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Tema: Richard Phillips Feynman ~ Ricard Filips Fejnman  (Pročitano 37363 puta)
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   Some of the special problems I had at Los Alamos were rather interesting. One thing had to do with the safety of the plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Los Alamos was going to make the bomb, but at Oak Ridge they were trying to separate the isotopes of uranium—uranium 238 and uranium 235, the explosive one. They were just beginning to get infinitesimal amounts from an experimental thing of 235, and at the same time they were practicing the chemistry. There was going to be a big plant, they were going to have vats of the stuff, and then they were going to take the purified stuff and repurify and get it ready for the next stage. (You have to purify it in several stages.) So they were practicing on the one hand, and they were just getting a little bit of U235 from one of the pieces of apparatus experimentally on the other hand. And they were trying to learn how to assay it, to determine how much uranium 235 there is in it. Though we would send them instructions, they never got it right.
   So finally Emil Segre said that the only possible way to get it right was for him to go down there and see what they were doing. The army people said, “No, it is our policy to keep all the information of Los Alamos at one place.”
   The people in Oak Ridge didn’t know anything about what it was to be used for; they just knew what they were trying to do. I mean the higher people knew they were separating uranium, but they didn’t know how powerful the bomb was, or exactly how it worked or anything. The people underneath didn’t know at all what they were doing. And the army wanted to keep it that way. There was no information going back and forth. But Segre insisted they’d never get the assays right, and the whole thing would go up in smoke. So he finally went down to see what they were doing, and as he was walking through he saw them wheeling a tank carboy of water, green water—which is uranium nitrate solution.
   He said, “Uh, you’re going to handle it like that when it’s purified too? Is that what you’re going to do?”
   They said, “Sure—why not?”
   “Won’t it explode?” he said.
   Huh! Explode?
   Then the army said, “You see! We shouldn’t have let any information get to them! Now they are all upset.”
   It turned out that the army had realized how much stuff we needed to make a bomb—twenty kilograms or whatever it was—and they realized that this much material, purified, would never be in the plant, so there was no danger. But they did not know that the neutrons were enormously more effective when they are slowed down in water. In water it takes less than a tenth—no, a hundredth—as much material to make a reaction that makes radioactivity. It kills people around and so on. It was very dangerous, and they had not paid any attention to the safety at all.
   So a telegram goes from Oppenheimer to Segre: “Go through the entire plant. Notice where all the concentrations are supposed to be, with the process as they designed it. We will calculate in the meantime how much material can come together before there’s an explosion.”
   Two groups started working on it. Christy’s group worked on water solutions and my group worked on dry powder in boxes. We calculated about how much material they could accumulate safely. And Christy was going to go down and tell them all at Oak Ridge what the situation was, because this whole thing is broken down and we have to go down and tell them now. So I happily gave all my numbers to Christy and said, you have all the stuff, so go. Christy got pneumonia; I had to go.
   I had never traveled on an airplane before. They strapped the secrets in a little thing on my back! The airplane in those days was like a bus, except the stations were further apart. You stopped off every once in a while to wait.
   There was a guy standing there next to me swinging a chain, saying something like, “It must be terribly difficult to fly without a priority on airplanes these days.”
   I couldn’t resist. I said, “Well, I don’t know. I have a priority.
   A little bit later he tried again. “There are some generals coming. They are going to put off some of us number threes.”
   “It’s all right,” I said. “I’m a number two.”
   He probably wrote to his congressman—if he wasn’t a congressman himself—saying, “What are they doing sending these little kids around with number two priorities in the middle of the war?”
   At any rate, I arrived at Oak Ridge. The first thing I did was have them take me to the plant, and I said nothing. I just looked at everything. I found out that the situation was even worse than Segre reported, because he noticed certain boxes in big lots in a room, but he didn’t notice a lot of boxes in another room on the other side of the same wall—and things like that. Now, if you have too much stuff together, it goes up, you see.
   So I went through the entire plant. I have a very bad memory but when I work intensively I have a good shortterm memory and so I could remember all kinds of crazy things like building 90-207, vat number so-and-so, and so forth.
