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The speech went fine, but I was always getting into slight difficulties with royalty. During the King’s Di
“Yes, but there wouldn’t be very much of a market for it here,” she said, uneasily. “There’s not that much royalty.”
“On the contrary, there’d be a very big market. At first, only the king would have a machine, and we could give it to him free. Then, of course, other people would want a machine, too. The question now becomes, who will be allowed to have a machine? The prime minister is permitted to buy one; then the president of the senate is 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 di
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 di
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 di
She turned to me and said, “Oh! You’re one of the Nobel-Prize-wi
“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 Di
Everybody says “Booooo!” and Weisskopf jumps up and tears off his coat and says, “We’re not go
I took my coat off, loosened my tie, and said, “By the time I had been through Sweden, I was begi
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.”