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
The
reason why I say I’m “uncultured” or “anti-intellectual” probably goes all the
way back to the time when I was in high school. I was always worried about
being a sissy; I didn’t want to be too delicate. To me, no real man ever paid any
attention to poetry and such things. How poetry ever got written—that never struck
me! So I developed a negative attitude toward the guy who studies French
literature, or studies too much music or poetry—all those “fancy” things. I
admired better the steel-worker, the welder, or the machine shop man. I always
thought the guy who worked in the machine shop and could make things, now he was a real guy! That was my
attitude. To be a practical man was, to me, always somehow a positive virtue,
and to be “cultured” or “intellectual” was not. The first was right, of course,
but the second was crazy.
I
still had this feeling when I was doing my graduate study at Princeton, as
you’ll see. I used to eat often in a nice little restaurant called Papa’s
Place. One day while I was eating there, a painter in his painting clothes came
down from an upstairs room he’d been painting, and sat near me. Somehow we
struck up a conversation and he started talking about how you’ve got to learn a
lot to be in the painting business. “For example,” he said, “in this
restaurant, what colors would you use to paint the walls, if you had the job to do?”
I
said I didn’t know, and he said, “You have a dark band up to such-and-such a
height, because, you see, people who sit at the tables rub their elbows against
the walls, so you don’t want a nice, white wall there. It gets dirty too
easily. But above that, you do
want it white to give a feeling of cleanliness to the restaurant.”
The
guy seemed to know what he was doing, and I was sitting there, hanging on his
words, when he said, “And you also have to know about colors—how to get
different colors when you mix the paint. For example, what colors would you mix to get yellow?”
I
didn’t know how to get yellow by mixing paints. If it’s light, you mix green and
red, but I knew he was talking paints.
So I said, “I don’t know how you get yellow without using yellow.”
“Well,”
he said, “if you mix red and white, you’ll get yellow.”
“Are
you sure you don’t mean pink?”
“No,”
he said, “you’ll get yellow”—and I believed that he got yellow, because he was
a professional painter, and I always admired guys like that. But I still
wondered how he did it.
I
got an idea. “It must be some kind of chemical
change. Were you using some special kind of pigments that make a chemical
change?”
“No,”
he said, “any old pigments will work. You go down to the five-and-ten and get
some paint—just a regular can of red paint and a regular can of white paint—and
I’ll mix ‘em, and I’ll show how you get yellow.”
At
this juncture I was thinking, “Something is crazy. I know enough about paints
to know you won’t get yellow, but he
must know that you do
get yellow, and therefore something interesting happens. I’ve got to see what
it is!”
So
I said, “OK, I’ll get the paints.”
The
painter went back upstairs to finish his painting job, and the restaurant owner
came over and said to me, “What’s the idea of arguing with that man? The man is
a painter; he’s been a painter all his life, and he says he gets yellow. So why argue with
him?”
I
felt embarrassed. I didn’t know what to say. Finally I said, “All my life, I’ve
been studying light. And I think that with red and white you can’t get yellow—you can
only get pink.”
So
I went to the five-and-ten and got the paint, and brought it back to the
restaurant. The painter came down from upstairs, and the restaurant owner was
there too. I put the cans of paint on an old chair, and the painter began to
mix the paint. He put a little more red, he put a little more white—it still
looked pink to me—and he mixed some more. Then he mumbled something like, “I
used to have a little tube of yellow here to sharpen it up a bit—then this’ll
be yellow.”
“Oh!”
I said. “Of course! You add yellow, and you can get yellow, but you couldn’t do
it without the yellow.”
The
painter went back upstairs to paint.
The
restaurant owner said, “That guy has his nerve, arguing with a guy who’s
studied light all his life!”
But
that shows you how much I trusted these “real guys.” The painter had told me so
much stuff that was reasonable that I was ready to give a certain chance that
there was an odd phenomenon I didn’t know. I was expecting pink, but my set of
thoughts were, “The only way to get yellow will be something new and
interesting, and I’ve got to see this.”
I’ve
very often made mistakes in my physics by thinking the theory isn’t as good as
it really is, thinking that there are lots of complications that are going to
spoil it—an attitude that anything can happen, in spite of what you’re pretty
sure should happen.