Fishing for Proper Words of Wonder

The other day I quoted an ancient Chinese saying, “Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish--don’t overdo it,” and attributed it to Confucius.

As reader A. Novakov points out, the author was the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu, also known as Lao-tse, not Confucius. The words “don’t overdo it” were not by Lao-tzu, he adds. “And they are redundant.”

Indeed they are (though President Reagan tacked them on to the quote in his State of the Union address), and I don’t know where I found that version, attributed to Confucius, but I should have known better. Nearly 30 years ago I wrote a column that began:

“The Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu once said, ‘Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.’ ”

The thesis of that column, written shortly after the Russians astonished us with sputnik, was that the government was wrong to rush a whole generation of American students into space engineering.

“Whatever happens to our young fish,” I said, “they should not be baked en masse in the ovens of science and mathematics. Some of them ought to be left out, uncooked, to think about things.” It was also at the time of Little Rock, and I said I doubted that such integration problems would ever be solved by graduate nuclear physicists.

It is ironic that I should be reminded of that column so soon after the death of Richard Feynman, the Caltech physicist and Nobel Prize winner. Feynman was the embodiment of wonder. He wondered about everything from ants and subatomic particles to the stars, and he wondered about wonder itself.

As a student at MIT he wrote a theme on the phenomenon of sleep, after trying night after night to observe the process by which our consciousness is turned off. He concluded with this verse:

I wonder why, I wonder why.

I wonder why I wonder.

I wonder why I wonder why

I wonder why I wonder? Feynman couldn’t see an ant in his bathroom without getting out his magnifying glass to study its behavior. As a kid he had read in a book that dragon flies don’t sting. One day he allowed a dragon fly to land on his bare foot, while all his friends screamed warnings. He proved the book was right.

Feynman was irrepressible. While working at Los Alamos on the atom bomb, he went to visit his wife in an Albuquerque hospital. Waiting in the hospital library, he found an article explaining that bloodhounds track human beings by the scent left on objects by their hands and feet. When he was admitted to his wife’s room, he saw a six-pack of empty Coke bottles. He asked her to handle one or two of them while he left the room. When he came back he immediately found the ones she had handled--by their warmth and the fresh scent of her hands.

Only a man truly moved by wonder would dare to engage in such self-absorbed experiments when he visited his wife in a hospital.

As Lee Dye pointed out in his excellent obituary, Feynman had a reputation as a “skirt chaser.” I remember that many years ago, when the topless bar first came into being in our suburbs, someone discovered Feynman sitting alone at the bar of a Pasadena pub, near Caltech, drinking a beer and watching a topless dancer jiggling on the bar.

Feynman was not at all embarrassed. He said he simply found the topless dancer to be another of life’s interesting phenomena, to be scrutinized and wondered at. Besides, watching one was a relaxing respite from the rigors of doing physics.

I never knew Feynman, but I did meet him once at a costume party in the home of Albert Hibbs, the Jet Propulsion Lab scientist. My wife pointed out a man sitting by himself in a window box. He wore a long white robe and a long false beard.

“I think that’s Feynman,” she said. “I think he’s supposed to be Moses.”

I went over to him and said, “Are you Moses?” He said, “No. I’m God.”

I went over to Al Hibbs and said, “Feynman says he’s God.” Hibbs said, “Oh, we’ve known that all along.”

If he isn’t God, he’s probably checking him out right now.