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So each father has to get up and stick his head through 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:
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 convey ideas through writing on the blackboard.
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 go
One of my fraternity brothers said, “OK, Feynman, you’re not go
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 ca
Then another fraternity brother offered some more advice. “Feynman,” he said, “it ain’t go
“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 I 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 aa
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 co