1Once I was at a party playing bongos, and I got going pretty well. One of the guys was particularly inspired by the drumming. He went into the bathroom, took off his shirt, smeared shaving cream in funny designs all over his chest, and came out dancing wildly, with cherries hanging from his ears. Naturally, this crazy nut and I became good friends right away. His name is Jerry Zorthian; he's an artist.

2We often had long discussions about art and science. I'd say things like, "Artists are lost: they don't have any subject! They used to have the religious subjects, but they lost their religion and now they haven't got anything. They don't understand the technical world they live in; they don't know anything about the beauty of the real world ­­ the scientific world ­­ so they don't have anything in their hearts to paint." Jerry would reply that artists don't need to have a physical subject; there are many emotions that can be expressed through art. Besides, art can be abstract. Furthermore, scientists destroy the beauty of nature when they pick it apart and turn it into mathematical equations.

3One time I was over at Jerry's for his birthday, and one of these dopey arguments lasted until 3:00 A.M. The next morning I called him up: "Listen, Jerry," I said, "the reason we have these arguments that never get anywhere is that you don't know a damn thing about science, and I don't know a damn thing about art. So, on alternate Sundays, I'll give you a lesson in science, and you give me a lesson in art." "OK," he said. "I'll teach you how to draw." "That will be impossible," I said, because when I was in high school, the only thing I could draw was pyramids on deserts ­­ consisting mainly of straight lines ­­ and from time to time I would attempt a palm tree and put in a sun. I had absolutely no talent.

4I sat next to a guy who was equally adept. When he was permitted to draw anything, it consisted of two flat, elliptical blobs, like tires stacked on one another, with a stalk coming out of the top, culminating in a green triangle. It was supposed to be a tree. So I bet Jerry that he wouldn't be able to teach me to draw.

5"Of course you'll have to work," he said.

6I promised to work, but still bet that he couldn't teach me to draw. I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It's difficult to describe because it's an emotion. It's analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there's a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run "behind the scenes" by the same organization, the same physical laws. It's an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It's a feeling of awe ­­ of scientific awe ­­ which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.

7Jerry turned out to be a very good teacher. He told me first to go home and draw anything. So I tried to draw a shoe; then I tried to draw a flower in a pot. It was a mess!

8The next time we met I showed him my attempts: "Oh, look!" he said. "You see, around in back here, the line of the flower pot doesn't touch the leaf." (I had meant the line to come up to the leaf.) "That's very good. It's a way of showing depth. That's very clever of you."

9"And the fact that you don't make all the lines the same thickness (which I didn't mean to do) is good. A drawing with all the lines the same thickness is dull." It continued like that: Everything that I thought was a mistake, he used to teach me something in a positive way. He never said it was wrong; he never put me down. So I kept on trying, and I gradually got a little bit better, but I was never satisfied.

10To get more practice I also signed up for a correspondence school course, with International Correspondence Schools, and I must say they were good. They started me off drawing pyramids and cylinders, shading them and so on. We covered many areas: drawing, pastels, watercolors, and paints. Near the end I petered out: I made an oil painting for them, but I never sent it in. They kept sending me letters urging me to continue. They were very good.

11I practiced drawing all the time, and became very interested in it. If I was at a meeting that wasn't getting anywhere ­­ like the one where Carl Rogers came to Caltech to discuss with us whether Caltech should develop a psychology department ­­ I would draw the other people. I had a little pad of paper I kept with me and I practiced drawing wherever I went. So, as Jerry taught me, I worked very hard.

12Jerry, on the other hand, didn't learn much physics. His mind wandered too easily.

13I tried to teach him something about electricity and magnetism, but as soon as I mentioned "electricity," he'd tell me about some motor he had that didn't work, and how might he fix it. When I tried to show him how an electromagnet works by making a little coil of wire and hanging a nail on a piece of string, I put the voltage on, the nail swung into the coil, and Jerry said, "Ooh! It's just like fucking!" So that was the end of that.

14So now we have a new argument­whether he's a better teacher than I was, or I'm a better student than he was.

15I gave up the idea of trying to get an artist to appreciate the feeling I had about nature so he could portray it. I would now have to double my efforts in learning to draw so I could do it myself. It was a very ambitious undertaking, and I kept the idea entirely to myself, because the odds were I would never be able to do it.

