Ebook rtf mathematics Feynman, Richard Surely You’…

this
way." 
"What the hell do 
you
know, Maurice?" we said, frustrated. "You're always making these jokes. Why should we go 
this
way?" 
"Simple: Look at the telephone lines. Where there's more wires, it's going toward the central station." 
This guy, who looked like he wasn't paying attention to anything, had come up with a terrific idea! We walked straight into town without making 
an error. 
On the following day there was going to be a school wide freshman versus sophomore mudeo (various forms of wrestling and tug of wars that 
take place in the mud). Late in the evening, into our fraternity comes a whole bunch of sophomores--some from our fraternity and some from outside-
- and they kidnap us: they want us to be tired the next day so they can win. 
The sophomores tied up all the freshmen relatively easily--except me. I didn't want the guys in the fraternity to find out that I was a "sissy." (I 
was never any good in sports. I was always terrified if a tennis ball would come over the fence and land near me, because I never could get it over the 
fence-it usually went about a radian off of where it was supposed to go.) I figured this was a new situation, a new world, and I could make a new 
reputation. So in order that I wouldn't look like I didn't know how to fight, I fought like a son of a gun as best I could (not knowing what I was doing), 

---

and it took three or four guys many tries before they were finally able to tie me up. The sophomores took us to a house, far away in the woods, and 
tied us all down to a wooden floor with big U tacks. 
I tried all sorts of ways to escape, but there were sophomores guarding us, and none of my tricks worked. I remember distinctly one young man 
they were afraid to tie down because he was so terrified: his face was pale yellow green and he was shaking. I found out later he was from Europe-
this was in the early thirties--and he didn't realize that these guys all tied down to the floor was some kind of a joke; he knew what kinds of things 
were going on in Europe. The guy was frightening to look at, he was so scared. 
By the time the night was over, there were only three sophomores guarding twenty of us freshmen, but we didn't know that. The sophomores had 
driven their cars in and out a few times to make it sound as if there was a lot of activity, and we didn't notice it was always the same cars and the 
same people. So we didn't win that one. 
My father and mother happened to come up that morning to see how their son was doing in Boston, and the fraternity kept putting them off until 
we came back from being kidnapped. I was so bedraggled and dirty from struggling so hard to escape and from lack of sleep that they were really 
horrified to discover what their son looked like at MIT! 
I had also gotten a stiff neck, and I remember standing in line for inspection that afternoon at ROTC, not being able to look straight forward. The 
commander grabbed my head and turned it, shouting, "Straighten up!" 
I winced, as my shoulders went at an angle: "I can't help it, sir! 
"Oh, excuse 
m e
!" he said, apologetically. 
Anyway, the fact that I fought so long and hard not to be tied up gave me a terrific reputation, and I never had to worry about that sissy business 
again--a tremendous relief. 
I often listened to my roommates--they were both seniors--studying for their theoretical physics course. One day they were working pretty hard 
on something that seemed pretty clear to me, so I said, "Why don't you use the Bernoulli’s equation?" 
"What's that!" they exclaimed. "What are you talking about!" 
I explained to them what I meant and how it worked in this case, and it solved the problem. It turned out it was Bernoulli's equation that I meant, 
but I had read all this stuff in the encyclopedia without talking to anybody about it, so I didn't know how to pronounce anything. 
But my roommates were very excited, and from then on they discussed their physics problems with me--I wasn't so lucky with many of them--
and the next year, when I took the course, I advanced rapidly. That was a very good way to get educated, working on the senior problems and 
learning how to pronounce things. 
I liked to go to a place called the Raymor and Playmore Ballroom--two ballrooms that were connected together--on Tuesday nights. My 
fraternity brothers didn't go to these "open" dances; they preferred their own dances, where the girls they brought were upper crust ones they had met 
"properly." I didn't care, when I met somebody, where they were from, or what their background was, so I would go to these dances--even though my 
fraternity brothers disapproved (I was a junior by this time, and they couldn't stop me)--and I had a very good time. 
One time I danced with a certain girl a few times, and didn't say much. Finally, she said to me, "Who hants vewwy nice-ee." 
I couldn't quite make it out--she had some difficulty in speech--but I thought she said, "You dance very nicely." 
"Thank you," I said. "It's been an honor." 
We went over to a table where a friend of hers had found a boy she was dancing with and we sat, the four of us, together. One girl was very hard 
of hearing, and the other girl was nearly deaf. 
When the two girls conversed they would do a large amount of signaling very rapidly back and forth, and grunt a little bit. It didn't bother me; 
the girl danced well, and she was a nice person. 
After a few more dances, we're sitting at the table again, and there's a large amount of signaling back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, 
until finally she says something to me which I gathered means, she'd like us to take them to some hotel. 
I ask the other guy if he wants to go. 
"What do they want us to go to this hotel for?" he asks.
"Hell, I don't know. We didn't talk well enough!" But I don't 
have
to know. It's just fun, seeing what's going to happen; it's an adventure! 
The other guy's afraid, so he says no. So I take the two girls in a taxi to the hotel, and discover that there's a dance organized by the deaf and 
dumb, believe it or not. They all belonged to a club. It turns out many of them can feel the rhythm enough to dance to the music and applaud the band 
at the end of each number. 
It was very, very interesting! I felt as if I was in a foreign country and couldn't speak the language: I could speak, but nobody could hear me. 
Everybody was talking with signs to everybody else, and I couldn't understand anything! I asked my girl to teach me some signs and I learned a few, 
like you learn a foreign language, just for fun. 
Everyone was so happy and relaxed with each other, making jokes and smiling all the time; they didn't seem to have any real difficulty of any 
kind communicating with each other. It was the same as with any other language, except for one thing: as they're making signs to each other, their 
heads were always turning from one side to the other. I realized what that was. When someone wants to make a side remark or interrupt you, he can't 
yell, "Hey, Jack!" He can only make a signal, which you won't catch unless you're in the habit of looking around all the time. 
They were completely comfortable with each other. It was 
my
problem to be comfortable. It was a wonderful experience. 

