On Wednesdays at the Princeton Graduate College, various
people would come in to give talks. The speakers were often interesting, and
in the discussions after the talks we used to have a lot of fun. For instance,
one guy in our school was very strongly anti-Catholic, so he passed out questions
in advance for people to ask a religious speaker, and we gave the speaker a
hard time.
Another time somebody gave a talk about poetry. He talked about the structure
of the poem and the emotions that come with it; he divided everything up into
certain kinds of classes. In the discussion that came afterwards, he said, "Isn't
that the same as in mathematics, Dr. Eisenhart?"
Dr. Eisenhart was the dean of the graduate school and a great professor of mathematics.
He was also very clever. He said, "I'd like to know what Dick Feynman thinks
about it in reference to theoretical physics." He was always putting me
on in this kind of situation.
I got up and said, "Yes, it's very closely related. In theoretical physics,
the analog of the word is the mathematical formula, the analog of the structure
of the poem is the interrelationship of the theoretical bling-bling with the
so-and-so- and I went through the whole thing, making a perfect analogy. The
speaker's eyes were beaming with happiness.
Then I said, "It seems to me that no matter what you say about poetry,
I could find a way of making up an analog with any subject, just as I did with
theoretical physics. I don't consider such analogs meaningful."
-Richard Feynman