Man of a Thousand Tongues

When I was in Brazil I had struggled to learn the local language, and decided to give my physics lectures in Portuguese. Soon after I came to Caltech, I was invited to a party hosted by Professor Bacher. Before I arrived at the party, Bacher told the guests, “This guy Feynman thinks he’s smart because he learned a little Portuguese, so let’s fix him good: Mrs. Smith, here (she’s completely Caucasian), grew up in China. Let’s have her greet Feynman in Chinese.”

I walk into the party innocently, and Bacher introduces me to all these people: “Mr. Feynman, this is Mr. So-and-so.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Feynman.”

“And this is Mr. Such-and-such.”

“My pleasure, Mr. Feynman.”

“And this is Mrs. Smith.”

“Ai, choong, ngong jia! ” she says, bowing.

This is such a surprise to me that I figure the only thing to do is to reply in the same spirit. I bow politely to her, and with complete confidence I say, “Ah ching, jong jien! ”

“Oh, my God!” she exclaims, losing her own composure. “I knew this would happen—I speak Mandarin and he speaks Cantonese!”

Certainly, Mr. Big!

I used to cross the United States in my automobile every summer, trying to make it to the Pacific Ocean. But, for various reasons, I would always get stuck somewhere-usually in Las Vegas.

I remember the first time, particularly, I liked it very much. Then, as now, Las Vegas made its money on the people who gamble, so the whole problem for the hotels was to get people to come there to gamble. So they had shows and dinners which were very inexpensive—almost free. You didn’t have to make any reservations for anything: you could walk in, sit down at one of the many empty tables, and enjoy the show. It was just wonderful for a man who didn’t gamble, because I was enjoying all the advantages—the rooms were inexpensive, the meals were next to nothing, the shows were good, and I liked the girls.

One day I was lying around the pool at my motel, and some guy came up and started to talk to me. I can’t remember how he got started, but his idea was that I presumably worked for a living, and it was really quite silly to do that. Look how easy it is for me,” he said. “I just hang around the pool all the time and enjoy life in Las Vegas.”

“How the hell do you do that without working?”

“Simple: I bet on the horses.”

“I don’t know anything about horses, but I don’t see how you can make a living betting on the horses,” I said, skeptically.

“Of course you can,” he said. “That’s how I live! I’ll tell you what: I’ll teach you how to do it. We’ll go down and I’ll guarantee that you’ll win a hundred dollars.”

“How can you do that?”

“I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that you’ll win,” he said. “So if you win it doesn’t cost you anything, and if you lose, you get a hundred dollars!”

So I think, “Gee! That’s right! If I win a hundred dollars on the horses and I have to pay him, I don’t lose anything; it’s just an exercise—it’s just proof that his system works. And if he fails, I win a hundred dollars. It’s quite wonderful!”

He takes me down to some betting place where they have a list of horses and racetracks all over the country. He introduces me to other people who say, “Geez, he’s great! I won a hundred dollars!”

I gradually realize that I have to put up some of my own money for the bets, and I begin to get a little nervous. “How much money do I have to bet?” I ask.

“Oh, three or four hundred dollars.”

I haven’t got that much. Besides, it begins to worry me: Suppose I lose all the bets?

So then he says, “I’ll tell you what: My advice will cost you only fifty dollars, and onlyifitworks. If it doesn’t work, I’ll give you the hundred dollars you would have won anyway.”

I figure, “Wow! Now I win both ways—either fifty or a hundred dollars! How the heck can he do that?” Then I realize that if you have a reasonably even game—forget the little losses from the take for the moment in order to understand it—the chance that you’ll win a hundred dollars versus losing your four hundred dollars is four to one. So out of five times that he tries this on somebody, four times they’re going to win a hundred dollars, he gets two hundred (and he points out to them how smart he is); the fifth time he has to pay a hundred dollars. So he receives two hundred, on the average, when he’s paying out one hundred! So I finally understood how he could do that.

This process went on for a few days. He would invent some scheme that sounded like a terrific deal at first, but after I thought about it for a while I’d slowly figure out how it worked. Finally, in some sort of desperation he says, “All right, I’ll tell you what: You pay me fifty dollars for the advice, and if you lose, I’ll pay you back all your money.”