   I went to my room that night, and went through the whole thing, explained where all the dangers were, and what you would have to do to fix this. It’s rather easy. You put cadmium in solutions to absorb the neutrons in the water, and you separate the boxes so they are not too dense, according to certain rules.
   The next day there was going to be a big meeting. I forgot to say that before I left Los Alamos Oppenheimer said to me, “Now, the following people are technically able down there at Oak Ridge: Mr. Julian Webb, Mr. So-and-so, and so on. I want you to make sure that these people are at the meeting, that you tell them how the thing can he made safe, so that they really understand.”
   I said, “What if they’re not at the meeting? What am I supposed to do?”
   He said, “Then you should say: Los Alamos cannot accept the responsibility for the safety of the Oak Ridge plant unless–!”
   I said, “You mean me, little Richard, is going to go in there and say—?”
   He said, “Yes, little Richard, you go and do that.”
   I really grew up fast!
   When I arrived, sure enough, the big shots in the company and the technical people that I wanted were there, and the generals and everyone who was interested in this very serious problem. That was good because the plant would have blown up if nobody had paid attention to this problem.
   There was a Lieutenant Zumwalt who took care of me. He told me that the colonel said I shouldn’t tell them how the neutrons work and all the details because we want to keep things separate, so just tell them what to do to keep it safe.
   I said, “In my opinion it is impossible for them to obey a bunch of rules unless they understand how it works. It’s my opinion that it’s only going to work if I tell them, and Los Alamos cannot accept the responsibility for the safety of the Oak Ridge plant unless they are fully informed as to how it works! ”
   It was great. The lieutenant takes me to the colonel and repeats my remark. The colonel says, “Just five minutes,” and then he goes to the window and he stops and thinks. That’s what they’re very good at—making decisions. I thought it was very remarkable how a problem of whether or not information as to how the bomb works should be in the Oak Ridge plant had to be decided and could be decided in five minutes. So I have a great deal of respect for these military guys, because I never can decide anything very important in any length of time at all.
   In five minutes he said, “All right, Mr. Feynman, go ahead.”
   I sat down and I told them all about neutrons, how they worked, da da, ta ta ta, there are too many neutrons together, you’ve got to keep the material apart, cadmium absorbs, and slow neutrons are more effective than fast neutrons, and yak yak—all of which was elementary stuff at Los Alamos, but they had never heard of any of it, so I appeared to be a tremendous genius to them.
   The result was that they decided to set up little groups to make their own calculations to learn how to do it. They started to redesign plants, and the designers of the plants were there, the construction designers, and engineers, and chemical engineers for the new plant that was going to handle the separated material.
   They told me to come back in a few months, so I came back when the engineers had finished the design of the plant. Now it was for me to look at the plant.
   How do you look at a plant that isn’t built yet? I don’t know. Lieutenant Zumwalt, who was always coming around with me because I had to have an escort everywhere, takes me into this room where there are these two engineers and a loooooong table covered with a stack of blueprints representing the various floors of the proposed plant.
   I took mechanical drawing when I was in school, but I am not good at reading blueprints. So they unroll the stack of blueprints and start to explain it to me, thinking I am a genius. Now, one of the things they had to avoid in the plant was accumulation. They had problems like when there’s an evaporator working, which is trying to accumulate the stuff, if the valve gets stuck or something like that and too much stuff accumulates, it’ll explode. So they explained to me that this plant is designed so that if any one valve gets stuck nothing will happen. It needs at least two valves everywhere.
   Then they explain how it works. The carbon tetrachloride comes in here, the uranium nitrate from here comes in here, it goes up and down, it goes up through the floor, comes up through the pipes, coming up from the second floor, bluuuuurp–going through the stack of blueprints, downup-down-up, talking very fast, explaining the very very complicated chemical plant.
   I’m completely dazed. Worse, I don’t know what the symbols on the blueprint mean! There is some kind of a thing that at first I think is a window. It’s a square with a little cross in the middle, all over the damn place. I think it’s a window, but no, it can’t be a window, because it isn’t always at the edge. I want to ask them what it is.
