Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (25 page)

They were a very interesting, friendly couple, and we had many interesting conversations. I recalled how we had met, and I asked them why Tamara was always introducing the new girls to me.

Gloria replied, “When Tamara was about to introduce me to you, she said, ‘Now I’m going to introduce you to the real _spender_ around here!’

I had to think a moment before I realized that the sixteen-dollar bottle of champagne bought with such a vigorous and misunderstood “_never mind!_” turned out to be a good investment. I apparently had the reputation of being some kind of eccentric who always came in _not_ dressed up, not in a neat suit, but _always_ ready to spend lots of money on the girls.

Eventually I told them that I was struck by something: “I’m fairly intelligent,” I said, “but probably only about physics. But in that bar there are lots of intelligent guys–oil guys, mineral guys, important businessmen, and so forth– and all the time they’re buying the girls drinks, and they get nothin’ _for_ it!” (By this time I had decided that nobody else was getting anything out of all those drinks either.) “How is it possible,” I asked, “that an ‘intelligent’ guy can be such a goddamn fool when he gets into a bar?”

The master said, “_This_ I know all about. I know exactly how it all works. I will give you lessons, so that hereafter you can get something from a girl in a bar like this. But before I give you the lessons, I must demonstrate that I really know what I’m talking about. So to do that, Gloria will get a _man_ to buy _you_ a champagne cocktail.”

I say, “OK,” though I’m thinking, “How the hell are they gonna _do_ it?”

The master continued: “Now you must do exactly as we tell you. Tomorrow night you should sit some distance from Gloria in the bar, and when she gives you a sign, all you have to do is walk by.”

“Yes,” says Gloria. “It’ll be easy.”

The next night I go to the bar and sit in the corner, where I can keep my eye on Gloria from a distance. After a while, sure enough, there’s some guy sitting with her, and after a little while longer the guy’s happy and Gloria gives me a wink. I get up and nonchalantly saunter by. Just as I’m passing, Gloria turns around and says in a real friendly and bright voice, “Oh, hi, Dick! When did you get back into town? Where have you been?”

At this moment the guy turns around to see who this “Dick” is, and I can see in his eyes something I understand completely, since I have been in that position so often myself.

First look: “Oh-oh, competition coming up. He’s gonna take her away from me after I bought her a drink! What’s gonna happen?”

Next look: “No, it’s just a casual friend. They seem to know each other from some time back.” I could see all this. I could read it on his face. I knew exactly what he was going through.

Gloria turns to him and says, “Jim, I’d like you to meet an old friend of mine, Dick Feynman.”

Next look: “I know what I’ll do; _I’ll be kind to this guy so that she’ll like me more_.”

Jim turns to me and says, “Hi, Dick. How about a drink?”

“Fine!” I say.

“What’ll ya have?”

“Whatever she’s having.”

“Bartender, another champagne cocktail, please.”

So it was easy; there was nothing to it. That night after the bar closed I went again over to the master and Gloria’s motel. They were laughing and smiling, happy with how it worked out. “All right,” I said, “I’m absolutely convinced that you two know exactly what you’re talking about. Now, what about the lessons?”

“OK,” he says. “The whole principle is this: The guy wants to be a gentleman. He doesn’t want to be thought of as impolite, crude, or especially a cheapskate. As long as the girl knows the guy’s motives so well, it’s easy to steer him in the direction she wants him to go.

“Therefore,” he continued, “under _no circumstances_ be a gentleman! You must _disrespect_ the girls. Furthermore, the very first rule is, don’t buy a girl _anything_–not even a package of cigarettes–until you’ve _asked_ her if she’ll sleep with you, and you’re convinced that she _will_, and that she’s not lying.”

“Uh . . . you mean . . . you don’t . . . uh . . . you just _ask_ them?”

“OK,” he says, “I know this is your first lesson, and it may be hard for you to be so blunt. So you might buy her one thing–just one little something–before you ask. But on the other hand, it will only make it more difficult.”

Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t _worth_ anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.