Now I can’tlose on that! So I say, “All right, you’ve got a deal!”

“Fine,” he says. “But unfortunately, I have to go to San Francisco this weekend, so you just mail me the results, and if you lose your four hundred dollars, I’ll send you the money.

The first schemes were designed to make him money by honest arithmetic. Now, he’s going to be out of town. The only way he’s going to make money on this scheme is not to send it—to be a realcheat.

So I never accepted any of his offers. But it was very entertaining to see how he operated.

The other thing that was fun in Las Vegas was meeting show girls. I guess they were supposed to hang around the bar between shows to attract customers. I met several of them that way, and talked to them, and found them to be nice people. People who say, “Show girls, eh?” have already made up their mind what they are! But in any group, if you look at it, there’s all kinds of variety. For example, there was the daughter of a dean of an Eastern university. She had a talent for dancing and liked to dance; she had the summer off and dancing jobs were hard to find, so she worked as a chorus girl in Las Vegas. Most of the show girls were very nice, friendly people. They were all beautiful, and I just love beautiful girls. In fact, show girls were my real reason for liking Las Vegas so much.

At first I was a little bit afraid: the girls were so beautiful, they had such a reputation, and so forth. I would try to meet them, and I’d choke a little bit when I talked. It was difficult at first, but gradually it got easier, and finally I had enough confidence that I wasn’t afraid of anybody.

I had a way of having adventures which is hard to explain: it’s like fishing, where you put a line out and then you have to have patience. When I would tell someone about some of my adventures, they might say, “Oh, come on—let’s do that!” So we would go to a bar to see if something will happen, and they would lose patience after twenty minutes or so. You have to spend a couple of days before something happens, on average. I spent a lot of time talking to show girls. One would introduce me to another, and after a while, something interesting would often happen.

I remember one girl who liked to drink Gibsons. She danced at the Flamingo Hotel, and I got to know her rather well. When I’d come into town, I’d order a Gibson put at her table before she sat down, to announce my arrival.

One time I went over and sat next to her and she said, “I’m with a man tonight—a high-roller from Texas.” (I had already heard about this guy. Whenever he’d play at the craps table, everybody would gather around to see him gamble.) He came back to the table where we were sitting, and my show girl friend introduced me to him.

The first thing he said to me was, “You know somethin’? I lost sixty thousand dollars here last night.”

I knew what to do: I turned to him, completely unimpressed, and I said, “Is that supposed to be smart, or stupid?”

We were eating breakfast in the dining room. He said, “Here, let me sign your check. They don’t charge me for all these things because I gamble so much here.”

“I’ve got enough money that I don’t need to worry about who pays for my breakfast, thank you.” I kept putting him down each time he tried to impress me.

He tried everything: how rich he was, how much oil he had in Texas, and nothing worked, because I knew the formula!

We ended up having quite a bit of fun together.

One time when we were sitting at the bar he said to me, “You see those girls at the table over there? They’re whores from Los Angeles.”

They looked very nice; they had a certain amount of class.

He said, “Tell you what I’ll do: I’ll introduce them to you, and then I’ll pay for the one you want.”

I didn’t feel like meeting the girls, and I knew he was saying that to impress me, so I began to tell him no. But then I thought, “This is something! This guy is trying so hard to impress me, he’s willing to buy this for me. If I’m ever going to tell the story … So I said to him, “Well, OK, introduce me.”

We went over to their table and he introduced me to the girls and then went off for a moment. A waitress came around and asked us what we wanted to drink. I ordered some water, and the girl next to me said, “Is it all right if I have a champagne?”

“You can have whatever you want,” I replied, coolly, ‘cause you’re payin’ for it.”

“What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Cheapskate, or something?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re certainly not a gentleman!” she said indignantly.

“You figured me out immediately!” I replied. I had learned in New Mexico many years before not to be a gentleman.

Pretty soon they were offering to buy me drinks—the tables were turned completely! (By the way, the Texas oilman never came back.)

