- QED Home
- Diagrams and Equations
- Singing and Drumming
- What We Know
- The Chief of Bali Hai
- Physics X Class
- The Nobel Prize
- Tuva or Bust!
- The Challenger
- The Connection Machine
- Feynman's Cancer
- Hot Springs at Esalen
- Los Alamos from Below
- Safecracking
- Feynman and family
- Feynman and Art
- Topless bars
- CalTech
- Feynman Lectures
- Hans Bethe
- Production History
Why CalTech? Deciding Not to Decide
"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 and 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 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...
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.....When you're young, you have all these things to worry about--should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It's much easier to just plain decide. Never mind--nothing is going to change your mind. I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again--I had the solution to that problem. Anyway, I decided it would always be CalTech.
One time someone tried to change my mind about CalTech....Two people from Chicago came out and asked to visit me at my home--I didn't know what it was about. They began telling me all the good reasons I ought to go to Chicago.....Finally, they asked if I wanted to know the salary. "Oh, no!" I said..."Besides, I've decided not to decide any more; I'm staying at CalTech for good." A week later I got a letter from [Leona Marshall]. I opened it, and the first sentence said, "The salary they were offering was ------ ", a tremendous amount of money, three or four times what I was making. Staggering! ..... So I wrote them back a letter that said, "After reading the salary, I've decided that I must refuse. The reason I have to refuse a salary like that is I would be able to do what I've always wanted to do--get a wonderful mistress, put her up in an apartment, buy her nice things....With that salary you have offered, I could really do that, and I know what would happen to me. I'd worry about her, what she's doing; I'd get into arguments when I come home, and so on. All this bother would make me uncomfortable and unhappy. I wouldn't be able to physics well, and it would be a big mess! What I've always wanted to do would be bad for me, so I've decided that I can't accept your offer."
--from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
So I drove his car every night down to 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...
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.....When you're young, you have all these things to worry about--should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It's much easier to just plain decide. Never mind--nothing is going to change your mind. I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again--I had the solution to that problem. Anyway, I decided it would always be CalTech.
One time someone tried to change my mind about CalTech....Two people from Chicago came out and asked to visit me at my home--I didn't know what it was about. They began telling me all the good reasons I ought to go to Chicago.....Finally, they asked if I wanted to know the salary. "Oh, no!" I said..."Besides, I've decided not to decide any more; I'm staying at CalTech for good." A week later I got a letter from [Leona Marshall]. I opened it, and the first sentence said, "The salary they were offering was ------ ", a tremendous amount of money, three or four times what I was making. Staggering! ..... So I wrote them back a letter that said, "After reading the salary, I've decided that I must refuse. The reason I have to refuse a salary like that is I would be able to do what I've always wanted to do--get a wonderful mistress, put her up in an apartment, buy her nice things....With that salary you have offered, I could really do that, and I know what would happen to me. I'd worry about her, what she's doing; I'd get into arguments when I come home, and so on. All this bother would make me uncomfortable and unhappy. I wouldn't be able to physics well, and it would be a big mess! What I've always wanted to do would be bad for me, so I've decided that I can't accept your offer."
--from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
"Less responsible than he should have been..."
"The story picks up again when I went to Cal Tech as president. Dick was in the hospital when I arrived, recovering from a horrendous operation for the removal of a four kilogram malignant kidney tumor. I went to see him and the first things he said to me was that he would rather be where he was than where I was. The second thing he said was that he wouldn't do anything I wanted him to do at Cal Tech. He actually relented on this on a couple of occasions. HE was vitally interested in the intellectual aspects of being a faculty member, especially in teaching and participating in seminars, but he had no patience for committees or faculty politics. He had very few PhD students and was less responsible than I think he should have been for the welfare of his younger colleagues. I have no knowledge of whether he didn't like to have collaborators or whether he only rarely found ones that were congenial. The fact is that in physics he was very much a loner."
--Marvin L. Goldberger "More of the Good Stuff"
--Marvin L. Goldberger "More of the Good Stuff"