   You must have been in a situation like this when you didn’t ask them right away. Right away it would have been OK. But now they’ve been talking a little bit too long. You hesitated too long. If you ask them now they’ll say “What are you wasting my time all this time for?”
   What am I going to do? I get an idea. Maybe it’s a valve.
   I take my finger and I put it down on one of the mysterious little crosses in the middle of one of the blueprints on page three, and I say “What happens if this valve gets stuck?”—figuring they’re going to say “That’s not a valve, sir, that’s a window.”
   So one looks at the other and says, “Well, if that valve gets stuck—” and he goes up and down on the blueprint, up and down, the other guy goes up and down, back and forth, back and forth, and they both look at each other. They turn around to me and they open their mouths like astonished fish and say “You’re absolutely right, sir.”
   So they rolled up the blueprints and away they went and we walked out. And Mr. Zumwalt, who had been following me all the way through, said, “You’re a genius. I got the idea you were a genius when you went through the plant once and you could tell them about evaporator C-21 in building 90-207 the next morning,” he says, “but what you have just done is so fantastic I want to know how, how do you do that?”
   I told him you try to find out whether it’s a valve or not.
   Another kind of problem I worked on was this. We had to do lots of calculations, and we did them on Marchant calculating machines. By the way, just to give you an idea of what Los Alamos was like: We had these Marchant computers—hand calculators with numbers. You push them, and they multiply divide, add, and so on, but not easy like they do now. They were mechanical gadgets, failing often, and they had to be sent back to the factory to be repaired. Pretty soon you were running out of machines. A few of us started to take the covers off. (We weren’t supposed to. The rules read: “You take the covers off, we cannot be responsible …”) So we took the covers off and we got a nice series of lessons on how to fix them, and we got better and better at it as we got more and more elaborate repairs. When we got something too complicated, we sent it back to the factory but we’d do the easy ones and kept the things going. I ended up doing all the computers and there was a guy in the machine shop who took care of typewriters.
   Anyway we decided that the big problem—which was to figure out exactly what happened during the bomb’s implosion, so you can figure out exactly how much energy was released and so on—required much more calculating than we were capable of. A clever fellow by the name of Stanley Frankel realized that it could possibly he done on IBM machines. The IBM company had machines for business purposes, adding machines called tabulators for listing sums, and a multiplier that you put cards in and it would take two numbers from a card and multiply them. There were also collators and sorters and so on.
   So Frankel figured out a nice program. If we got enough of these machines in a room, we could take the cards and put them through a cycle. Everybody who does numerical calculations now knows exactly what I’m talking about, but this was kind of a new thing then—mass production with machines. We had done things like this on adding machines. Usually you go one step across, doing everything yourself. But this was different—where you go first to the adder, then to the multiplier, then to the adder, and so on. So Frankel designed this system and ordered the machines from the IBM company because we realized it was a good way of solving our problems.
   We needed a man to repair the machines, to keep them going and everything. And the army was always going to send this fellow they had, but he was always delayed. Now, we always were in a hurry. Everything we did, we tried to do as quickly as possible. In this particular case, we worked out all the numerical steps that the machines were supposed to do—multiply this, and then do this, and subtract that. Then we worked out the program, but we didn’t have any machine to test it on. So we set up this room with girls in it. Each one had a Marchant: one was the multiplier, another was the adder. This one cubed—all she did was cube a number on an index card and send it to the next girl.
   We went through our cycle this way until we got all the bugs out. It turned out that the speed at which we were able to do it was a hell of a lot faster than the other way where every single person did all the steps. We got speed with this system that was the predicted speed for the IBM machine. The only difference is that the IBM machines didn’t get tired and could work three shifts. But the girls got tired after a while.
   Anyway we got the bugs out during this process, and finally the machines arrived, but not the repairman. These were some of the most complicated machines of the technology of those days, big things that came partially disassembled, with lots of wires and blueprints of what to do. We went down and we put them together, Stan Frankel and I and another fellow, and we had our troubles. Most of the trouble was the big shots coming in all the time and saying, “You’re going to break something!”