16Early on in the process of learning to draw, some lady I knew saw my attempts and said, "You should go down to the Pasadena Art Museum. They have drawing classes there, with models ­­ nude models."

17"No," I said; "I can't draw well enough: I'd feel very embarrassed." "You're good enough; you should see some of the others!" So I worked up enough courage to go down there. In the first lesson they told us about newsprint ­­ very large sheets of low­grade paper, the size of a newspaper ­­ and the various kinds of pencils and charcoal to get. For the second class a model came, and she started off with a ten­minute pose.

18I started to draw the model, and by the time I'd done one leg, the ten minutes were up. I looked around and saw that everyone else had already drawn a complete picture, with shading in the back ­­ the whole business.

19I realized I was way out of my depth. But finally, at the end, the model was going to pose for thirty minutes. I worked very hard, and with great effort I was able to draw her whole outline. This time there was half a hope. So this time I didn't cover up my drawing, as I had done with all the previous ones.

20We went around to look at what the others had done, and I discovered what they could really do: they draw the model, with details and shadows, the pocketbook that's on the bench she's sitting on, the platform, everything! They've all gone zip, zip, zip, zip, zip with the charcoal, all over, and I figure it's hopeless ­­ utterly hopeless.

21I go back to cover up my drawing, which consists of a few lines crowded into the upper left­hand corner of the newsprint ­­ I had, until then, only been drawing on 8 1/2 x 11 paper ­­ but some others in the class are standing nearby: "Oh, look at this one," one of them says. "Every line counts!"

22I didn't know what that meant, exactly, but I felt encouraged enough to come to the next class. In the meantime,

23Jerry kept telling me that drawings that are too full aren't any good. His job was to teach me not to worry about the others, so he'd tell me they weren't so hot.

24I noticed that the teacher didn't tell people much (the only thing he told me was my picture was too small on the page). Instead, he tried to inspire us to experiment with new approaches. I thought of how we teach physics: We have so many techniques ­­ so many mathematical methods ­­ that we never stop telling the students how to do things.

25On the other hand, the drawing teacher is afraid to tell you anything. If your lines are very heavy, the teacher can't say, "Your lines are too heavy," because some artist has figured out a way of making great pictures using heavy lines. The teacher doesn't want to push you in some particular direction. So the drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

26They were always telling me to "loosen up," to become more relaxed about drawing. I figured that made no more sense than telling someone who's just learning to drive to "loosen up" at the wheel. It isn't going to work. Only after you know how to do it carefully can you begin to loosen up. So I resisted this perennial loosen­up stuff.

27One exercise they had invented for loosening us up was to draw without looking at the paper. Don't take your eyes off the model; just look at her and make the lines on the paper without looking at what you're doing.

28One of the guys says, "I can't help it. I have to cheat. I bet everybody's cheating!" "I'm not cheating!" I say.

29"Aw, baloney!" they say.

30I finish the exercise and they come over to look at what I had drawn. They found that, indeed, I was NOT cheating; at the very beginning my pencil point had busted, and there was nothing but impressions on the paper.

31When I finally got my pencil to work, I tried it again. I found that my drawing had a kind of strength ­­ a funny, semi­Picasso­like strength ­­ which appealed to me. The reason I felt good about that drawing was, I knew it was impossible to draw well that way, and therefore it didn't have to be good ­­ and that's really what the loosening up was all about. I had thought that "loosen up" meant "make sloppy drawings," but it really meant to relax and not worry about how the drawing is going to come out.

32I made a lot of progress in the class, and I was feeling pretty good. Up until the last session, all the models we had were rather heavy and out of shape; they were rather interesting to draw. But in the last class we had a model who was a nifty blonde, perfectly proportioned. It was then that I discovered that I still didn't know how to draw: I couldn't make anything come out that looked anything like this beautiful girl! With the other models, if you draw something a little too big or bit too small, it doesn't make any difference because it's all out of shape anyway. But when you're trying to draw something that's so well put together, you can't fool yourself: It's got to be just right!

33During one of the breaks I overheard a guy who could really draw asking this model whether she posed privately. She said yes. "Good. But I don't have a studio yet. I'll have to work that out first."

