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
Cornell
had all kinds of departments that I didn’t have much interest in. (That doesn’t
mean there was anything wrong with them; it’s just that I didn’t happen to have
much interest in them.) There was domestic science, philosophy (the guys from
this department were particularly inane), and there were the cultural
things—music and so on. There were quite a few people I did enjoy talking to,
of course. In the math department there was Professor Kac and Professor Feller;
in chemistry, Professor Calvin; and a great guy in the zoology department, Dr.
Griffin, who found out that bats navigate by making echoes. But it was hard to
find enough of these guys to talk to, and there was all this other stuff which
I thought was low-level baloney. And Ithaca was a small town.
The
weather wasn’t really very good. One day I was driving in the car, and there
came one of those quick snow flurries that you don’t expect, so you’re not
ready for it, and you figure, “Oh, it isn’t going to amount to much; I’ll keep
on going.”
But
then the snow gets deep enough that the car begins to skid a little bit, so you
have to put the chains on. You get out of the car, put the chains out on the
snow, and it’s cold,
and you’re beginning to shiver. Then you roll the car back onto the chains, and
you have this problem—or we had it in those days; I don’t know what there is
now—that there’s a hook on the inside that you have to hook first. And because
the chains have to go on pretty tight, it’s hard to get the hook to hook. Then
you have to push this clamp down with your fingers, which by this time are
nearly frozen. And because you’re on the outside of the tire, and the hook is
on the inside, and your hands are cold, it’s very difficult to control. It
keeps slipping, and it’s cold,
and the snow’s coming down, and you’re trying to push this clamp, and your
hand’s hurting, and the damn thing’s not going down—well, I remember that that was the moment when
I decided that this
is insane;
there must be a part of the world that doesn’t have this problem.
I
remembered the couple of times I had visited Caltech, at the invitation of
Professor Bacher, who had previously been at Cornell. He was very smart when I
visited. He knew me inside out, so he said, “Feynman, I have this extra car,
which I’m gonna lend you. Now here’s how you go to Hollywood and the Sunset
Strip. Enjoy yourself.”
So
I drove his car every night down to the Sunset Strip—to the nightclubs and the
bars and the action. It was the kind of stuff I liked from Las Vegas—pretty
girls, big operators, and so on. So Bacher knew how to get me interested in
Caltech.
You
know the story about the donkey who is standing exactly in the middle of two
piles of hay, and doesn’t go to either one, because it’s balanced? Well, that’s
nothing. Cornell and Caltech started making me offers, and as soon as I would
move, figuring that Caltech was really better, they would up their offer at
Cornell; and when I thought I’d stay at Cornell, they’d up something at
Caltech. So you can imagine this donkey between the two piles of hay, with the
extra complication that as soon as he moves toward one, the other one gets
higher. That makes it very difficult!
The
argument that finally convinced me was my sabbatical leave. I wanted to go to
Brazil again, this time for ten months, and I had just earned my sabbatical
leave from Cornell. I didn’t want to lose that, so now that I had invented a
reason to come to a decision, I wrote Bacher and told him what I had decided.
Caltech
wrote back: “We’ll hire you immediately, and we’ll give you your first year as
a sabbatical year.” That’s the way they were acting: no matter what I decided
to do, they’d screw it up. So my first year at Caltech was really spent in Brazil.
I came to Caltech to teach on my second year. That’s how it happened.
Now
that I have been at Caltech since 1951, I’ve been very happy here. It’s exactly the thing for a
one-sided guy like me. There are all these people who are close to the top, who
are very interested in what they are doing, and who I can talk to. So I’ve been
very comfortable.
But
one day, when I hadn’t been at Caltech very long, we had a bad attack of smog.
It was worse then than it is now—at least your eyes smarted much more. I was
standing on a corner, and my eyes were watering, and I thought to myself, “This
is crazy! This is absolutely INSANE! It was all right back at Cornell. I’m
getting out of here.”
So
I called up Cornell, and asked them if they thought it was possible for me to
come back. They said, “Sure! We’ll set it up and call you back tomorrow.”
The
next day, I had the greatest luck in making a decision. God must have set it up
to help me decide. I was walking to my office, and a guy came running up to me
and said, “Hey, Feynman! Did you hear what happened? Baade found that there are
two different populations of stars! All the measurements we had been making of
the distances to the galaxies had been based on Cephid variables of one type, but there’s another type, so the universe
is twice, or three, or even four times as old as we thought!”
