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“So I say, Yeah …” At this point Feynman, relating the story, takes on a tone of misunderstood innocence. He is scrupulously honest. If only the psychiatrist would forget the formulas, forget the mumbo jumbo, and try to understand him. “I wasn’t trying to fake it… . I meant in the sense that my mother talks to her friends… . I tried to explain—honest… .” The psychiatrist makes a note.

Do you think people stare at you? Feynman would say no—honest—but the psychiatrist adds, For example, do you think that any of the fellows sitting on the benches are looking at us now. Well, Feynman has sat on one of those benches, and there was not much else to look at. He does some mental arithmetic. “So I figure … there are about twelve guys in the thing and about three of them are looking—well, that’s all they’ve got to do—so I say, to be conservative, ‘Yeah, maybe two of them are looking at us.’”

He turns around to check, and sure enough. But the psychiatrist, “this nincompoop, this nincompoop … doesn’t bother to turn around and find out if it’s true or not.” (No scientist he.)

Do you talk to yourself? “I admitted that I do… .” (“Incidentally, I didn’t tell him something which I can tell you, which is I find myself sometimes talking to myself in quite an elaborate fashion … : ‘The integral will be larger than this sum of the terms, so that would make the pressure higher, you see?’ ‘No, you’re crazy.’ ‘No, I’m not! No, I’m not!’ I say. I argue with myself… I have two voices that work back and forth.”)

I see you lost a wife recently. Do you talk to her? (The resentment that this question must stir goes beyond the comic bounds of the anecdote.)

Do you hear voices in your head? “No,” Feynman says. “Very rarely.” He admits a few occasions. Sometimes, in fact, just as he was falling asleep, he would hear Edward Teller, with a distinctive Hungarian accent, in Chicago giving him his first briefing on the atomic bomb.

There was much more: an argument about the nature of insanity, an argument about the value of life—Feynman in both cases continuing to get under the examiner’s skin. Feynman acknowledged that one of his mother’s sisters was mentally ill. And then the punch line, more serious than Feynman’s audiences tended to realize.

Well, Dick, I see you have a Ph.D. Where did you study?

MIT and Princeton. Where did you study?

Yale and London. And what did you study, Dick?

Physics. And what did you study?

Medicine.

And this is medicine?

The story never included several plausible points. Feynman never pleaded that, having contributed three years of wartime service in the Manhattan Project, he ought to be exempt from a further contribution. Nor did he mention how destructive it would have been to his career as a theoretical physicist if he had been conscripted now, at the age of twenty-eight. He had to walk a narrow line. There was nothing amusing or stylish in the summer of 1946 about evading the draft. For most people, to be declared mentally deficient by one’s draft board was a more frightening possibility than army service—far more damaging to one’s civilian prospects. So the Selective Service established few safeguards against fakery in the psychiatric examination. It did not expect to see records of a previous history of mental illness, for example; in any case private psychiatric treatment was far more unusual than it became in the next generation. Examiners felt they could rely on a subject’s naïve self-description to answer their checklist questions. Feynman repeated his answers to a second psychiatrist. His ability to conjure the voice of Teller was recorded as hypnagogic hallucinations. It was noted that the subject had a peculiar stare. (“I think it was probably when I said, ‘And this is medicine?’”) He was rejected.

It occurred to him that the Selective Service would examine its own files and discover a series of official letters requesting deferment so that Feynman could conduct essential research in physics during the war. More recent letters stated that he was performing an important service