“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

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.

Bringing Culture to the Physicists

Nina Byers, a professor at UCLA, became in charge of the physics colloquium sometime in the early seventies. The colloquia are normally a place where physicists from other universities come and talk pure technical stuff. But partly as a result of the atmosphere of that particular period of time, she got the idea that the physicists needed more culture, so she thought she would arrange something along those lines: Since Los Angeles is near