Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (42 page)

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 he 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,” hut 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 he 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 Mexico, she would have a colloquium on the mathematics and astronomy of the Mayans–the old civilization of Mexico.

(Remember my attitude to culture: This kind of thing would have driven me _crazy_ if it were in my university!)

She started looking for a professor to lecture on the subject, and couldn’t find anybody at UCLA who was quite an expert. She telephoned various places and still couldn’t find anybody.

Then she remembered Professor Otto Neugebauer, of Brown University, the great expert on Babylonian mathematics.* She telephoned him in Rhode Island and asked if he knew someone on the West Coast who could lecture on Mayan mathematics and astronomy.

[* When I was a young professor at Cornell, Professor Neugebauer had come one year to give a sequence of lectures, called the Messenger Lectures, on Babylonian mathematics. They were wonderful, Oppenheimer lectured the next year. I remember thinking to myself, “Wouldn’t it be nice to come, someday, and be able to give lectures like that!” Some years later, when I was refusing invitations to lecture at various places, I was invited to give the Messenger Lectures at Cornell. Of course I couldn’t refuse, because I had put that in my mind so I accepted an invitation to go over to Bob Wilson’s house for a weekend and we discussed various ideas. The result was a series of lectures called “The Character of Physical Law.”]

“Yes,” he said. “I do. He’s not a professional anthropologist or a historian; he’s an amateur. But he certainly knows a lot about it. His name is Richard Feynman.”

She nearly died! She’s trying to bring some culture to the physicists, and the only way to do it is to get a physicist!

The only reason I knew anything about Mayan mathematics was that I was getting exhausted on my honeymoon in Mexico with my second wife, Mary Lou. She was greatly interested in •art history, particularly that of Mexico. So we went to Mexico for our honeymoon and we climbed up pyramids and down pyramids; she had me following her all over the place. She showed me many interesting things, such as certain relationships in the designs of various figures, but after a few days (and nights) of going up and down in hot and steamy jungles, I was exhausted.

In some little Guatemalan town in the middle of nowhere we went into a museum that had a case displaying a manuscript full of strange symbols, pictures, and bars and dots. It was a copy (made by a man named Villacorta) of the Dresden Codex, an original book made by the Mayans found in a museum in Dresden. I knew the bars and dots were numbers. My father had taken me to the New York World’s Fair when I was a little kid, and there they had reconstructed a Mayan temple. I remembered him telling me how the Mayans had invented the zero and had done many interesting things.

The museum had copies of the codex for sale, so I bought one. On each page at the left was the codex copy, and on the right a description and partial translation in Spanish.

I love puzzles and codes, so when I saw the bars and dots, I thought, “I’m gonna have some fun!” I covered up the Spanish with a piece of yellow paper and began playing this game of deciphering the Mayan bars and dots, sitting in the hotel room, while my wife climbed up and down the pyramids all day.

I quickly figured out that a bar was equal to five dots, what the symbol for zero was, and so on. It took me a little longer to figure out that the bars and dots always carried at twenty the first time, but they carried at eighteen the second time (making cycles of 360). I also worked out all kinds of things about various faces: they had surely meant certain days and weeks.

After we got back home I continued to work on it. Altogether, it’s a lot of fun to try to decipher something like that, because when you start out you don’t know anything– you have no clue to go by. But then you notice certain numbers that appear often, and add up to other numbers, and so on.

There was one place in the codex where the number 584 was very prominent. This 584 was divided into periods of 236, 90, 250, and 8. Another prominent number was 2920, or 584 x 5 (also 365 x 8). There was a table of multiples of 2920 up to 13 x 2920, then there were multiples of 13 x 2920 for a while, and then–_funny numbers!_ They were errors, as far as I could tell. Only many years later did I figure out what they were.

Because figures denoting days were associated with this 584 which was divided up so peculiarly, I figured if it wasn’t some mythical period of some sort, it might be something astronomical, Finally I went down to the astronomy library and looked it up, and found that 583.92 days is the period of Venus as it appears from the earth. Then the 236, 90, 250, 8 became apparent: it must be the phases that Venus goes through. It’s a morning star, then it can’t be seen (it’s on the far side of the sun); then it’s an evening star, and finally it disappears again (it’s between the earth and the sun). The 90 and the 8 are different because Venus moves more slowly through the sky when it is on the far side of the sun compared to when it passes between the earth and the sun. The difference between the 236 and the 250 might indicate a difference between the eastern and western horizons in Maya land.

I discovered another table nearby that had periods of 11,959 days. This turned out to be a table for predicting lunar eclipses. Still another table had multiples of 91 in descending order. I never did figure that one out (nor has anyone else).

When I had worked out as much as I could, I finally decided to look at the Spanish commentary to see how much I was able to figure out. It was complete nonsense. This symbol was Saturn, this symbol was a god–it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense. So I didn’t have to have covered the commentary; I wouldn’t have learned anything from it anyway.

After that I began to read a lot about the Mayans, and found that the great man in this business was Eric Thompson, some of whose books I now have.

When Nina Byers called me up I realized that I had lost my copy of the Dresden Codex. (I had lent it to Mrs. H. P Robertson, who had found a Mayan codex in an old trunk of an antique dealer in Paris. She had brought it back to Pasadena for me to look at–I still remember driving home with it on the front seat of my car, thinking, “I’ve gotta be careful driving: I’ve got the new codex”–but as soon as I looked at it carefully, I could see immediately that it was a complete fake. After a little bit of work I could find where each picture in the new codex had come from in the Dresden Codex. So I lent her my book to show her, and I eventually forgot she had it.) So the librarians at UCLA worked very hard to find another copy of Villacorta’s rendition of the Dresden Codex, and lent it to me.

I did all the calculations all over again, and in fact I got a little bit further than I did before: I figured out that those “funny numbers” which I thought before were errors were really integer multiples of something closer to the correct period (583.923)–the Mayans had realized that 584 wasn’t exactly right!*

[* While I was studying this table of corrections for the period of venus, I discovered a rare exaggeration by Mr. Thompson. He wrote that by looking at the table, you can deduce how the Mayans calculated the correct period of Venus–use this number four times and that difference once and you get an accuracy of one day in 4000 years, which is really quite remarkable, especially since the Mayans observed for only a few hundred years.

Thompson happened to pick a combination which fit what he thought was the right period ftr ‘Venus, 583.92. But when you put in a more exact figure, something like 583.923, you find the Mayans were off by more. Of course, by choosing a different combination you can get the numbers in the table to give you 583.923 with the same remarkable accuracy!]