Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman Read Free Book Online

and say something–one guy recites “Mary Had a Little Lamb”–and they don’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do either, but by the time I got up there, I told them that I was going to recite a little poem, and I’m sorry that it’s not in English, but I’m sure they will appreciate it anyway:
    A TUZZO LANTO
    –Poici di Pare
    TANto SAca TULna TI, na PUta TUchi PUti TI la.
    RUNto CAta CHANto CHANta MANto CHI la TI da.
    YALta CAra SULda MI la CHAta Picha Pino Tito
    BRALda pe te CHIna nana CHUNda lala CHINda lala CHUNda!
    RONto piti CA le, a TANto CHINto quinta LALda
    ola TiNta dalla LALta, YENta PUcha lalla TALta!
    I do this for three or four stanzas, going through all the emotions that I heard on Italian radio, and the kids are unraveled, rolling in the aisles, laughing with happiness.
    After the banquet was over, the scoutmaster and a schoolteacher came over and told me they had been discussing my poem. One of them thought it was Italian, and the other thought it was Latin. The schoolteacher asks, “Which one of us is right?”
    I said, “You’ll have to go ask the girls–they understood what language it was right away.”
    ———————–
Always Trying to Escape
———————–
    When I was a student at MIT I was interested only in science; I was no good at anything else. But at MIT there was a rule: You have to take some humanities courses to get more “culture.” Besides the English classes required were two electives, so I looked through the list, and right away I found astronomy–as a _humanities_ course! So that year I escaped with astronomy. Then next year I looked further down the list, past French literature and courses like that, and found philosophy. It was the closest thing to science I could find.
    Before I tell you what happened in philosophy, let me tell you about the English class. We had to write a number of themes. For instance, Mill had written something on liberty, and we had to criticize it. But instead of addressing myself to _political_ liberty, as Mill did, I wrote about liberty in social occasions–the problem of having to fake and lie in order to be polite, and does this perpetual game of faking in social situations lead to the “destruction of the moral fiber of society.” An interesting question, but not the one we were supposed to discuss.
    Another essay we had to criticize was by Huxley, “On a Piece of Chalk,” in which he describes how an ordinary piece of chalk he is holding is the remains from animal bones, and the forces inside the earth lifted it up so that it became part of the White Cliffs, and then it was quarried and is now used to conve ideas through writing on the l)lackboard.
    But again, instead of criticizing the essay assigned to us, I wrote a parody called, “On a Piece of Dust,” about how dust makes the colors of the sunset and precipitates the rain, and so on. I was always a faker, always trying to escape.
    But when we had to write a theme on Goethe’s _Faust_, it was hopeless! The work was too long to make a parody of it or to invent something else. I was storming back and forth in the fraternity saying, “I _can’t_ do it. I’m just _not_ gonna do it. I ain’t gonna do it!”
    One of my fraternity brothers said, “OK, Feynman, you’re not gonna do it. But the professor will think you didn’t do it because you don’t want to do the work. You oughta write a theme on _something_–same number of words–and hand it in with a note saying that you just couldn’t understand the _Faust_, you haven’t got the heart for it, and that it’s impossible for you to write a theme on it.”
    So I did that. I wrote a long theme, “On the Limitations of Reason.” I had thought about scientific techniques for solving problems, and how there are certain limitations: moral values cannot be decided by scientific methods, yak, yak, yak, and so on.
    Then another fraternity brother offered some more advice. “Feynman,” he said, “it