34I figured I could learn a lot from this guy, and I'd never get another chance to draw this nifty model unless I did something. "Excuse me," I said to him, "I have a room downstairs in my house that could be used as a studio." They both agreed. I took a few of the guy's drawings to my friend Jerry, but he was aghast. "Those aren't so good," he said. He tried to explain why, but I never really understood.

35Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art. I had very little appreciation for things artistic, and only very rarely, such as once when I was in a museum in Japan. I saw a painting done on brown paper of bamboo, and what was beautiful about it to me was that it was perfectly poised between being just some brush strokes and being bamboo ­­ I could make it go back and forth.

36The summer after the drawing class I was in Italy for a science conference and I thought I'd like to see the Sistine Chapel. I got there very early in the morning, bought my ticket before anybody else, and ran up the stairs as soon as the place opened. I therefore had the unusual pleasure of looking at the whole chapel for a moment, in silent awe, before anybody else came in.

37Soon the tourists came, and there were crowds of people milling around, talking different languages, pointing at this and that. I'm walking around, looking at the ceiling for a while. Then my eye came down a little bit and I saw some big, framed pictures, and I thought, "Gee! I never knew about these!" Unfortunately I'd left my guidebook at the hotel, but I thought to myself, "I know why these panels aren't famous; they aren't any good." But then I looked at another one, and I said, "Wow! That's a good one." I looked at the others. "That's good too, so is that one, but that one's lousy." I had never heard of these panels, but I decided that they were all good except for two.

38I went into a place called the Sala de Raphael ­­ the Raphael Room ­­ and I noticed the same phenomenon. I thought to myself, "Raphael is irregular. He doesn't always succeed. Sometimes he's very good. Sometimes it's just junk." When I got back to my hotel, I looked at the guidebook. In the part about the Sistine Chapel: "Below the paintings by Michelangelo there are fourteen panels by Botticelli, Perugino" ­­ all these great artists ­­ "and two by So­and­so, which are of no significance." This was a terrific excitement to me, that I also could tell the difference between a beautiful work of art and one that's not, without being able to define it. As a scientist you always think you know what you're doing, so you tend to distrust the artist who says, "It's great," or "It's no good," and then is not able to explain to you why, as Jerry did with those drawings I took him. But here I was, sunk: I could do it too!

39In the Raphael Room the secret turned out to be that only some of the paintings were made by the great master; the rest were made by students. I had liked the ones by Raphael. This was a big jab for my self­confidence in my ability to appreciate art.

40Anyway, the guy from the art class and the nifty model came over to my house a number of times and I tried to draw her and learn from him. After many attempts I finally drew what I felt was a really nice picture ­­ it was a portrait of her head ­­ and I got very excited about this first success.

41I had enough confidence to ask an old friend of mine named Steve Demitriades if his beautiful wife would pose for me, and in return I would give him the portrait. He laughed. "If she wants to waste her time posing for you, it's all right with me, ha, ha, ha." I worked very hard on her portrait, and when he saw it, he turned over to my side completely: "It's just wonderful!" he exclaimed. "Can you get a photographer to make copies of it? I want to send one to my mother in Greece!" His mother had never seen the girl he married. That was very exciting to me, to think that I had improved to the point where someone wanted one of my drawings.

42A similar thing happened at a small art exhibit that some guy at Caltech had arranged, where I contributed two drawings and a painting. He said, "We oughta put a price on the drawings."

43I thought, "That's silly! I'm not trying to sell them." "It makes the exhibition more interesting. If you don't mind parting with them, just put a price on."

44After the show the guy told me that a girl had bought one of my drawings and wanted to speak to me to find out more about it.

45The drawing was called "The Magnetic Field of the Sun." For this particular drawing I had borrowed one of those beautiful pictures of the solar prominences taken at the solar laboratory in Colorado. Because I understood how the sun's magnetic field was holding up the flames and had, by that time, developed some technique for drawing magnetic field lines (it was similar to a girl's flowing hair), I wanted to draw something beautiful that no artist would think to draw: the rather complicated and twisting lines of the magnetic field, close together here and spreading out there.

46I explained all this to her, and showed her the picture that gave me the idea.

47She told me this story: She and her husband had gone to the exhibit, and they both liked the drawing very much. "Why don't we buy it?" she suggested.

48Her husband was the kind of a man who could never do anything right away.

49"Let's think about it a while," he said.

50She realized his birthday was a few months ahead, so she went back the same day and bought it herself.