Then that night I was ready to try it out. I go into the bar as usual, and right away my friend says, “Hey, Dick! Wait’ll you see the girl I got tonight! She had to go change her clothes, but she’s coming right back.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say, unimpressed, and I sit at another table to watch the show. My friend’s girl comes in just as the show starts, and I’m thinking, “I don’t give a damn _how_ pretty she is; all she’s doing is getting him to buy her drinks, and she’s going to give him _nothing!_”

After the first act my friend says, “Hey, Dick! I want you to meet Ann. Ann, this is a good friend of mine, Dick Feyn man.”

I say “Hi” and keep looking at the show.

A few moments later Ann says to me, “Why don’t you come and sit at the table here with us?”

I think to myself, “Typical bitch: _he’s_ buying her drinks, and _she’s_ inviting somebody _else_ to the table.” I say, “I can see fine from here.”

A little while later a lieutenant from the military base nearby comes in, dressed in a nice uniform. It isn’t long before we notice that Ann is sitting over on the other side of the bar with the lieutenant!

Later that evening I’m sitting at the bar, Ann is dancing with the lieutenant, and when the lieutenant’s back is toward me and she’s facing me, she smiles very pleasantly to me. I think again, “Some bitch! Now she’s doing this trick on the _lieutenant_ even!”

Then I get a good idea: I don’t look at her until the lieutenant can also see me, and _then_ I smile back at her, so the lieutenant will know what’s going on. So her trick didn’t work for long.

A few minutes later she’s not with the lieutenant any more, but asking the bartender for her coat and handbag, saying in a loud, obvious voice, “I’d like to go for a walk. Does anybody want to go for a walk with me?”

I think to myself, “You can keep saying no and pushing them off, but you can’t do it permanently, or you won’t get anywhere. There comes a time when you have to go along.” So I say coolly, “_I’ll_ walk with you.” So we go out. We walk down the street a few blocks and see a café, and she says, “I’ve got an idea–let’s get some coffee and sandwiches, and go over to my place and eat them.”

The idea sounds pretty good, so we go into the café and she orders three coffees and three sandwiches and I pay for them.

As we’re going out of the café, I think to myself, “Something’s wrong: too many sandwiches!”

On the way to her motel she says, “You know, I won’t have time to eat these sandwiches with you, because a lieutenant is coming over..

I think to myself, “See, I flunked. The master gave me a lesson on what to do, and I flunked. I bought her $1.10 worth of sandwiches, and hadn’t asked her anything, and now I _know_ I’m gonna get nothing! I have to recover, if only for the pride of my teacher.”

I stop suddenly and I say to her, “You . . . are worse than a WHORE!”

“Whaddya mean?”

“You got _me_ to buy these sandwiches, and what am I going to get for it? _Nothing!_”

“Well, you cheapskate!” she says. “If that’s the way you feel, _I’ll_ pay you _back_ for the sandwiches!”

I called her bluff: “Pay me back, then.”

She was astonished. She reached into her pocketbook, took out the little bit of money that she had and gave it to me. I took my sandwich and coffee and went off.

After I was through eating, I went back to the bar to report to the master. I explained everything, and told hirn I was sorry that I flunked, but I tried to recover.

He said very calmly, “It’s OK, Dick; it’s all right. Since you ended up not buying her anything, she’s gonna sleep with you tonight.”

“_What?_”

“That’s right,” he said confidently; “she’s gonna sleep with you. I _know_ that.”

“But she isn’t even _here!_ She’s at _her_ place with the lieu–“

“It’s all right.”

Two o’clock comes around, the bar closes, and Ann hasn’t appeared. I ask the master and his wife if I can come over to their place again. They say sure.

Just as we’re coming out of the bar, here comes Ann, running across Route 66 toward me. She puts her arm in mine, and says, “Come on, let’s go over to my place.

The master was right. So the lesson was terrific!

When I was back at Cornell in the fall, I was dancing with the sister of a grad student, who was visiting from Virginia. She was very nice, and suddenly I got this idea: “Let’s go to a bar and have a drink,” I said.

On the way to the bar I was working up nerve to try the master’s lesson on an _ordinary_ girl. After all, you don’t feel so bad disrespecting a bar girl who’s trying to get you to buy her drinks–but a nice, ordinary, Southern girl?

We went into the bar, and before I sat down, I said, “Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?”

