'What Do You Care What Other People Think?' Read online

  That was too much for me. I felt terribly deceived: I wanted the straight story—not fixed up by somebody else—so I could decide for myself what it meant. But it was difficult for me to argue with adults. All I could do was get tears in my eyes. I started to cry, I was so upset.

  He said, “What’s the matter?”

  I tried to explain. “I’ve been listening to all these stories, and now I don’t know, of all the things you told me, which were true, and which were not true! I don’t know what to do with everything that I’ve learned!” I was trying to explain that I was losing everything at the moment, because I was no longer sure of the data, so to speak. Here I had been struggling to understand all these miracles, and now—well, it solved a lot of miracles, all right! But I was unhappy.

  The rabbi said, “If it is so traumatic for you, why do you come to Sunday school?”

  “Because my parents make me.”

  I never talked to my parents about it, and I never found out whether the rabbi communicated with them or not, but my parents never made me go again. And it was just before I was supposed to get confirmed as a believer.

  Anyway, that crisis resolved my difficulty rather rapidly, in favor of the theory that all the miracles were stories made up to help people understand things “more vividly,” even if they conflicted with natural phenomena. But I thought nature itself was so interesting that I didn’t want it distorted like that. And so I gradually came to disbelieve the whole religion.

  Anyway, the Jewish elders had organized this club with all its activities not just to get us kids off the street, but to get us interested in the Jewish way of life. So to have someone like me elected as president would have made them very embarrassed. To our mutual relief I wasn’t elected, but the center eventually failed anyway—it was on its way out when I was nominated, and had I been elected, I surely would have been blamed for its demise.

  One day Arlene told me Jerome isn’t her boyfriend anymore. She’s not tied up with him. That was a big excitement for me, the beginning of hope! She invited me over to her house, at 154 Westminster Avenue in nearby Cedarhurst.

  When I went to her house that time, it was dark and the porch wasn’t lit. I couldn’t see the numbers. Not wanting to disturb anyone by asking if it was the right house, I crawled up, quietly, and felt the numbers on the door: 154.

  Arlene was having trouble with her homework in philosophy class. “We’re studying Descartes,” she said. “He starts out with ‘Cogito, ergo sum’—‘I think, therefore I am’—and ends up proving the existence of God.”

  “Impossible!” I said, without stopping to think that I was doubting the great Descartes. (It was a reaction I learned from my father: have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look at what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, “Is it reasonable?”) I said, “How can you deduce one from the other?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Well, let’s look it over,” I said. “What’s the argument?”

  So we look it over, and we see that Descartes’ statement “Cogito, ergo sum” is supposed to mean that there is one thing that cannot be doubted—doubt itself. “Why doesn’t he just say it straight?” I complained. “He just means somehow or other that he has one fact that he knows.”

  Then it goes on and says things like, “I can only imagine imperfect thoughts, but imperfect can only be understood as referent to the perfect. Hence the perfect must exist somewhere.” (He’s workin’ his way towards God now.)

  “Not at all!” I say. “In science you can talk about relative degrees of approximation without having a perfect theory. I don’t know what this is all about. I think it’s a bunch of baloney.”

  Arlene understood me. She understood, when she looked at it, that no matter how impressive and important this philosophy stuff was supposed to be, it could be taken lightly—you could just think about the words, instead of worrying about the fact that Descartes said it. “Well, I guess it’s okay to take the other side,” she said. “My teacher keeps telling us, ‘There are two sides to every question, just like there are two sides to every piece of paper.’ ”

  “There’s two sides to that, too,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  I had read about the Möbius strip in the Britannica, my wonderful Britannica! In those days, things like the Möbius strip weren’t so well known to everybody, but they were just as understandable as they are to kids today. The existence of such a surface was so real: it wasn’t a wishy-washy political question, or anything that you needed history to understand. Reading about those things was like being way off in a wonderful world that nobody knows about, and you’re getting a kick not only from the delight of learning the stuff itself, but also from making yourself unique.

  I got a strip of paper, put a half twist in it, and made it into a loop. Arlene was delighted.

  The next day, in class, she lay in wait for her teacher. Sure enough, he holds up a piece of paper and says, “There are two sides to every question, just like there are two sides to every piece of paper.” Arlene holds up her own strip of paper—with a half twist in it—and says, “Sir, there are even two sides to that question: there’s paper with only one side!” The teacher and the class got all excited, and Arlene got such a kick out of showing them the Möbius strip that I think she paid more attention to me after that on account of it.

  But after Jerome, I had a new competitor—my “good friend” Harold Gast. Arlene was always making up her mind one way or the other. When it came time for graduation, she went with Harold to the senior prom, but sat with my parents for the graduation ceremony.

  I was the best in science, the best in mathematics, the best in physics, and the best in chemistry, so I was going up to the stage and receiving honors many times at the ceremony. Harold was the best in English and the best in history, and had written the school play, so that was very impressive.

  I was terrible in English. I couldn’t stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention—it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature. Any word can be spelled just as well a different way. I was impatient with all this English stuff.