51That night when he came home from work, he was depressed. She finally got it out of him: He thought it would be nice to buy her that picture, but when he went back to the exhibit, he was told that the picture had already been sold. So she had it to surprise him on his birthday.

52What I got out of that story was something still very new to me: I understood at last what art is really for, at least in certain respects. It gives somebody, individually, pleasure. You can make something that somebody likes so much that they're depressed, or they're happy, on account of that damn thing you made! In science, it's sort of general and large: You don't know the individuals who have appreciated it directly.

53I understood that to sell a drawing is not to make money, but to be sure that it's in the home of someone who really wants it; someone who would feel bad if they didn't have it. This was interesting.

54So I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn't want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn't supposed to be able to draw, isn't that wonderful, so I made up a false name. My friend Dudley Wright suggested "Au Fait," which means "It is done" in French. I spelled it O­f­e­y, which turned out to be a name the blacks used for "whitey." But after all, I was whitey, so it was all right.

55One of my models wanted me to make a drawing for her, but she didn't have the money. (Models don't have money; if they did, they wouldn't be modeling.) She offered to pose three times free if I would give her a drawing.

56"On the contrary," I said. "I'll give you three drawings if you'll pose once for nothing."

57She put one of the drawings I gave her on the wall in her small room, and soon her boyfriend noticed it. He liked it so much that he wanted to commission a portrait of her. He would pay me sixty dollars. (The money was getting pretty good now.) Then she got the idea to be my agent: She could earn a little extra money by going around selling my drawings, saying, "There's a new artist in Altadena. . ." It was fun to be in a different world! She arranged to have some of my drawings put on display at Bullock's, Pasadena's most elegant department store. She and the lady from the art section picked out some drawings ­­ drawings of plants that I had made early on (that I didn't like) ­­ and had them all framed. Then I got a signed document from Bullock's saying that they had such­and­such drawings on consignment. Of course nobody bought any of them, but otherwise I was a big success: I had my drawings on sale at Bullock's! It was fun to have them there, just so I could say one day that I had reached that pinnacle of success in the art world.

58Most of my models I got through Jerry, but I also tried to get models on my own.

59Whenever I met a young woman who looked as if she would be interesting to draw, I would ask her to pose for me. It always ended up that I would draw her face, because I didn't know exactly how to bring up the subject of posing nude.

60Once when I was over at Jerry's, I said to his wife Dabney, "I can never get the girls to pose nude: I don't know how Jerry does it!" "Well, did you ever ask them?"

61"Oh! I never thought of that."

62The next girl I met that I wanted to pose for me was a Caltech student. I asked her if she would pose nude. "Certainly," she said, and there we were! So it was easy. I guess there was so much in the back of my mind that I thought it was somehow wrong to ask.

63I've done a lot of drawing by now, and I've gotten so I like to draw nudes best. For all I know it's not art, exactly; it's a mixture. Who knows the percentages?

64One model I met through Jerry had been a Playboy playmate. She was tall and gorgeous. However, she thought she was too tall. Every girl in the world, looking at her, would have been jealous. When she would come into a room, she'd be half stooped over.

65I tried to teach her, when she was posing, to please stand up, because she was so elegant and striking. I finally talked her into that.

66Then she had another worry: she's got "dents" near her groin. I had to get out a book of anatomy to show her that it's the attachment of the muscles to the ilium, and to explain to her that you can't see these dents on everybody; to see them, everything must be just right, in perfect proportion, like she was. I learned from her that every woman is worried about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.

67I wanted to draw a picture of this model in color, in pastels, just to experiment. I thought I would first make a sketch in charcoal, which would be later covered with the pastel. When I got through with this charcoal drawing that I had made without worrying how it was going to look, I realized that it was one of the best drawings I had ever made.

68I decided to leave it, and forget about the pastels for that one. My "agent" looked at it and wanted to take it around. "You can't sell that," I said, "it's on newsprint." "Oh, never mind," she said.

69A few weeks later she came back with this picture in a beautiful wooden frame with a red band and a gold edge. It's a funny thing which must make artists, generally, unhappy ­­ how much improved a drawing gets when you put a frame around it. My agent told me that a particular lady got all excited about the drawing and they took it to a picture framer. He told them that there were special techniques for mounting drawings on newsprint: Impregnate it with plastic, do this, do that. So this lady goes to all that trouble over this drawing I had made, and then has my agent bring it back to me. "I think the artist would like to see how lovely it is, framed," she said.