“Yes.”

So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn’t enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up.

————-
Lucky Numbers
————-

One day at Princeton I was sitting in the lounge and overheard some mathematicians talking about the series for e^x, which is 1 + x + x^2/2! + x^3/3! Each term you get by multiplying the preceding term by x and dividing by the next number. For example, to get the next term after x^4/4! you multiply that term by x and divide by 5. It’s very simple.

When I was a kid I was excited by series, and had played with this thing. I had computed e using that series, and had seen how quickly the new terms became very small.

I mumbled something about how it was easy to calculate e to any power using that series (you just substitute the power for x).

“Oh yeah?” they said. “Well, then what’s e to the 3.3?” said some joker–I think it was Tukey.

I say, “That’s easy. It’s 27.11.”

Tukey knows it isn’t so easy to compute all that in your head. “Hey! How’d you do that?”

Another guy says, “You know Feynman, he’s just faking it. It’s not really right.”

They go to get a table, and while they’re doing that, I put on a few more figures.: “27.1126,” I say.

They find it in the table. “It’s right! But how’d you do it!”

“I just summed the series.”

“Nobody can sum the series that fast. You must just happen to know that one. How about e to the 3?”

“Look,” I say. “It’s hard work! Only one a day!”

“Hah! It’s a fake!” they say, happily.

“All right,” I say, “It’s 20.085.”

They look in the book as I put a few more figures on. They’re all excited now, because I got another one right.

Here are these great mathematicians of the day, puzzled at how I can compute e to any power! One of them says, “He just _can’t_ be substituting and summing–it’s too hard. There’s some trick. You couldn’t do just any old number like e to the 1.4.”

I say, “It’s hard work, but for you, OK. It’s 4.05.”

As they’re looking it up, I put on a few more digits and say, “And that’s the last one for the day!” and walk out.

What happened was this: I happened to know three numbers–the logarithm of 10 to the base e (needed to convert numbers from base 10 to base e), which is 2.3026 (so I knew that e to the 2.3 is very close to 10), and because of radioactivity (mean-life and half-life), I knew the log of 2 to the base e, which is .69315 (so I also knew that e to the .7 is nearly equal to 2). I also knew e (to the 1), which is 2. 71828.

The first number they gave me was e to the 3.3, which is e to the 2.3–ten–times e, or 27.18. While they were sweating about how I was doing it, I was correcting for the extra .0026–2.3026 is a little high.

I knew I couldn’t do another one; that was sheer luck. But then the guy said e to the 3: that’s e to the 2.3 times e to the .7, or ten times two. So I knew it was 20. something, and while they were worrying how I did it, I adjusted for the .693.

Now I was _sure_ I couldn’t do another one, because the last one was again by sheer luck. But the guy said e to the 1.4, which is e to the .7 times itself. So all I had to do is fix up 4 a little bit!

They never did figure out how I did it.

When I was at Los Alamos I found out that Hans Bethe was absolutely topnotch at calculating. For example, one time we were putting some numbers into a formula, and got to 48 squared. I reach for the Marchant calculator, and he says, “That’s 2300.” I begin to push the buttons, and he says, “If you want it exactly, it’s 2304.”

The machine says 2304. “Gee! That’s pretty remarkable!” I say.

“Don’t you know how to square numbers near 50?” he says. “You square 50–that’s 2500–and subtract 100 times the difference of your number from 50 (in this case it’s 2), so you have 2300. If you want the correction, square the difference and add it on. That makes 2304.”

A few minutes later we need to take the cube root of 2½. Now to take cube roots on the Marchant you had to use a table for the first approximation. I open the drawer to get the table–it takes a little longer this time–and he says, “It’s about 1.35.”

I try it out on the Marchant and it’s right. “How did you do that one?” I ask. “Do you have a secret for taking cube roots of numbers?”

“Oh,” he says, “the log of 2½ is so-and-so. Now onethird of that log is between the logs of 1.3, which is this, and 1.4, which is that, so I interpolated.”

So I found out something: first, he knows the log tables; second, the amount of arithmetic he did to make the interpolation alone would have taken me longer to do than reach for the table and punch the buttons on the calculator. I was very impressed.