   We put them together, and sometimes they would work, and sometimes they were put together wrong and they didn’t work. Finally I was working on some multiplier and I saw a bent part inside, but I was afraid to straighten it because it might snap off—and they were always telling us we were going to bust something irreversibly. When the repairman finally got there, he fixed the machines we hadn’t got ready and everything was going. But he had trouble with the one that I had had trouble with. After three days he was still working on that one last machine.
   I went down. I said, “Oh, I noticed that was bent.”
   He said, “Oh, of course. That’s all there is to it!” Bend! It was all right. So that was it.
   Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It’s a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches—if it’s an even number you do this, if it’s an odd number you do that—and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.
   After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn’t paying any attention; he wasn’t supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly—while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.
   Absolutely useless. We had tables of arc-tangents. But if you’ve ever worked with computers, you understand the disease—the delight in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing.
   I was asked to stop working on the stuff I was doing in my group and go down and take over the IBM group, and I tried to avoid the disease. And, although they had done only three problems in nine months, I had a very good group.
   The real trouble was that no one had ever told these fellows anything. The army had selected them from all over the country for a thing called Special Engineer Detachment—clever boys from high school who had engineering ability. They sent them up to Los Alamos. They put them in barracks. And they would tell them nothing.
   Then they came to work, and what they had to do was work on IBM machines—punching holes, numbers that they didn’t understand. Nobody told them what it was. The thing was going very slowly. I said that the first thing there has to be is that these technical guys know what we’re doing. Oppenheimer went and talked to the security and got special permission so I could give a nice lecture about what we were doing, and they were all excited: “We’re fighting a war! We see what it is!” They knew what the numbers meant. If the pressure came out higher, that meant there was more energy released, and so on and so on. They knew what they were doing.
   Complete transformation! They began to invent ways of doing it better. They improved the scheme. They worked at night. They didn’t need supervising in the night; they didn’t need anything. They understood everything; they invented several of the programs that we used.
   So my boys really came through, and all that had to be done was to tell them what it was. As a result, although it took them nine months to do three problems before, we did nine problems in three months, which is nearly ten times as fast.
   But one of the secret ways we did our problems was this. The problems consisted of a hunch of cards that had to go through a cycle. First add, then multiply—and so it went through the cycle of machines in this room, slowly, as it went around and around. So we figured a way to put a different colored set of cards through a cycle too, but out of phase. We’d do two or three problems at a time.
   But this got us into another problem. Near the end of the war, for instance, just before we had to make a test in Albuquerque, the question was: How much energy would be released? We had been calculating the release from various designs, but we hadn’t computed for the specific design that was ultimately used. So Bob Christy came down and said, “We would like the results for how this thing is going to work in one month”—or some very short time, like three weeks.
   I said, “It’s impossible.”
   He said, “Look, you’re putting out nearly two problems a month. It takes only two weeks per problem, or three weeks per problem.”
   I said, “I know. It really takes much longer to do the problem, but we’re doing them in parallel. As they go through, it takes a long time and there’s no way to make it go around faster.”
   He went out, and I began to think. Is there a way to make it go around faster? What if we did nothing else on the machine, so nothing else was interfering? I put a challenge to the boys on the blackboard—CAN WE DO IT? They all start yelling, “Yes, we’ll work double shifts, we’ll work overtime,” all this kind of thing. “We’ll try it. We’ll try it!”
   And so the rule was: All other problems out. Only one problem and just concentrate on this one. So they started to work.
   My wife, Arlene, was ill with tuberculosis—very ill indeed. It looked as if something might happen at any minute, so I arranged ahead of time with a friend of mine in the dormitory to borrow his car in an emergency so I could get to Albuquerque quickly. His name was Klaus Fuchs. He was the spy, and he used his automobile to take the atomic secrets away from Los Alamos down to Santa Fe. But nobody knew that.
