Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake

Taken from “Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!” Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Phillips Feynman as told to Ralph Leighton edited by Edward Hutchings

In Canada they have a big association of physics students. They have meetings; they give papers, and so on. One time the Vancouver chapter wanted to have me come and talk to them. The girl in charge of it arranged with my secretary to fly all the way to Los Angeles without telling me. She just walked into my office. She was really cute, a beautiful blonde. (That helped; it’s not supposed to, but it did.) And I was impressed that the students in Vancouver had financed the whole thing. They treated me so nicely in Vancouver that now I know the secret of how to really be entertained and give talks: Wait for the students to ask you.

One time, a few years after I had won the Nobel Prize, some kids from the Irvine students’ physics club came around and wanted me to talk. I said, “I’d love to do it. What I want to do is talk just to the physics club. But—I don’t want to be immodest—I’ve learned from experience that there’ll be trouble.”

I told them how I used to go over to a local high school every year to talk to the physics club about relativity, or whatever they asked about. Then, after I got the Prize, I went over there again, as usual, with no preparation, and they stuck me in front of an assembly of three hundred kids. It was a mess!

I got that shock about three or four times, being an idiot and not catching on right away. When I was invited to Berkeley to give a talk on something in physics, I prepared something rather technical, expecting to give it to the usual physics department group. But when I got there, this tremendous lecture hall is full of people! And I know there’s not that many people in Berkeley who know the level at which I prepared my talk. My problem is, I like to please the people who come to hear me, and I can’t do it if everybody and his brother wants to hear: I don’t know my audience then.

After the students understood that I can’t just easily go over somewhere and give a talk to the physics club, I said, “Let’s cook up a dull-sounding title and a dull-sounding professor’s name, and then only the kids who are really interested in physics will bother to come, and those are the ones we want, OK? You don’t have to sell anything.”

A few posters appeared on the Irvine campus: Professor Henry Warren from the University of Washington is going to talk about the structure of the proton on May 17th at 3:00 in Room D102.

Then I came and said, “Professor Warren had some personal difficulties and was unable to come and speak to you today, so he telephoned me and asked me if I would talk to you about the subject, since I’ve been doing some work in the field. So here I am.” It worked great.

But then, somehow or other, the faculty adviser of the club found out about the trick, and he got very angry at them. He said, “You know, if it were known that Professor Feynman was coming down here, a lot of people would like to have listened to him.”

The students explained, “That’s just it!” But the adviser was mad that he hadn’t been allowed in on the joke.

Hearing that the students were in real trouble, I decided to write a letter to the adviser and explained that it was all my fault, that I wouldn’t have given the talk unless this arrangement had been made; that I had told the students not to tell anyone; I’m very sorry; please excuse me, blah, blah, blah …” That’s the kind of stuff I have to go through on account of that damn prize!

Just last year I was invited by the students at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks to talk, and had a wonderful time, except for the interviews on local television. I don’t need interviews; there’s no point to it. I came to talk to the physics students, and that’s it. If everybody in town wants to know that, let the school newspaper tell them. It’s on account of the Nobel Prize that I’ve got to have an interview—I’m a big shot, right?

A friend of mine who’s a rich man—he invented some kind of simple digital switch—tells me about these people who contribute money to make prizes or give lectures: “You always look at them carefully to find out what crookery they’re trying to absolve their conscience of.”

My friend Matt Sands was once going to write a book to be called Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake.

For many years I would look, when the time was coming around to give out the Prize, at who might get it. But after a while I wasn’t even aware of when it was the right “season.” I therefore had no idea why someone would be calling me at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning.

“Professor Feynman?”

“Hey! Why are you bothering me at this time in the morning?”

“I thought you’d like to know that you’ve won the Nobel Prize.”

“Yeah, but I’m sleeping! It would have been better if you had called me in the morning.”—and I hung up.

My wife said, “Who was that?”

“They told me I won the Nobel Prize.”

“Oh, Richard, who was it?” I often kid around and she is so smart that she never gets fooled, but this time I caught her.

The phone rings again: “Professor Feynman, have you heard …”

(In a disappointed voice) “Yeah.”

