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For the purpose of the aforementioned WAGER, the term “responsible position” shall be taken to signify a position which, by reason of its nature, compels the holder to issue instructions to other persons to carry out certain acts, notwithstanding the fact that the holder has no understanding whatsoever of that which he is instructing the aforesaid persons to accomplish.

Feynman collected the ten dollars in 1976.

He already tried to avoid encumbrances as though every invitation, honor, professional membership, or knock at his door were another vine wrapping itself around his creative center. By the time he won the Nobel Prize he had been trying for five years to resign from the National Academy of Sciences. This simple task was taking on a life of its own. He began by scribbling a note with his dues bill: he paid the forty dollars, but he resigned. Almost a year later he received a personal letter from the academy’s president, the biologist Detlev W. Bronk (whose original paper on the single nerve impulse he had read as a Princeton student). He felt obliged to write a polite explanation:

My desire to resign is merely a personal one; it is not meant as a protest of any kind… . My peculiarity is this: I find it psychologically very distasteful to judge people’s “merit.” So I cannot participate in the main activity of selecting people for membership. To be a member of a group, of which an important activity is to choose others deemed worthy of membership in that self-esteemed group, bothers me… .

Maybe I don’t explain it very well, but suffice to say that I am not happy as a member of a self-perpetuating honorary society.

It was 1961. Bronk let Feynman’s letter sit for months. Then he answered with calculated obtuseness:

Thank you for your willingness to continue as a member of the academy… . I have done my best to reduce the emphasis on the “honor” of election… . I am grateful that you will continue a member at least during my last year as president.

Eight years later, Feynman was still trying. He re-resigned. A reply came from the president-elect, Philip Handler, who mused talmudically, “I suppose that we truly have no alternative, in the sense that surely the Academy must adhere to your wishes,” and deftly slid Feynman’s resignation into the subjunctive mood:

I would consider your resignation a most sorrowful event indeed… . I write to hope that you will reconsider… . I am reluctant to endorse such an action… . Before processing your request, a procedure for which I trust that the Office of the Home Secretary is in some manner prepared, I very much hope that you will let us hear from you further… .

Feynman wrote again, as plainly as he could. Handler replied:

I have your somewhat cryptic note… . We are seeking to increase the meaningful roles of the Academy… . Wouldn’t you rather join us in that effort?

Finally, by 1970, Feynman’s resignation began to seem real even to the academy, though he continued to hear from scientists who wondered whether he would confirm the rumor and explain why.

He turned down honorary degrees offered by the University of Chicago and by Columbia University and thus finally kept the promise he had made to himself on the day he received his doctorate from Princeton. He turned down hundreds of other propositions with a curtness that impressed even his protective secretary. To a book publisher who had invited him to “introduce a draft of fresh air into a rather stuffy area,” he wrote: “No sir. The area is stuffy from too much hot air already.” He refused to sign petitions and newspaper advertisements; the Vietnam War was now drawing the opposition of many scientists, but he would not join them publicly. Feynman, Nobel laureate, found that even canceling a magazine subscription took an entire correspondence. “Dear Professor Feynman,” began a long letter from the editor of Physics Today, the magazine whose second issue had carried his article about the Pocono conference in 1948:

The comment you sent back with our questionnaire on our May issue (“I never read your magazine. I