Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [247]
His favorite sort of triumph in the world of these stories came in the realm of everyday cleverness—as when he arrived at a North Carolina airport, late for a meeting of relativists, and worked out how to get help from a taxi dispatcher:
“Listen,” I said to the dispatcher. “The main meeting began yesterday, so there were a whole lot of guys going to the meeting who must have come through here yesterday. Let me describe them to you: They would have their heads kind of in the air, and they would be talking to each other, not paying attention to where they were going, saying things to each other like ‘G-mu-nu. G-mu-nu.”’
His face lit up. “Ah, yes,” he said. “You mean Chapel Hill!”
Feynman chose as a title the odd phrase uttered by Mrs. Eisenhart at his first Princeton tea when he asked for both cream and lemon: “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” Those words had stayed in his mind for forty years, a reminder of how people used manners and culture to make him feel small, and now he was taking revenge. W. W. Norton and Company bought the manuscript for an advance payment of fifteen hundred dollars, a tiny sum for a trade book. Its staff did not like Feynman’s title at all. They proposed I Have to Understand the World or I Got an Idea (“a nice Brooklyn ring and a little double meaning,” the editor said). But Feynman would not budge. Norton released Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! in a small first printing early in 1985. It sold out quickly, and within weeks the publisher had a surprising best-seller.
One unhappy reader was Murray Gell-Mann. His attention focused on Feynman’s description of the joy of discovering the “new law” of weak interactions in 1957: “It was the first time, and the only time, in my career that I knew a law of nature that nobody else knew.” Gell-Mann’s rage could be heard through the halls of Lauritsen Laboratory, and he told other physicists that he was going to sue. For late editions of the paperback Feynman added a parenthetical disclaimer: “Of course it wasn’t true, but finding out later that at least Murray Gell-Mann—and also Sudarshan and Marshak—had worked out the same theory didn’t spoil my fun.”
Surely You’re Joking gave offense in another way. Feynman spoke of women as he always had—“a nifty blonde, perfectly proportioned”; “a cornfed, rather fattish-looking woman.” They appeared as objects of flirtation, nude models for his drawings, or “bar girls” to be tricked into sleeping with him. He knew that his diction was not wholly innocent. Sexual politics had caught up with him before, at the 1972 meeting of the American Physical Society in San Francisco, where he accepted the Oersted Medal for contributions to the teaching of physics. His personal relationships were not the issue, although in the male world of Caltech a part of his glamorous reputation with envious students came from his apparent sway over women. He continued to flirt with young women at parties and encouraged Don Juan–style rumors. He frequented one of the first California topless bars, Gianonni’s—he filled its scalloped paper placemats with chains of equations—and amused the local press by testifying in court on its behalf in 1968. There was genuine machismo in the hero-worship of the male graduate students.
He had received a letter the previous fall suggesting that some of his language tended to “reinforce many ‘sexist’ or ‘male-chauvinist’ ideas.” For example, he told an anecdote about a scientist who was “out with his girl friend the night after he realized that nuclear reactions must be going on in the stars.”
She said “Look at how pretty the stars shine!” He said “Yes, and right now I am the only man in the world who knows why they shine.”
The letter writer, E. V. Rothstein, cited another anecdote about a “lady driver” and asked him, please, not to contribute