70I certainly did. There was another example of the direct pleasure somebody got out of one of my pictures. So it was a real kick selling the drawings.

71There was a period when there were topless restaurants in town: You could go there for lunch or dinner, and the girls would dance without a top, and after a while without anything. One of these places, it turned out, was only a mile and a half away from my house, so I went there very often. I'd sit in one of the booths and work a little physics on the paper placemats with the scalloped edges, and sometimes I'd draw one of the dancing girls or one of the customers, just to practice.

72My wife Gweneth, who is English, had a good attitude about my going to this place. She said, "The Englishmen have clubs they go to." So it was something like my club.

73There were pictures hanging around the place, but I didn't like them much. They were these fluorescent colors on black velvet ­­ kind of ugly ­­ a girl taking off her sweater, or something. Well, I had a rather nice drawing I had made of my model Kathy, so I gave it to the owner of the restaurant to put up on the wall, and he was delighted.

74Giving him the drawing turned out to produce some useful results. The owner became very friendly to me, and would give me free drinks all the time. Now, every time I would come in to the restaurant a waitress would come over with my free 7­Up. I'd watch the girls dance, do a little physics, prepare a lecture, or draw a little bit. If I got a little tired, I'd watch the entertainment for a while, and then do a little more work. The owner knew I didn't want to be disturbed, so if a drunk man came over and started to talk to me, right away a waitress would come and get the guy out of there. If a girl came over, he would do nothing. We had a very good relationship. His name was Gianonni.

75The other effect of my drawing on display was that people would ask him about it. One day a guy came over to me and said, "Gianonni tells me you made that picture." "Yeah."

76"Good. I'd like to commission a drawing." "All right; what would you like?"

77"I want a picture of a nude toreador girl being charged by a bull with a man's head."

78"Well, uh, it would help me a little if I had some idea of what this drawing is for." "I want it for my business establishment." "What kind of business establishment?"

79"It's for a massage parlor: you know, private rooms, masseuses ­­ get the idea?" "Yeah, I get the idea." I didn't want to draw a nude toreador girl being charged by a bull with a man's head, so I tried to talk him out of it. "How do you think that looks to the customers, and how does it make the girls feel? The men come in there and you get 'em all excited with this picture. Is that the way you want 'em to treat the girls?" He's not convinced.

80"Suppose the cops come in and they see this picture, and you're claiming it's a massage parlor."

81"OK, OK," he says; "You're right. I've gotta change it. What I want is a picture that, if the cops look at it, is perfectly OK for a massage parlor, but if a customer looks at it, it gives him ideas."

82"OK," I said. We arranged it for sixty dollars, and I began to work on the drawing.

83First, I had to figure out how to do it. I thought and I thought, and I often felt I would have been better off drawing the nude toreador girl in the first place!

84Finally I figured out how to do it: I would draw a slave girl in imaginary Rome, massaging some important Roman ­­ a senator, perhaps. Since she's a slave girl, she has a certain look on her face. She knows what's going to happen next, and she's sort of resigned to it.

85I worked very hard on this picture. I used Kathy as the model. Later, I got another model for the man. I did lots of studies, and soon the cost for the models was already eighty dollars. I didn't care about the money; I liked the challenge of having to do a commission. Finally I ended up with a picture of a muscular man lying on a table with the slave girl massaging him: she's wearing a kind of toga that covers one breast­the other one was nude­and I got the expression of resignation on her face just right.

86I was just about ready to deliver my commissioned masterpiece to the massage parlor when Gianonni told me that the guy had been arrested and was in jail. So I asked the girls at the topless restaurant if they knew any good massage parlors around Pasadena that would like to hang my drawing in the lobby.

87They gave me names and locations of places in and around Pasadena and told me things like "When you go to the Such­and­such massage parlor, ask for Frank ­­ he's a pretty good guy. If he's not there, don't go in." Or "Don't talk to Eddie. Eddie would never understand the value of a drawing."

88The next day I rolled up my picture, put it in the back of my station wagon, and my wife Gweneth wished me good luck as I set out to visit the brothels of Pasadena to sell my drawing.