I
knew the problem. In those days, the earth appeared to be older than the
universe. The earth was four and a half billion, and the universe was only a
couple, or three billion years old. It was a great puzzle. And this discovery
resolved all that: The universe was now demonstrably older than was previously
thought. And I got this information right away—the guy came running up to me to
tell me all this.
I
didn’t even make it across the campus to get to my office, when another guy
came up—Matt Meselson, a biologist who had minored in physics. (I had been on
his committee for his Ph.D.) He had built the first of what they call a density
gradient centrifuge—it could measure the density of molecules. He said, “Look
at the results of the experiment I’ve been doing!”
He
had proved that when a bacterium makes a new one, there’s a whole molecule,
intact, which is passed from one bacterium to another—a molecule we now know as
DNA. You see, we always think of everything dividing, dividing. So we think everything in the
bacterium divides and gives half of it to the new bacterium. But that’s
impossible: Somewhere, the smallest molecule that contains genetic information can’t divide in half; it
has to make a copy
of itself, and send one copy to the new bacterium, and keep one copy for the
old one. And he had proved it in this way: He first grew the bacteria in heavy
nitrogen, and later grew them all in ordinary nitrogen. As he went along, he
weighed the molecules in his density gradient centrifuge.
The
first generation of new bacteria had all of their chromosome molecules at a
weight exactly in between the weight of molecules made with heavy, and
molecules made with ordinary, nitrogen—a result that could occur if everything
divided, including the chromosome molecules.
But
in succeeding generations, when one might expect that the weight of the
chromosome molecules would be one-fourth, one-eighth, and one-sixteenth of the
difference between the heavy and ordinary molecules, the weights of the
molecules fell into only two groups. One group was the same weight as the first
new generation (halfway between the heavier and the lighter molecules), and the
other group was lighter—the weight of molecules made in ordinary nitrogen. The percentage of heavier
molecules was cut in half in each succeeding generation, but not their weights.
That was tremendously exciting, and very important—it was a fundamental
discovery. And I realized, as I finally got to my office, that this is where
I’ve got to be. Where people from all different fields of science would tell me
stuff, and it was all exciting. It was exactly what I wanted, really.
So
when Cornell called a little later, and said they were setting everything up,
and it was nearly ready, I said, “I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind again.” But I
decided then never
to decide again. Nothing—absolutely nothing—would ever change my mind again.
When
you’re young, you have all these things to worry about—should you go there,
what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something
else comes up. It’s much easier to just plain decide. Never mind—nothing is going to
change your mind. I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and
tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the
restaurant, so I decided it would always
be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again—I had the solution to that problem. Anyway, I
decided it would always be Caltech.
One
time someone tried to change my mind about Caltech. Fermi had just died a short
time before, and the faculty at Chicago were looking for someone to take his
place. Two people from Chicago came out and asked to visit me at my home—I
didn’t know what it was about. They began telling me all the good reasons why I
ought to go to Chicago: I could do this, I could do that, they had lots of
great people there, I had the opportunity to do all kinds of wonderful things.
I didn’t ask them how much they would pay, and they kept hinting that they
would tell me if I asked. Finally, they asked me if I wanted to know the
salary. “Oh, no!” I said. “I’ve already decided to stay at Caltech. My wife
Mary Lou is in the other room, and if she hears how much the salary is, we’ll
get into an argument. Besides, I’ve decided not to decide any more; I’m staying
at Caltech for good.” So I didn’t let them tell me the salary they were
offering.
About
a month later I was at a meeting, and Leona Marshall came over and said, “It’s
funny you didn’t accept our offer at Chicago. We were so disappointed, and we
couldn’t understand how you could turn down such a terrific offer.”
“It
was easy,” I said, “because I never let them tell me what the offer was.”
A
week later I got a letter from her. I opened it, and the first sentence said,
“The salary they were offering was—,” a tremendous
amount of money, three or four times what I was making. Staggering! Her letter
continued, “I told you the salary before you could read any further. Maybe now
you want to reconsider, because they’ve told me the position is still open, and
we’d very much like to have you.”
So
I wrote them back a letter that said, “After reading the salary, I’ve decided
that I must
refuse. The reason I have to refuse a salary like that is I would be able to do
what I’ve always wanted to do—get a wonderful mistress, put her up in an
apartment, buy her nice things … With the salary you have offered, I could
actually do
that, and I know what would happen to me. I’d worry about her, what she’s
doing; I’d get into arguments when I come home, and so on. All this bother
would make me uncomfortable and unhappy. I wouldn’t be able to do physics well,
and it would be a big mess!
What I’ve always wanted to do would be bad for me, so I’ve decided that I can’t
accept your offer.”