Then I began to think, “How can I turn this all off? I don’t want any of this!” So the first thing was to take the telephone off the hook, because calls were coming one right after the other. I tried to go back to sleep, but found it was impossible.

I went down to the study to think: What am I going to do? Maybe I won’t accept the Prize. What would happen then? Maybe that’s impossible.

I put the receiver back on the hook and the phone rang right away. It was a guy from Time magazine. I said to him, “Listen, I’ve got a problem, so I want this off the record. I don’t know how to get out of this thing. Is there some way not to accept the Prize?”

He said, “I’m afraid, sir, that there isn’t any way you can do it without making more of a fuss than if you leave it alone.” It was obvious. We had quite a conversation, about fifteen or twenty minutes, and the Time guy never published anything about it.

I said thank you very much to the Time guy and hung up. The phone rang immediately: it was the newspaper.

“Yes, you can come up to the house. Yes, it’s all right. Yes, Yes, Yes …”

One of the phone calls was a guy from the Swedish consulate. He was going to have a reception in Los Angeles.

I figured that since I decided to accept the Prize, I’ve got to go through with all this stuff.

The consul said, “Make a list of the people you would like to invite, and we’ll make a list of the people we are inviting. Then I’ll come to your office and we’ll compare the lists to see if there are any duplicates, and we’ll make up the invitations …”

So I made up my list. It had about eight people-my neighbor from across the street, my artist friend Zorthian, and so on.

The consul came over to my office with his list: the Governor of the State of California, the This, the That; Getty, the oilman; some actress—it had three hundred people! And, needless to say, there was no duplication whatsoever!

Then I began to get a little bit nervous. The idea of meeting all these dignitaries frightened me.

The consul saw I was worried. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “Most of them don’t come.”

Well, I had never arranged a party that I invited people to, and knew to expect them not to come! I don’t have to kowtow to anybody and give them the delight of being honored with this invitation that they can refuse; it’s stupid!

By the time I got home I was really upset with the whole thing. I called the consul back and said, “I’ve thought it over, and I realize that I just can’t go through with the reception.”

He was delighted. He said, “You’re perfectly right.” I think he was in the same position—having to set up a party for this jerk was just a pain in the ass, It turned out, in the end, everybody was happy. Nobody wanted to come, including the guest of honor! The host was much better off, too!

I had a certain psychological difficulty all the way through this period. You see, I had been brought up by my father against royalty and pomp (he was in the uniforms business, so he knew the difference between a man with a uniform on, and with the uniform off—it’s the same man). I had actually learned to ridicule this stuff all my life, and it was so strong and deeply cut into me that I couldn’t go up to a king without some strain. It was childish, I know, but I was brought up that way, so it was a problem.

People told me that there was a rule in Sweden that after you accept the Prize, you have to back away from the king without turning around. You come down some steps, accept the Prize, and then go back up the steps. So I said to myself, “All right, I’m gonna fix them!”—and I practiced jumping up stairs, backwards, to show how ridiculous their custom was. I was in a terrible mood! That was stupid and silly, of course.

I found out this wasn’t a rule any more; you could turn around when you left the king, and walk like a normal human being, in the direction you were intending to go, with your nose in front.

I was pleased to find that not all the people in Sweden take the royal ceremonies as seriously as you! might think. When you get there, you discover that they’re on your side.

The students had, for example, a special ceremony in which they granted each Nobel-Prize-winner the special “Order of the Frog.” When you get this little frog, you have to make a frog noise.

When I was younger I was anti-culture, but my father had some good books around. One was a book with the old Greek play TheFrogs in it, and I glanced at it one time and I saw in there that a frog talks. It was written as “brek, kek, kek.” I thought, “No frog ever made a sound like that; that’s a crazy way to describe it!” so I tried it, and after practicing it awhile, I realized that it’s very accurately what a frog says.

So my chance glance into a book by Aristophanes turned out to be useful, later on: I could make a good frog noise at the students’ ceremony for the Nobel-Prize-winners! And jumping backwards fit right in, too. So I liked that part of it; that ceremony went well.