89Just before I went to the first place on my list, I thought to myself, "You know, before I go anywhere else, I oughta check at the place he used to have. Maybe it's still open, and perhaps the new manager wants my drawing." I went over there and knocked on the door. It opened a little bit, and I saw a girl's eye. "Do we know you?" she asked.

90"No, you don't, but how would you like to have a drawing that would be appropriate for your entrance hall?"

91"I'm sorry," she said, "but we've already contracted an artist to make a drawing for us, and he's working on it."

92"I'm the artist," I said, "and your drawing is ready!" It turns out that the guy, as he was going to jail, told his wife about our arrangement. So I went in and showed them the drawing.

93The guy's wife and his sister, who were now running the place, were not entirely pleased with it; they wanted the girls to see it. I hung it up on the wall, there in the lobby, and all the girls came out from the various rooms in the back and started to make comments.

94One girl said she didn't like the expression on the slave girl's face. "She doesn't look happy," she said. "She should be smiling." I said to her, "Tell me ­­ while you're massaging a guy, and he's not lookin' at you, are you smiling?"

95"Oh, no!" she said. "I feel exactly like she looks! But it's not right to put it in the picture."

96I left it with them, but after a week of worrying about it back and forth, they decided they didn't want it. It turned out that the real reason that they didn't want it was the one nude breast. I tried to explain that my drawing was a tone­down of the original request, but they said they had different ideas about it than the guy did. I thought the irony of people running such an establishment being prissy about one nude breast was amusing, and I took the drawing home.

97My businessman friend Dudley Wright saw the drawing and I told him the story about it. He said, "You oughta triple its price. With art, nobody is really sure of its value, so people often think, 'If the price is higher, it must be more valuable!'" I said, "You're crazy!" but, just for fun, I bought a twenty­dollar frame and mounted the drawing so it would be ready for the next customer.

98Some guy from the weather forecasting business saw the drawing I had given Gianonni and asked if I had others. I invited him and his wife to my "studio" downstairs in my home, and they asked about the newly framed drawing. "That one is two hundred dollars." (I had multiplied sixty by three and added twenty for the frame.) The next day they came back and bought it. So the massage parlor drawing ended up in the office of a weather forecaster.

99One day there was a police raid on Gianonni's, and some of the dancers were arrested. Someone wanted to stop Gianonni from putting on topless dancing shows, and Gianonni didn't want to stop. So there was a big court case about it; it was in all the local papers.

100Gianonni went around to all the customers and asked them if they would testify in support of him. Everybody had an excuse: "I run a day camp, and if the parents see that I'm going to this place, they won't send their kids to my camp. . ." Or, "I'm in the such­ and­such business, and if it's publicized that I come down here, we'll lose customers." I think to myself, "I'm the only free man in here. I haven't any excuse! I like this place, and I'd like to see it continue, I don't see anything wrong with topless dancing." So I said to Gianonni, "Yes, I'll be glad to testify." In court the big question was, is topless dancing acceptable to the community ­­ do community standards allow it?

101The lawyer from the defense tried to make me into an expert on community standards. He asked me if I went into other bars.

102"Yes."

103"And how many times per week would you typically go to Gianonni's?"

104"Five, six times a week." (That got into the papers: The Caltech professor of physics goes to see topless dancing six times a week.) "What sections of the community were represented at Gianonni's?" "Nearly every section: there were guys from the real estate business, a guy from the city governing board, workmen from the gas station, guys from engineering firms, a professor of physics. . ."

105"So would you say that topless entertainment is acceptable to the community, given that so many sections of it are watching it and enjoying it?" "I need to know what you mean by 'acceptable to the community.' Nothing is accepted by everybody, so what percentage of the community must accept something in order for it to be 'acceptable to the community'?" The lawyer suggests a figure. The other lawyer objects. The judge calls a recess, and they all go into chambers for 15 minutes before they can decide that "acceptable to the community" means accepted by 50% of the community.

106In spite of the fact that I made them be precise, I had no precise numbers as evidence, so I said, "I believe that topless dancing is accepted by more than 50% of the community, and is therefore acceptable to the community." Gianonni temporarily lost the case, and his, or another one very similar to it, went ultimately to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, his place stayed open, and I got still more free 7­Ups.

107Around that time there were some attempts to develop an interest in art at Caltech.

