Ebook rtf mathematics Feynman, Richard Surely You’…

Found Out in Paris 
I gave a series of lectures in physics that the AddisonWesley Company made into a book, and one time at lunch we were discussing what the 
cover of the book should look like, I thought that since the lectures were a combination of the real world and mathematics, it would be a good idea to 
have a picture of a drum, and on top of it some mathematical diagrams--circles and lines for the nodes of the oscillating drumheads, which were 
discussed in the book. 
The book came out with a plain, red cover, but for some reason, in the preface, there's a picture of me playing a drum. I think they put it in there 
to satisfy this idea they got that "the author wants a drum somewhere." Anyway, everybody wonders why that picture of me playing drums is in the 
preface of the Feynman Lectures, because it doesn't have any diagrams on it, or any other things which would make it clear. (It's true that I like 
drumming, but that's another story.) 
At Los Alamos things were pretty tense from all the work, and there wasn't any way to amuse yourself: there weren't any movies, or anything 
like that. But I discovered some drums that the boys' school, which had been there previously, had collected: Los Alamos was in the middle of New 
Mexico, where there are lots of Indian villages. So I amused myself--sometimes alone, sometimes with another guy--just making noise, playing on 
these drums. I didn't know any particular rhythm, but the rhythms of the Indians were rather simple, the drums were good, and I had fun. 
Sometimes I would take the drums with me into the woods at some distance, so I wouldn't disturb anybody, and would beat them with a stick, 
and sing. I remember one night walking around a tree, looking at the moon, and beating the drum, making believe I was an Indian. 
One day a guy came up to me and said, "Around Thanksgiving you weren't out in the woods beating a drum, were you?" 
"Yes, I was," I said. 
"Oh! Then my wife was right!" Then he told me this story: 
One night he heard some drum music in the distance, and went upstairs to the other guy in the duplex house that they lived in, and the other guy 
heard it too. Remember, all these guys were from the East. They didn't know anything about Indians, and they were very interested: the Indians must 
have been having some kind of ceremony, or something exciting, and the two men decided to go out to see what it was. 
As they walked along, the music got louder as they came nearer, and they began to get nervous. They realized that the Indians probably had 
scouts out watching so that nobody would disturb their ceremony. So they got down on their bellies and crawled along the trail until the sound was 
just over the next hill, apparently. They crawled up over the hill and discovered to their surprise that it was only one Indian, doing the ceremony all 
by himself--dancing around a tree, beating the drum with a stick, chanting. The two guys backed away from him slowly, because they didn't want to 
disturb him: He was probably setting up some kind of spell, or something. 
They told their wives what they saw, and the wives said, "Oh, it must have been Feynman--he likes to beat drums." 
"Don't be ridiculous!" the men said. "Even 
Feynman
wouldn't be 
that
crazy!" 
So the next week they set about trying to figure out who the Indian was. There were Indians from the nearby reservation working at Los Alamos, 
so they asked one Indian, who was a technician in the technical area, who it could be. The Indian asked around, but none of the other Indians knew 
who it might be, except there was one Indian whom nobody could talk to. 
He
was an Indian who knew his race: He had two big braids down his back 
and held his head high; whenever he walked anywhere he walked with dignity, alone; and nobody could talk to him. You would be