While I had a lot of fun, I did still have this psychological difficulty all the way through. My greatest problem was the Thank-You speech that you give at the King’s Dinner. When they give you the Prize they give you some nicely bound books about the years before, and they have all the Thank-You speeches written out as if they’re some big deal. So you begin to think it’s of some importance what you say in this ThankYou speech, because it’s going to be published. What I didn’t realize was that hardly anyone was going to listen to it carefully, and nobody was going to read it! I had lost my sense of proportion: I couldn’t just say thank you very much, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah; it would have been so easy to do that, but no, I have to make it honest. And the truth was, I didn’t really want this Prize, so how do I say thank you when I don’t want it?

My wife says I was a nervous wreck, worrying about what I was going to say in the speech, but I finally figured out a way to make a perfectly satisfactory-sounding speech that was nevertheless completely honest. I’m sure those who heard the speech had no idea what this guy had gone through in preparing it.

I started out by saying that I had already received my prize in the pleasure I got in discovering what I did, from the fact that others used my work, and so on. I tried to explain that I had already received everything I expected to get, and the rest was nothing compared to it. I had already received my prize.

But then I said I received, all at once, a big pile of letters—I said it much better in the speech—reminding me of all these people that I knew: letters from childhood friends who jumped up when they read the morning newspaper and cried out, “I know him! He’s that kid we used to play with!” and so on; letters like that, which were very supportive and expressed what I interpreted as a kind of love. For that I thanked them.

The speech went fine, but I was always getting into slight difficulties with royalty. During the King’s Dinner I was sitting next to a princess who had gone to college in the United States. I assumed, incorrectly, that she had the same attitudes as I did. I figured she was just a kid like everybody else. I remarked on how the king and all the royalty had to stand for such a long time, shaking hands with all the guests at the reception before the dinner. “In America,” I said, “we could make this more efficient. We would design a machine to shake hands.”

“Yes, but there wouldn’t be very much of a market for it here,” she said, uneasily. “There’s not that much royalty.”

“On the contrary, there’d be a very big market. At first, only the king would have a machine, and we could give it to him free. Then, of course, other people would want a machine, too. The question now becomes, who will be allowed to have a machine? The prime minister is permitted to buy one; then the president of the senate is allowed to buy one, and then the most important senior deputies. So there’s a very big, expanding market, and pretty soon, you wouldn’t have to go through the reception line to shake hands with the machines; you’d send your machine!”

I also sat next to the lady who was in charge of organizing the dinner. A waitress came by to fill my wine glass, and I said, “No, thank you. I don’t drink.”

The lady said, “No, no. Let her pour the drink.”

“But I don’t drink.”

She said, “It’s all right. Just look. You see, she has two bottles. We know that number eighty-eight doesn’t drink.” (Number eighty-eight was on the back of my chair.) “They look exactly the same, but one has no alcohol.”

“But how do you know?” I exclaimed.

She smiled. “Now watch the king,” she said. “He doesn’t drink either.”

She told me some of the problems they had had this particular year. One of them was, where should the Russian ambassador sit? The problem always is, at dinners like this, who sits nearer to the king. The Prize-winners normally sit closer to the king than the diplomatic corps does. And the order in which the diplomats sit is determined according to the length of time they have been in Sweden. Now at that time, the United States ambassador had been in Sweden longer than the Russian ambassador, But that year, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was Mr. Sholokhov, a Russian, and the Russian ambassador wanted to be Mr. Sholokhov’s translator—and therefore to sit next to him. So the problem was how to let the Russian ambassador sit closer to the king without offending the United States ambassador and the rest of the diplomatic corps.

She said, “You should have seen what a fuss they went through—letters back and forth, telephone calls, and so on—before I ever got permission to have the ambassador sit next to Mr. Sholokhov. It was finally agreed that the ambassador wouldn’t officially represent the embassy of the Soviet Union that evening; rather, he was to be only the translator for Mr. Sholokhov.”

After the dinner we went off into another room, where there were different conversations going on. There was a Princess Somebody of Denmark sitting at a table with a number of people around her, and I saw an empty chair at their table and sat down.

She turned to me and said, “Oh! You’re one of the Nobel-Prize-winners. In what field did you do your work?”

