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

ain’t gonna work, handing in a theme that’s got nothing to do with _Faust_. What you oughta do is work that thing you wrote _into_ the _Faust_.”
    “Ridiculous!” I said.
    But the other fraternity guys think it’s a good idea.
    “All right, all right!” I say, protesting. “I’ll try.”
    So I added half a page to what 1 had already written, and said that Mephistopheles represents reason, and Faust represents the spirit, and Goethe is trying to show the limitations of reason. I stirred it up, cranked it all in, and handed in my theme.
    The professor had us each come in individually to discuss our theme. I went in expecting the worst.
    He said, “The introductory material is fine, but the _Faust_ material is a bit too brief. Otherwise, it’s very good– B + .” I escaped again!
    Now to the philosophy class. The course was taught by an old bearded professor named Robinson, who always mumbled. I would go to the class, and he would mumble along, and I couldn’t understand a _thing_. The other people in the class seemed to understand him better, but they didn’t seem to pay any attention. I happened to have a small drill, about one-sixteenth-inch, and to pass the time in that class, I would twist it between my fingers and drill holes in the sole of my shoe, week after week.
    Finally one day at the end of the class, Professor Robinson went “wugga mugga mugga wugga wugga . . . and everybody got excited! They were all talking to each other and discussing, so I figured he’d said something interesting, thank God! I wondered what it was?
    I asked somebody, and they said, “We have to write a theme, and hand it in in four weeks.”
    “A theme on what?”
    “On what he’s been talking about all year.”
    I was stuck. The only thing that I had heard during that entire term that I could remember was a moment when there came this upwelling, “muggawuggastreamofconsciousnessmugga wugga,” and _phoom!_–it sank back into chaos.
    This “stream of consciousness” reminded me of a problem my father had given to me many years before. He said, “Suppose some Martians were to come down to earth, and Martians never slept, but instead were perpetually active. Suppose they didn’t have this crazy phenomenon that we have, called sleep. So they ask you the question: ‘How does it _feel_ to go to sleep? What _happens_ when you go to sleep? Do your thoughts suddenly stop, or do they move less aanndd lleeessss rraaaaapppppiidddddllllllllyyyyyyyyyyy yyy? How does the mind actually turn off?”
    I got interested. Now I had to answer this question: How does the stream of consciousness _end_, when you go to sleep?
    So every afternoon for the next four weeks I would work on my theme, I would pull down the shades in my room, turn off the lights, and go to sleep. And I’d watch what _happened_, when I went to sleep.
    Then at night, I’d go to sleep again, so I had two times each day when I could make observations–it was very good!
    At first I noticed a lot of subsidiary things that had little to do with falling asleep. I noticed, for instance, that I did a lot of thinking by speaking to myself internally. I could also imagine things visually.
    Then, when I was getting tired, I noticed that I could think of two things at once. I discovered this when I was talking internally to myself about something, and _while_ I was doing this, I was idly imagining two ropes connected to the end of my bed, going through some pulleys, and winding around a turning cylinder, slowly lifting the bed. I wasn’t _aware_ that I was imagining these ropes until I began to worry that one rope would catch on the other rope, and they wouldn’t wind up smoothly. But I said, internally, “Oh, the tension will take care of that,” and this interrupted the first thought I was having, and made me aware that I was thinking of two things at once.
    I also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they become less and less logically