  There was a series of exams called the Regents, which the state of New York gave to every high school student. A few months before, when we all were taking the Regents examination in English, Harold and the other literary friend of mine, David Leff—the editor of the school newspaper—asked me which books I had chosen to write about. David had chosen something with profound social implications by Sinclair Lewis, and Harold had picked some playwright. I said I chose Treasure Island because we had that book in first-year English, and told them what I wrote.

  They laughed. “Boy, are you gonna flunk, saying such simple stuff about such a simple book!”

  There was also a list of questions for an essay. The one I chose was “The Importance of Science in Aviation.” I thought, “What a dumb question! The importance of science in aviation is obvious!”

  I was about to write a simple theme about this dumb question when I remembered that my literary friends were always “throwing the bull”—building up their sentences to sound complex and sophisticated. I decided to try it, just for the hell of it. I thought, “If the Regents are so silly as to have a subject like the importance of science in aviation, I’m gonna do that.”

  So I wrote stuff like, “Aeronautical science is important in the analysis of the eddies, vortices, and whirlpools formed in the atmosphere behind the aircraft…”—I knew that eddies, vortices, and whirlpools are the same thing, but mentioning them three different ways sounds better! That was the only thing I would not have ordinarily done on the test.

  The teacher who corrected my examination must have been impressed by eddies, vortices, and whirlpools, because I got a 91 on the exam—while my literary friends, who chose topics the English teachers could more easi
ly take issue with, both got 88.

  That year a new rule came out: if you got 90 or better on a Regents examination, you automatically got honors in that subject at graduation! So while the playwright and the editor of the school newspaper had to stay in their seats, this illiterate fool physics student was called to go up to the stage once again and receive honors in English!

  After the graduation ceremony, Arlene was in the hall with my parents and Harold’s parents when the head of the math department came over. He was a very strong man—he was also the school disciplinarian—a tall, dominating fellow. Mrs. Gast says to him, “Hello, Dr. Augsberry. I’m Harold Gast’s mother. And this is Mrs. Feynman…”

  He completely ignores Mrs. Gast and immediately turns to my mother. “Mrs. Feynman, I want to impress upon you that a young man like your son comes along only very rarely. The state should support a man of such talent. You must be sure that he goes to college, the best college you can afford!” He was concerned that my parents might not be planning to send me to college, for in those days lots of kids had to get a job immediately after graduation to help support the family.

  That in fact happened to my friend Robert. He had a lab, too, and taught me all about lenses and optics. (One day he had an accident in his lab. He was opening carbolic acid and the bottle jerked, spilling some acid on his face. He went to the doctor and had bandages put on for a few weeks. The funny thing was, when they took the bandages off his skin was smooth underneath, nicer than it had been before—there were many fewer blemishes. I’ve since found out that there was, for a while, some kind of a beauty treatment using carbolic acid in a more dilute form.) Robert’s mother was poor, and he had to go to work right away to support her, so he couldn’t continue his interest in the sciences.

  Anyway, my mother reassured Dr. Augsberry: “We’re saving money as best we can, and we’re trying to send him to Columbia or MIT.” And Arlene was listening to all this, so after that I was a little bit ahead.

  Arlene was a wonderful girl. She was the editor of the newspaper at Nassau County Lawrence High School; she played the piano beautifully, and was very artistic. She made some decorations for our house, like the parrot on the inside of our closet. As time went on, and our family got to know her better, she would go to the woods to paint with my father, who had taken up painting in later life, as many people do.

  Arlene and I began to mold each other’s personality. She lived in a family that was very polite, and was very sensitive to other people’s feelings. She taught me to be more sensitive to those kinds of things, too. On the other hand, her family felt that “white lies” were okay.

  I thought one should have the attitude of “What do you care what other people think!” I said, “We should listen to other people’s opinions and take them into account. Then, if they don’t make sense and we think they’re wrong, then that’s that!”

  Arlene caught on to the idea right away. It was easy to talk her into thinking that in our relationship, we must be very honest with each other and say everything straight, with absolute frankness. It worked very well, and we became very much in love—a love like no other love that I know of.

  After that summer I went away to college at MIT. (I couldn’t go to Columbia because of the Jewish quota.*) I began getting letters from my friends that said things like, “You should see how Arlene is going out with Harold,” or “She’s doing this and she’s doing that, while you’re all alone up there in Boston.” Well, I was taking out girls in Boston, but they didn’t mean a thing to me, and I knew the same was true with Arlene.

  When summer came, I stayed in Boston for a summer job, and worked on measuring friction. The Chrysler Company had developed a new method of polishing to get a super finish, and we were supposed to measure how much better it was. (It turned out that the “super finish” was not significantly better.)

  Anyway, Arlene found a way to be near me. She found a summer job in Scituate, about twenty miles away, taking care of children. But my father was concerned that I would become too involved with Arlene and get off the track of my studies, so he talked her out of it—or talked me out of it (I can’t remember). Those days were very, very different from now. In those days, you had to go all the way up in your career before marrying.