After a while, one of the girls said, “Let’s go over to the El Rancho. Maybe things are livelier over there.” We got in their car. It was a nice car, and they were nice people. On the way, they asked me my name.

“Dick Feynman.”

“Where are you from, Dick? What do you do?”

“I’m from Pasadena; I work at Caltech.”

One of the girls said, “Oh, isn’t that the place where that scientist Pauling comes from?”

I had been in Las Vegas many times, over and over, and there was nobody who ever knew anything about science. I had talked to businessmen of all kinds, and to them, a scientist was a nobody. “Yeah!” I said, astonished.

“And there’s a fella named Gellan, or something like that—a physicist.” I couldn’t believe it. I was riding in a car full of prostitutes and they know all this stuff!

“Yeah! His name is Gell-Mann! How did you happen to know that?”

“Your pictures were in Time magazine.” It’s true, they had pictures of ten U.S. scientists in Time magazine, for some reason. I was in it, and so were Pauling and Gell-Mann.

“How did you remember the names?” I asked.

“Well, we were looking through the pictures, and we picked out the youngest and the handsomest!” (Gell-Mann is younger than I am.)

We got to the El Rancho Hotel and the girls continued this game of acting towards me like everybody normally acts towards them: “Would you like to gamble?” they asked. I gambled a little bit with their money and we all had a good time.

After a while they said, “Look, we see a live one, so we’ll have to leave you now,” and they went back to work.

One time I was sitting at a bar and I noticed two girls with an older man. Finally he walked away, and they came over and sat next to me: the prettier and more active one next to me, and her duller friend, named Pam, on the other side.

Things started going along very nicely right away. She was very friendly. Soon she was leaning against me, and I put my arm around her. Two men came in and sat at a table nearby. Then, before the waitress came, they walked out.

“Did you see those men?” my new-found friend said.

“Yeah.”

“They’re friends of my husband.”

“Oh? What is this?”

“You see, I just married John Big”—she mentioned a very famous name—”and we’ve had a little argument. We’re on our honeymoon, and John is always gambling. He doesn’t pay any attention to me, so I go off and enjoy myself, but he keeps sending spies around to check on what I’m doing.”

She asked me to take her to her motel room, so we went in my car. On the way I asked her, “Well, what about John?”

She said, “Don’t worry. Just look around for a big red car with two antennas. If you don’t see it, he’s not around.”

The next night I took the “Gibson girl” and a friend of hers to the late show at the Silver Slipper, which had a show later than all the hotels. The girls who worked in the other shows liked to go there, and the master of ceremonies announced the arrival of the various dancers as they came in. So in I went with these two lovely dancers on my arm, and he said, “And here comes Miss So-and-so and Miss So-and-so from the Flamingo!” Everybody looked around to see who was coming in. I felt great!

We sat down at a table near the bar, and after a little while there was a bit of a flurry—waiters moving tables around, security guards, with guns, coming in. They were making room for a celebrity. JOHN BIG was coming in!

He came over to the bar, right next to our table, and right away two guys wanted to dance with the girls I brought. They went off to dance, and I was sitting alone at the table when John came over and sat down at my table. “How are yah?” he said. “Whattya doin’ in Vegas?”

I was sure he’d found out about me and his wife. “Just foolin’ around …” (I’ve gotta act tough, right?)

“How long ya been here?”

“Four or five nights.”

“I know ya,” he said. “Didn’t I see you in Florida?”

“Well, I really don’t know..

He tried this place and that place, and I didn’t know what he was getting at. “I know,” he said; “It was in El Morocco.” (El Morocco was a big nightclub in New York, where a lot of big operators go—like professors of theoretical physics, right?)

“That must have been it,” I said. I was wondering when he was going to get to it. Finally he leaned over to me and said, “Hey, will you introduce me to those girls you’re with when they come back from dancing?”

That’s all he wanted; he didn’t know me from a hole in the wall! So I introduced him, but my show girl friends said they were tired and wanted to go home.