   The emergency arrived. I borrowed Fuchs’s car and picked up a couple of hitchhikers, in case something happened with the car on the way to Albuquerque. Sure enough, just as we were driving into Santa Fe, we got a flat tire. The two guys helped me change the tire, and just as we were leaving Santa Fe, another tire went flat. We pushed the car into a nearby gas station.
   The gas station guy was repairing somebody else’s car, and it was going to take a while before he could help us. I didn’t even think to say anything, but the two hitchhikers went over to the gas station man and told him the situation. Soon we had a new tire (but no spare—tires were hard to get during the war).
   About thirty miles outside Albuquerque a third tire went flat, so I left the car on the road and we hitchhiked the rest of the way. I phoned a garage to go out and get the car while I went to the hospital to see my wife.
   Arlene died a few hours after I got there. A nurse came in to fill out the death certificate, and went out again. I spent a little more time with my wife. Then I looked at the clock I had given her seven years before, when she had first become sick with tuberculosis. It was something which in those days was very nice: a digital clock whose numbers would change by turning around mechanically. The clock was very delicate and often stopped for one reason or another—I had to repair it from time to time—but I kept it going for all those years. Now, it had stopped once more—at 9:22, the time on the death certificate!
   I remembered the time I was in my fraternity house at MIT when the idea came into my head completely out of the blue that my grandmother was dead. Right after that there was a telephone call, just like that. It was for Pete Bernays—my grandmother wasn’t dead. So I remembered that, in case somebody told me a story that ended the other way. I figured that such things can sometimes happen by luck—after all, my grandmother was very old—although people might think they happened by some sort of supernatural phenomenon.
   Arlene had kept this clock by her bedside all the time she was sick, and now it stopped the moment she died. I can understand how a person who half believes in the possibility of such things, and who hasn’t got a doubting mind—especially in a circumstance like that—doesn’t immediately try to figure out what happened, but instead explains that no one touched the clock, and there was no possibility of explanation by normal phenomena. The clock simply stopped. It would become a dramatic example of these fantastic phenomena.
   I saw that the light in the room was low, and then I remembered that the nurse had picked up the clock and turned it toward the light to see the face better. That could easily have stopped it.
   I went for a walk outside. Maybe I was fooling myself, but I was surprised how I didn’t feel what I thought people would expect to feel under the circumstances. I wasn’t delighted, but I didn’t feel terribly upset, perhaps because I had known for seven years that something like this was going to happen.
   I didn’t know how I was going to face all my friends up at Los Alamos. I didn’t want people with long faces talking to me about it. When I got back (yet another tire went flat on the way), they asked me what happened.
   “She’s dead. And how’s the program going?”
   They caught on right away that I didn’t want to moon over it.
   (I had obviously done something to myself psychologically: Reality was so important—I had to understand what really happened to Arlene, physiologically—that I didn’t cry until a number of months later, when I was in Oak Ridge. I was walking past a department store with dresses in the window, and I thought Arlene would like one of them. That was too much for me.)
   When I went back to work on the calculation program, I found it in a mess: There were white cards, there were blue cards, there were yellow cards, and I started to say, “You’re not supposed to do more than one problem—only one problem!” They said, “Get out, get out, get out. Wait—and we’ll explain everything.”
   So I waited, and what happened was this. As the cards went through, sometimes the machine made a mistake, or they put a wrong number in. What we used to have to do when that happened was to go back and do it over again. But they noticed that a mistake made at some point in one cycle only affects the nearby numbers, the next cycle affects the nearby numbers, and so on. It works its way through the pack of cards. If you have fifty cards and you make a mistake at card number thirty-nine, it affects thirty-seven, thirty-eight, and thirty-nine. The next, card thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and forty. The next time it spreads like a disease.
   So they found an error back a way, and they got an idea. They would only compute a small deck of ten cards around the error. And because ten cards could he put through the machine faster than the deck of fifty cards, they would go rapidly through with this other deck while they continued with the fifty cards with the disease spreading. But the other thing was computing faster, and they would seal it all up and correct it. Very clever.