---

The dance went on for a long time, and when it closed down we went to a cafeteria. They were all orderin g things by pointing to them. I 
remember somebody asking in signs, "Where-are-you-from?" and my girl spelling out "N-e-w Y-o-r-k." I still remember a guy signing to me "Good 
sport!"--he holds his thumb up, and then touches an imaginary lapel, for "sport." It's a nice system. 
Everybody was sitting around, making jokes, and getting me into their world very nicely. I wanted to buy a bottle of milk, so I went up to the 
guy at the counter and mouthed the word "milk" without saying anything. 
The guy didn't understand. 
I made the symbol for "milk," which is two fists moving as if you're milking a cow, and he didn't catch that either. 
I tried to point to the sign that showed the price of milk, but he still didn't catch on. 
Finally, some stranger nearby ordered milk, and I pointed to it. 
"Oh! Milk!" he said, as I nodded my head yes. 
He handed me the bottle, and I said, "Thank you very much!" 
"You SON of a GUN!" he said, smiling. 
I often liked to play tricks on people when I was at MIT. One time, in mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a piece of 
plastic for drawing smooth curves--a curly, funny-looking thing) and said, "I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?" 
I thought for a moment and said, "Sure they do. The curves are very special curves. Lemme show ya," and I picked up my French curve and 
began to turn it slowly. "The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal." 
All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it along, 
and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is horizontal. They were all excited by t his "discovery"--even though they had already gone through a 
certain amount of calculus and had already "learned" that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of 
any
curve is zero (horizontal). 
They didn't put two and two together. They didn't even know what they "knew." 
I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way--by rote, or something. Their 
knowledge is so fragile! 
I did the same kind of trick four years later at Princeton when I was talking with an experienced character, an assistant of Einstein, who was 
surely working with gravity all the time. I gave him a problem: You blast off in a rocket which has a clock on board, and there's a clock on the 
ground. The idea is that you have to be back when the clock on the ground says one hour has passed. Now you want it so that when you come back, 
your clock is as far ahead as possible. According to Einstein, if you go very high, your clock will go faster, because the higher something is in a 
gravitational field, the faster its clock goes. But if you try to go too high, since you've only got an hour, you have to go so fast to get there that the 
speed slows your clock down. So you can't go too high. The question is, exactly what program of speed and height should you make so that you get 
the maximum time on your clock? 
This assistant of Einstein worked on it for quite a bit before he realized that the answer is the real motion of matter. If you shoot something up in 
a normal way, so that the time it takes the shell to go up and come down is an hour, that's the correct motion. It's the fundamental principle of 
Einstein's gravity--that is, what's called the "proper time" is at a maximum for the actual curve. But when I put it to him, about a rocket with a clock, 
he didn't recognize it. It was just like the guys in mechanical drawing class, but this time it wasn't dumb freshmen. So this kind of fragility is, in fact, 
fairly common, even with more learned people. 
When I was a junior or senior I used to eat at a certain restaurant in Boston. I went there by myself, often on successive evenings. People got to 
know me, and I had the same waitress all the time. 
I noticed that they were always in a hurry, rushing around, so one day, just for fun, I left my tip, which was usually ten cents (normal for those 
days), in two nickels, under two glasses: I filled each glass to the very top, dropped a nickel in, and with a card over it, turned it over so it was upside 
down on the table. Then I slipped out the card (no water leaks out because no air can come in --the rim is too close to the table for that). 
I put the tip under two glasses because I knew they were always in a hurry. If the tip was a dime in one glass, the waitress, in her haste to get the 
table ready for the next customer, would pick up the glass, the water would spill out, and that would be the end of it. But after she does that with the 
first glass, what the hell is she going to do with the second one? She can't just have the nerve to lift it up now! 
On the way out I said to my waitress, "Be careful, Sue. There's something funny about the glasses you gave me-- they're filled in on the top, and 
there's a hole on the bottom!" 
The next day I came back, and I had a new waitress. My regular waitress wouldn't have anything to do with me. "Sue's very angry at you," my 
new waitress said. "After she picked up the first glass and water went all over the place, she called the boss out. They studied it a little bit, but they 
couldn't spend all day figuring out what to do, so they finally picked up the other one, and water went out