The next afternoon, I saw John Big at the Flamingo, standing at the bar, talking to the bartender about cameras and taking pictures. He must be an amateur photographer: He’s got all these bulbs and cameras, but he says the dumbest things about them. I decided he wasn’t an amateur photographer after all; he was just a rich guy who bought himself some cameras.

I figured by that time that he didn’t know I had been fooling around with his wife; he only wanted to talk to me because of the girls I had. So I thought I would play a game. I’d invent a part for myself: John Big’s assistant.

“Hi, John,” I said. “Let’s take some pictures. I’ll carry your flashbulbs.”

I put the flashbulbs in my pocket, and we started off taking pictures. I’d hand him flashbulbs and give him advice here and there; he likes that stuff.

We went over to the Last Frontier to gamble, and he started to win. The hotels don’t like a high roller to leave, but I could see he wanted to go. The problem was how to do it gracefully.

“John, we have to leave now,” I said in a serious voice.

“But I’m winning.”

“Yes, but we have made an appointment this afternoon.”

“OK, get my car.”

“Certainly, Mr. Big!” He handed me the keys and told me what it looked like (I didn’t let on that I knew).

I went out to the parking lot, and sure enough, there was this big, fat, wonderful car with the two antennas. I climbed into it and turned the key—and it wouldn’t start. It had an automatic transmission; they had just come out and I didn’t know anything about them. After a bit I accidentally shifted it into PARK and it started. I drove it very carefully, like a million-dollar car, to the hotel entrance, where I got out and went inside to the table where he was still gambling, and said, “Your car is ready, sir!”

“I have to quit,” he announced, and we left.

He had me drive the car. “I want to go to the El Rancho,” he said. “Do you know any girls there?”

I knew one girl there rather well, so I said “Yeah.” By this time I felt confident enough that the only reason he was going along with this game I had invented was that he wanted to meet some girls, so I brought up a delicate subject: “I met your wife the other night..

“My wife? My wife’s not here in Las Vegas.”

I told him about the girl I met in the bar.

“Oh! I know who you mean; I met that girl and her friend in Los Angeles and brought them to Las Vegas. The first thing they did was use my phone for an hour to talk to their friends in Texas. I got mad and threw ‘em out! So she’s been going around telling everybody that she’s my wife, eh?”

So that was cleared up.

We went into the El Rancho, and the show was going to start in about fifteen minutes. The place was packed; there wasn’t a seat in the house. John went over to the majordomo and said, “I want a table.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Big! It will be ready in a few minutes.”

John tipped him and went off to gamble. Meanwhile I went around to the back, where the girls were getting ready for the show, and asked for my friend. She came out and I explained to her that John Big was with me, and he’d like some company after the show.

“Certainly, Dick,” she said. “I’ll bring some friends and we’ll see you after the show.”

I went around to the front to find John. He was still gambling. “Just go in without me,” he said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

There were two tables, at the very front, right at the edge of the stage. Every other table in the place was packed. I sat down by myself. The show started before John came in, and the show girls came out. They could see me at the table, all by myself. Before, they thought I was some small-time. professor; now they see I’m a BIG OPERATOR.

Finally John came in, and soon afterwards some people sat down at the table next to us—John’s “wife” and her friend Pam, with two men!

I leaned over to John: “She’s at the other table.”

“Yeah.”

She saw I was taking care of John, so she leaned over to me from the other table and asked, “Could I talk to John?”

I didn’t say a word. John didn’t say anything either.

I waited a little while, then I leaned over to John: “She wants to talk to you.”

Then he waited a little bit. “All right,” he said.

I waited a little more, and then I leaned over to her: “John will speak to you now.”

She came over to our table. She started working on “Johnnie,” sitting very close to him. Things were beginning to get straightened out a little bit, I could tell.

I love to be mischievous, so every time they got things straightened out a little bit, I reminded John of something: “The telephone, John …”

“Yeah!” he said. “What’s the idea, spending an hour on the telephone?”

She said it was Pam who did the calling.

Things improved a little bit more, so I pointed out that it was her idea to bring Pam.

“Yeah!” he said. (I was having a great time playing this game; it went on for quite a while.)