   That was the way those guys worked to get speed. There was no other way. If they had to stop to try to fix it, we’d have lost time. We couldn’t have got it. That was what they were doing.
   Of course, you know what happened while they were doing that. They found an error in the blue deck. And so they had a yellow deck with a little fewer cards; it was going around faster than the blue deck. Just when they are going crazy—because after they get this straightened out, they have to fix the white deck—the boss comes walking in.
   “Leave us alone,” they say. I left them alone and everything came out. We solved the problem in time and that’s the way it was.

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   I was an underling at the beginning. Later I became a group leader. And I met some very great men. It is one of the great experiences of my life to have met all these wonderful physicists.
   There was, of course, Enrico Fermi. He came down once from Chicago, to consult a little bit, to help us if we had some problems. We had a meeting with him, and I had been doing some calculations and gotten some results. The calculations were so elaborate it was very difficult. Now, usually I was the expert at this; I could always tell you what the answer was going to look like, or when I got it I could explain why. But this thing was so complicated I couldn’t explain why it was like that.
   So I told Fermi I was doing this problem, and I started to describe the results. He said, “Wait, before you tell me the result, let me think. It’s going to come out like this (he was right), and it’s going to come out like this because of so and so. And there’s a perfectly obvious explanation for this—”
   He was doing what I was supposed to be good at, ten times better. That was quite a lesson to me.
   Then there was John von Neumann, the great mathematician. We used to go for walks on Sunday. We’d walk in the canyons, often with Bethe and Bob Bacher. It was a great pleasure. And von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since. But it was von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility!
   I also met Niels Bohr. His name was Nicholas Baker in those days, and he came to Los Alamos with Jim Baker, his son, whose name is really Aage Bohr. They came from Denmark, and they were very famous physicists, as you know. Even to the big shot guys, Bohr was a great god.
   We were at a meeting once, the first time he came, and everybody wanted to see the great Bohr. So there were a lot of people there, and we were discussing the problems of the bomb. I was back in a corner somewhere. He came and went, and all I could see of him was from between people’s heads.
   In the morning of the day he’s due to come next time, I get a telephone call.
   “Hello—Feynman?”
   “Yes.”
   “This is Jim Baker.” It’s his son. “My father and I would like to speak to you.”
   “Me? I’m Feynman, I’m just a—”
   “That’s right. Is eight o’clock OK?”
   So, at eight o’clock in the morning, before anybody’s awake, I go down to the place. We go into an office in the technical area and he says, “We have been thinking how we could make the bomb more efficient and we think of the following idea.”
   I say, “No, it’s not going to work. It’s not efficient… Blab, blab, blah.”
   So he says, “How about so and so?”
   I said, “That sounds a little bit better, but it’s got this damn fool idea in it.”
   This went on for about two hours, going back and forth over lots of ideas, back and forth, arguing. The great Niels kept lighting his pipe; it always went out. And he talked in a way that was un-understandable—mumble, mumble, hard to understand. His son I could understand better.
   “Well,” he said finally, lighting his pipe, “I guess we can call in the big shots now.” So then they called all the other guys and had a discussion with them.
   Then the son told me what happened. The last time he was there, Bohr said to his son, “Remember the name of that little fellow in the back over there? He’s the only guy who’s not afraid of me, and will say when I’ve got a crazy idea. So next time when we want to discuss ideas, we’re not going to be able to do it with these guys who say everything is yes, yes, Dr. Bohr. Get that guy and we’ll talk with him first.”
   I was always dumb in that way. I never knew who I was talking to. I was always worried about the physics. If the idea looked lousy, I said it looked lousy. If it looked good, I said it looked good. Simple proposition.
   I’ve always lived that way. It’s nice, it’s pleasant—if you can do it. I’m lucky in my life that I can do this.
   After we’d made the calculations, the next thing that happened, of course, was the test. I was actually at home on a short vacation at that time, after my wife died, and so I got a message that said, “The baby is expected on such and such a day.”
