have the specific, physical example of what he's trying to 
analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of the thing. So when the equation says it should behave so-and-so, and I know that's 
the wrong way around, I jump up and say, "Wait! There's a mistake!" 

---

So in Japan I couldn't understand or discuss anybody's work unless they could give me a physical example, and most of them couldn't find one. 
Of those who could, it was often a weak example, one which could be solved by a much simpler method of analysis. 
Since I was perpetually asking 
not
for mathematical equations, but for physical circumstances of what they were trying to work out, my visit was 
summarized in a mimeographed paper circulated among the scientist s (it was a modest but effective system of communication they had cooked up 
after the war) with the title, "Feynman's Bombardments, and Our Reactions." 
After visiting a number of universities I spent some months at the Yukawa Institute in Kyoto. I really enjoyed working there. Everything was so 
nice: You'd come to work, take your shoes off, and someone would come and serve you tea in the morning when you felt like it. It was very pleasant. 
While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. I worked much harder at it, and got to a point where I could go around in taxis and do 
things. I took lessons from a Japanese man every day for an hour. 
One day he was teaching me the word for "see." "All right," he said. "You want to say, 'May I see your garden?' What do you say?" 
I made up a sentence with the word that I had just learned. 
"No, no!" he said. "When you say to someone, 'Would you like to see my garden? you use the first 'see.' But when you want to see someone 
else's garden, you must use another 'see,' which is more polite." 
"Would you like to