When the show was over, the girls from the El Rancho came over to our table and we talked to them until they had to go back for the next show. Then John said, “I know a nice little bar not too far away from here. Let’s go over there.”

I drove him over to the bar and we went in. “See that woman over there?” he said. “She’s a really good lawyer. Come on, I’ll introduce you to her.”

John introduced us and excused himself to go to the restroom. He never came back. I think he wanted to get back with his “wife” and I was beginning to interfere.

I said, “Hi” to the woman and ordered a drink for myself (still playing this game of not being impressed and not being a gentleman).

“You know,” she said to me, “I’m one of the better lawyers here in Las Vegas.”

“Oh, no, you’re not,” I replied coolly. “You might be a lawyer during the day, but you know what you are right now? You’re just a barfly in a small bar in Vegas.”

She liked me, and we went to a few places dancing. She danced very well, and I love to dance, so we had a great time together.

Then, all of a sudden in the middle of a dance, my back began to hurt. It was some kind of big pain, and it started suddenly. I know now what it was: I had been up for three days and nights having these crazy adventures, and I was completely exhausted.

She said she would take me home. As soon as I got into her bed I went BONGO! I was out.

The next morning I woke up in this beautiful bed. The sun was shining, and there was no sign of her. Instead, there was a maid. “Sir,” she said, “are you awake? I’m ready with breakfast.”

“Well, uh …”

“I’ll bring it to you. What would you like?” and she went through a whole menu of breakfasts.

I ordered breakfast and had it in bed—in the bed of a woman I didn’t know; I didn’t know who she was or where she came from!

I asked the maid a few questions, and she didn’t know anything about this mysterious woman either: She had just been hired, and it was her first day on the job. She thought I was the man of the house, and found it curious that I was asking her questions. I got dressed, finally, and left. I never saw the mysterious woman again.

The first time I was in Las Vegas I sat down and figured out the odds for everything, and I discovered that the odds for the crap table were something like.493. If I bet a dollar, it would only cost me 1.4 cents. So I thought to myself, “Why am I so reluctant to bet? It hardly costs anything!”

So I started betting, and right away I lost five dollars in succession—one, two, three, four, five. I was supposed to be out only seven cents; instead, I was five dollars behind! I’ve never gambled since then (with my own money, that is). I’m very lucky that I started off losing.

One time I was eating lunch with one of the show girls. It was a quiet time in the afternoon; there was not the usual big bustle, and she said, “See that man over there, walking across the lawn? That’s Nick the Greek. He’s a professional gambler.”

Now I knew damn well what all the odds were in Las Vegas, so I said, “How can he be a professional gambler?”

“I’ll call him over.”

Nick came over and she introduced us.” Marilyn tells me that you’re a professional gambler.”

“That’s correct.”

“Well, I’d like to know how it’s possible to make your living gambling, because at the table, the odds are.493.”

“You’re right,” he said, “and I’ll explain it to you. I don’t bet on the table, or things like that. I only bet when the odds are in my favor.”

“Huh? When are the odds ever in your favor?” I asked incredulously.

“It’s really quite easy,” he said. “I’m standing around a table, when some guy says, ‘It’s comin’ out nine! It’s gotta be a nine!’ The guy’s excited; he thinks it’s going to be a nine, and he wants to bet. Now I know the odds for all the numbers inside out, so I say to him, ‘I’ll bet you four to three it’s not a nine,’ and I win in the long run. I don’t bet on the table; instead, I bet with people around the table who have prejudices—superstitious ideas about lucky numbers.”

Nick continued: “Now that I’ve got a reputation, it’s even easier, because people will bet with me even when they know the odds aren’t very good, just to have the chance of telling the story, if they win, of how they beat Nick the Greek. So I really do make a living gambling, and it’s wonderful!”

So Nick the Greek was really an educated character. He was a very nice and engaging man. I thanked him for the explanation; now I understood it. I have to understand the world, you see.