“In physics,” I said.

“Oh. Well, nobody knows anything about that, so I guess we can’t talk about it.”

“On the contrary,” I answered. “It’s because somebody knows something about it that we can’t talk about physics. It’s the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance—gold transfers we can’t talk about, because those are understood—so it’s the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!”

I don’t know how they do it. There’s a way of forming ice on the surface of the face, and she did it! She turned to talk to somebody else.

After a while I could tell I was completely cut out of the conversation, so I got up and started away. The Japanese ambassador, who was also sitting at that table, jumped up and walked after me. “Professor Feynman,” he said, “there is something I should like to tell you about diplomacy.”

He went into a long story about how a young man in Japan goes to the university and studies international relations because he thinks he can make a contribution to his country. As a sophomore he begins to have slight twinges of doubt about what he is learning. After college he takes his first post in an embassy and has still more doubts about his understanding of diplomacy, until he finally realizes that nobody knows anything about international relations. At that point, he can become an ambassador! “So Professor Feynman,” he said, “next time you give examples of things that everybody talks about that nobody knows about, please include international relations!”

He was a very interesting man, and we got to talking. I had always been interested in how it is the different countries and different peoples develop differently. I told the ambassador that there was one thing that always seemed to me to be a remarkable phenomenon: how Japan had developed itself so rapidly to become such a modern and important country in the world. “What is the aspect and character of the Japanese people that made it possible for the Japanese to do that?” I asked.

The ambassador answered in a way I like to hear: “I don’t know,” he said. “I might suppose something, but I don’t know if it’s true. The people of Japan believed they had only one way of moving up: to have their children educated more than they were; that it was very important for them to move out of their peasantry to become educated. So there has been a great energy in the family to encourage the children to do well in school, and to be pushed forward. Because of this tendency to learn things all the time, new ideas from the outside would spread through the educational system very easily. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Japan has advanced so rapidly.”

All in all, I must say I enjoyed the visit to Sweden, in the end. Instead of coming home immediately, I went to CERN, the European center for nuclear research in Switzerland, to give a talk. I appeared before my colleagues in the suit that I had worn to the King’s Dinner—I had never given a talk in a suit before—and I began by saying, “Funny thing, you know; in Sweden we were sitting around, talking about whether there are any changes as a result of our having won the Nobel Prize, and as a matter of fact, I think I already see a change: I rather like this suit.”

Everybody says “Booooo!” and Weisskopf jumps up and tears off his coat and says, “We’re not gonna wear suits at lectures!”

I took my coat off, loosened my tie, and said, “By the time I had been through Sweden, I was beginning to like this stuff, but now that I’m back in the world, everything’s all right again. Thanks for straightening me out!” They didn’t want me to change. So it was very quick: at CERN they undid everything that they had done in Sweden.

It’s nice that I got some money—I was able to buy a beach house—but altogether, I think it would have been much nicer not to have had the Prize—because you never, any longer, can be taken straightforwardly in any public situation.

In a way, the Nobel Prize has been something of a pain in the neck, though there was at least one time that I got some fun out of it, Shortly after I won the Prize, Gweneth and I received an invitation from the Brazilian government to be the guests of honor at the Carnaval celebrations in Rio. We gladly accepted and had a great time. We went from one dance to another and reviewed the big street parade that featured the famous samba schools playing their wonderful rhythms and music. Photographers from newspapers and magazines were taking pictures all the time—”Here, the Professor from America is dancing with Miss Brazil.”

It was fun to be a “celebrity,” but we were obviously the wrong celebrities. Nobody was very excited about the guests of honor that year. I found out later how our invitation had come about. Gina Lollobrigida was supposed to be the guest of honor, but just before Carnaval, she said no. The Minister of Tourism, who was in charge of organizing Carnaval, had some friends at the Center for Physical Research who knew I had played in a samba band, and since I had recently won the Nobel Prize, I was briefly in the news, In a moment of panic the Minister and his friends got this crazy idea to replace Gina Lollobrigida with the professor of physics!

Needless to say, the Minister did such a bad job on that Carnaval that he lost his position in the government.