  I was able to see Arlene only a few times that summer, but we promised each other we would marry after I finished school. I had known her for six years by that time. I’m a little tongue-tied trying to describe to you how much our love for each other developed, but we were sure we were right for each other.

  After I graduated from MIT I went to Princeton, and I would go home on vacations to see Arlene. One time when I went to see her, Arlene had developed a bump on one side of her neck. She was a very beautiful girl, so it worried her a little bit, but it didn’t hurt, so she figured it wasn’t too serious. She went to her uncle, who was a doctor. He told her to rub it with omega oil.

  Then, sometime later, the bump began to change. It got bigger—or maybe it was smaller—and she got a fever. The fever got worse, so the family doctor decided Arlene should go to the hospital. She was told she had typhoid fever. Right away, as I still do today, I looked up the disease in medical books and read all about it.

  When I went to see Arlene in the hospital, she was in quarantine—we had to put on special gowns when we entered her room, and so on. The doctor was there, so I asked him how the Wydell test came out—it was an absolute test for typhoid fever that involved checking for bacteria in the feces. He said, “It was negative.”

  “What? How can that be!” I said. “Why all these gowns, when you can’t even find the bacteria in an experiment? Maybe she doesn’t have typhoid fever!”

  The result of that was that the doctor talked to Arlene’s parents, who told me not to interfere. “After all, he’s the doctor. You’re only her fiancé.”

  I’ve found out since that such people don’t know what they’re doing, and get insulted when you make some suggestion or criticism. I realize that now, but I wish I had been much stronger then and told her parents that the doctor was an idiot—which he was—and didn’t know what he was doing. But as it was, her parents were in charge of it.

  Anyway, after a little while, Arlene got better, apparently: the swelling went down and the fever went away. But after some weeks the swelling started again, and this time she went to another doctor. This guy feels under her armpits and in her groin, and so on, and notices there’s swelling in those places, too. He says the problem is in her lymphatic glands, but he doesn’t yet know what the specific disease is. He will consult with other doctors.

  As soon as I hear about it I go down to the library at Princeton and look up lymphatic diseases, and find “Swelling of the Lymphatic Glands. (1) Tuberculosis of the lymphatic glands. This is very easy to diagnose…”—so I figure this isn’t what Arlene has, because the doctors are having trouble trying to figure it out.

  I start reading about some other diseases: lym-phodenema, lymphodenoma, Hodgkin’s disease, all kinds of other things; they’re all cancers of one crazy form or another. The only difference between lymphodenema and lymphodenoma was, as far as I could make out by reading it very carefully, that if the patient dies, it’s lymphodenoma; if the patient survives—at least for a while—then it’s lymphodenema.

  At any rate, I read through all the lymphatic diseases, and decided that the most likely possibility was that Arlene had an incurable disease. Then I half smiled to myself, thinking, “I bet everybody who reads through a medical book thinks they have a fatal disease.” And yet, after reading everything very carefully, I couldn’t find any other possibility. It was serious.

  Then I went to the weekly tea at Palmer Hall, and found myself talking to the mathematicians just as I always did, even though I had just found out that Arlene probably had a fatal disease. It was very strange—like having two minds.

  When I went to visit her, I told Arlene the joke about the people who don’t know any medicine reading the medical book and
always assuming they have a fatal disease. But I also told her I thought we were in great difficulty, and that the best I could figure out was that she had an incurable disease. We discussed the various diseases, and I told her what each one was like.

  One of the diseases I told Arlene about was Hodgkin’s disease. When she next saw her doctor, she asked him about it: “Could it be Hodgkin’s disease?”

  He said, “Well, yes, that’s a possibility.”

  When she went to the county hospital, the doctor wrote the following diagnosis: “Hodgkin’s disease—?” So I realized that the doctor didn’t know any more than I did about this problem.

  The county hospital gave Arlene all sorts of tests and X-ray treatments for this “Hodgkin’s disease—?” and there were special meetings to discuss this peculiar case. I remember waiting for her outside, in the hall. When the meeting was over, the nurse wheeled her out in a wheelchair. All of a sudden a little guy comes running out of the meeting room and catches up with us. “Tell me,” he says, out of breath, “do you spit up blood? Have you ever coughed up blood?”

  The nurse says, “Go away! Go away! What kind of thing is that to ask of a patient!”—and brushes him away. Then she turned to us and said, “That man is a doctor from the neighborhood who comes to the meetings and is always making trouble. That’s not the kind of thing to ask of a patient!”

  I didn’t catch on. The doctor was checking a certain possibility, and if I had been smart, I would have asked him what it was.

  Finally, after a lot of discussion, a doctor at the hospital tells me they figure the most likely possibility is Hodgkin’s disease. He says, “There will be some periods of improvement, and some periods in the hospital. It will be on and off, getting gradually worse. There’s no way to reverse it entirely. It’s fatal after a few years.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I say. “I’ll tell her what you said.”

  “No, no!” says the doctor. “We don’t want to upset the patient. “We’re going to tell her it’s glandular fever.”