108Somebody contributed the money to convert an old plant sciences building into some art studios. Equipment and supplies were bought and provided for the students, and they hired an artist from South Africa to coordinate and support the art activities around Caltech.

109Various people came in to teach classes. I got Jerry Zorthian to teach a drawing class, and some guy came in to teach lithography, which I tried to learn.

110The South African artist came over to my house one time to look at my drawings.

111He said he thought it would be fun to have a one­man show. This time I was cheating: If I hadn't been a professor at Caltech, they would have never thought my pictures were worth it.

112"Some of my better drawings have been sold, and I feel uncomfortable calling the people," I said.

113"You don't have to worry, Mr. Feynman," he reassured me. "You won't have to call them up. We will make all the arrangements and operate the exhibit officially and correctly."

114I gave him a list of people who had bought my drawings, and they soon received a telephone call from him: "We understand that you have an Ofey." "Oh, yes!"

115"We are planning to have an exhibition of Ofeys, and we're wondering if you would consider lending it to us." Of course they were delighted.

116The exhibition was held in the basement of the Athenaeum, the Caltech faculty club. Everything was like the real thing: All the pictures had titles, and those that had been taken on consignment from their owners had due recognition: "Lent by Mr.

117Gianonni," for instance.

118One drawing was a portrait of the beautiful blonde model from the art class, which I had originally intended to be a study of shading: I put a light at the level of her legs a bit to the side and pointed it upwards. As she sat, I tried to draw the shadows as they were ­­ her nose cast its shadow rather unnaturally across her face ­­ so they wouldn't look so bad. I drew her torso as well, so you could also see her breasts and the shadows they made. I stuck it in with the other drawings in the exhibit and called it "Madame Curie Observing the Radiations from Radium." The message I intended to convey was, nobody thinks of Madame Curie as a woman, as feminine, with beautiful hair, bare breasts, and all that. They only think of the radium part.

119A prominent industrial designer named Henry Dreyfuss invited various people to a reception at his home after the exhibition ­­ the woman who had contributed money to support the arts, the president of Caltech and his wife, and so on.

120One of these art­lovers came over and started up a conversation with me: "Tell me, Professor Feynman, do you draw from photographs or from models?" "I always draw directly from a posed model." "Well, how did you get Madame Curie to pose for you?" Around that time the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a similar idea to the one I had, that artists are far away from an understanding of science. My idea was that artists don't understand the underlying generality and beauty of nature and her laws (and therefore cannot portray this in their art). The museum's idea was that artists should know more about technology: they should become more familiar with machines and other applications of science.

121The art museum organized a scheme in which they would get some of the really good artists of the day to go to various companies which volunteered some time and money to the project. The artists would visit these companies and snoop around until they saw something interesting that they could use in their work. The museum thought it might help if someone who knew something about technology could be a sort of liaison with the artists from time to time as they visited the companies. Since they knew I was fairly good at explaining things to people and I wasn't a complete jackass when it came to art (actually, I think they knew I was trying to learn to draw) ­­ at any rate, they asked me if I would do that, and I agreed.

122It was lots of fun visiting the companies with the artists. What typically happened was, some guy would show us a tube that discharged sparks in beautiful blue, twisting patterns. The artists would get all excited and ask me how they could use it in an exhibit.

123What were the necessary conditions to make it work?

124The artists were very interesting people. Some of them were absolute fakes: they would claim to be an artist, and everybody agreed they were an artist, but when you'd sit and talk to them, they'd make no sense whatsoever! One guy in particular, the biggest faker, always dressed funny; he had a big black bowler hat. He would answer your questions in an incomprehensible way, and when you'd try to find out more about what he said by asking him about some of the words he used, off we'd be in another direction!

125The only thing he contributed, ultimately, to the exhibit for art and technology was a portrait of himself. Other artists I talked to would say things that made no sense at first, but they would go to great lengths to explain their ideas to me. One time I went somewhere, as a part of this scheme, with Robert Irwin. It was a two­day trip, and after a great effort of discussing back and forth, I finally understood what he was trying to explain to me, and I thought it was quite interesting and wonderful.

126Then there were the artists who had absolutely no idea about the real world. They thought that scientists were some kind of grand magicians who could make anything, and would say things like, "I want to make a picture in three dimensions where the figure is suspended in space and it glows and flickers." They made up the world they wanted, and had no idea what was reasonable or unreasonable to make.