An Offer You Must Refuse

Cornell had all kinds of departments that I didn’t have much interest in. (That doesn’t mean there was anything wrong with them; it’s just that I didn’t happen to have much interest in them.) There was domestic science, philosophy (the guys from this department were particularly inane), and there were the cultural things—music and so on. There were quite a few people I did enjoy talking to, of course. In the math department there was Professor Kac and Professor Feller; in chemistry, Professor Calvin; and a great guy in the zoology department, Dr. Griffin, who found out that bats navigate by making echoes. But it was hard to find enough of these guys to talk to, and there was all this other stuff which I thought was low-level baloney. And Ithaca was a small town.

The weather wasn’t really very good. One day I was driving in the car, and there came one of those quick snow flurries that you don’t expect, so you’re not ready for it, and you figure, “Oh, it isn’t going to amount to much; I’ll keep on going.”

But then the snow gets deep enough that the car begins to skid a little bit, so you have to put the chains on. You get out of the car, put the chains out on the snow, and it’s cold, and you’re beginning to shiver. Then you roll the car back onto the chains, and you have this problem—or we had it in those days; I don’t know what there is now—that there’s a hook on the inside that you have to hook first. And because the chains have to go on pretty tight, it’s hard to get the hook to hook. Then you have to push this clamp down with your fingers, which by this time are nearly frozen. And because you’re on the outside of the tire, and the hook is on the inside, and your hands are cold, it’s very difficult to control. It keeps slipping, and it’s cold, and the snow’s coming down, and you’re trying to push this clamp, and your hand’s hurting, and the damn thing’s not going down—well, I remember that that was the moment when I decided that this is insane; there must be a part of the world that doesn’t have this problem.

I remembered the couple of times I had visited Caltech, at the invitation of Professor Bacher, who had previously been at Cornell. He was very smart when I visited. He knew me inside out, so he said, “Feynman, I have this extra car, which I’m gonna lend you. Now here’s how you go to Hollywood and the Sunset Strip. Enjoy yourself.”

So I drove his car every night down to the Sunset Strip—to the nightclubs and the bars and the action. It was the kind of stuff I liked from Las Vegas—pretty girls, big operators, and so on. So Bacher knew how to get me interested in Caltech.

You know the story about the donkey who is standing exactly in the middle of two piles of hay, and doesn’t go to either one, because it’s balanced? Well, that’s nothing. Cornell and Caltech started making me offers, and as soon as I would move, figuring that Caltech was really better, they would up their offer at Cornell; and when I thought I’d stay at Cornell, they’d up something at Caltech. So you can imagine this donkey between the two piles of hay, with the extra complication that as soon as he moves toward one, the other one gets higher. That makes it very difficult!

The argument that finally convinced me was my sabbatical leave. I wanted to go to Brazil again, this time for ten months, and I had just earned my sabbatical leave from Cornell. I didn’t want to lose that, so now that I had invented a reason to come to a decision, I wrote Bacher and told him what I had decided.

Caltech wrote back: “We’ll hire you immediately, and we’ll give you your first year as a sabbatical year.” That’s the way they were acting: no matter what I decided to do, they’d screw it up. So my first year at Caltech was really spent in Brazil. I came to Caltech to teach on my second year. That’s how it happened.

Now that I have been at Caltech since 1951, I’ve been very happy here. It’s exactly the thing for a one-sided guy like me. There are all these people who are close to the top, who are very interested in what they are doing, and who I can talk to. So I’ve been very comfortable.

But one day, when I hadn’t been at Caltech very long, we had a bad attack of smog. It was worse then than it is now—at least your eyes smarted much more. I was standing on a corner, and my eyes were watering, and I thought to myself, “This is crazy! This is absolutely INSANE! It was all right back at Cornell. I’m getting out of here.”

So I called up Cornell, and asked them if they thought it was possible for me to come back. They said, “Sure! We’ll set it up and call you back tomorrow.”

The next day, I had the greatest luck in making a decision. God must have set it up to help me decide. I was walking to my office, and a guy came running up to me and said, “Hey, Feynman! Did you hear what happened? Baade found that there are two different populations of stars! All the measurements we had been making of the distances to the galaxies had been based on Cephid variables of one type, but there’s another type, so the universe is twice, or three, or even four times as old as we thought!”