   I flew back, and I arrived just when the buses were leaving, so I went straight out to the site and we waited out there, twenty miles away. We had a radio, and they were supposed to tell us when the thing was going to go off and so forth, but the radio wouldn’t work, so we never knew what was happening. But just a few minutes before it was supposed to go off the radio started to work, and they told us there was twenty seconds or something to go, for people who were far away like we were. Others were closer, six miles away.
   They gave out dark glasses that you could watch it with. Dark glasses! Twenty miles away, you couldn’t see a damn thing through dark glasses. So I figured the only thing that could really hurt your eyes (bright light can never hurt your eyes) is ultraviolet light. I got behind a truck windshield, because the ultraviolet can’t go through glass, so that would be safe, and so I could see the damn thing.
   Time comes, and this tremendous flash out there is so bright that I duck, and I see this purple splotch on the floor of the truck. I said, “That’s not it. That’s an after-image.” So I look back up, and I see this white light changing into yellow and then into orange. Clouds form and disappear again—from the compression and expansion of the shock wave.
   Finally, a big ball of orange, the center that was so bright, becomes a ball of orange that starts to rise and billow a little bit and get a little black around the edges, and then you see it’s a big ball of smoke with flashes on the inside, with the heat of the fire going outwards.
   All this took about one minute. It was a series from bright to dark, and I had seen it. I am about the only guy who actually looked at the damn thing—the first Trinity test. Everybody else had dark glasses, and the people at six miles couldn’t see it because they were all told to lie on the floor. I’m probably the only guy who saw it with the human eye.
   Finally, after about a minute and a half, there’s suddenly a tremendous noise—BANG, and then a rumble, like thunder—and that’s what convinced me. Nobody had said a word during this whole thing. We were all just watching quietly. But this sound released everybody—released me particularly because the solidity of the sound at that distance meant that it had really worked.
   The man standing next to me said, “What’s that?”
   I said, “That was the Bomb.”
   The man was William Laurence. He was there to write an article describing the whole situation. I had been the one who was supposed to have taken him around. Then it was found that it was too technical for him, and so later H. D. Smyth came and I showed him around. One thing we did, we went into a room and there on the end of a narrow pedestal was a small silver-plated ball. You could put your hand on it. It was warm. It was radioactive. It was plutonium. And we stood at the door of this room, talking about it. This was a new element that was made by man, that had never existed on the earth before, except for a very short period possibly at the very beginning. And here it was all isolated and radioactive and had these properties. And we had made it. And so it was tremendously valuable.
   Meanwhile, you know how people do when they talk—you kind of jiggle around and so forth. He was kicking the doorstop, you see, and I said, “Yes, the doorstop certainly is appropriate for this door.” The doorstop was a ten-inch hemisphere of yellowish metal—gold, as a matter of fact.
   What had happened was that we needed to do an experiment to see how many neutrons were reflected by different materials, in order to save the neutrons so we didn’t use so much material. We had tested many different materials. We had tested platinum, we had tested zinc, we had tested brass, we had tested gold. So, in making the tests with the gold, we had these pieces of gold and somebody had the clever idea of using that great ball of gold for a doorstop for the door of the room that contained the plutonium.
   After the thing went off, there was tremendous excitement at Los Alamos. Everybody had parties, we all ran around. I sat on the end of a jeep and beat drums and so on. But one man, I remember, Bob Wilson, was just sitting there moping.
   I said, “What are you moping about?”
   He said, “It’s a terrible thing that we made.”
   I said, “But you started it. You got us into it.”
   You see, what happened to me-what happened to the rest of us—is we started for a good reason, then you’re working very hard to accomplish something and it’s a pleasure, it’s excitement. And you stop thinking, you know; you just stop. Bob Wilson was the only one who was still thinking about it, at that moment.
   I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can’t understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth … How far from here was 34th Street? … All those buildings, all smashed—and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they’d be making a new road, and I thought, they’re crazy, they just don’t understand, they don’t understand. Why are they making new things? It’s so useless.
   But, fortunately, it’s been useless for almost forty years now, hasn’t it? So I’ve been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I’m glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.
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Safecracker Meets Safecracker

   I learned to pick locks from a guy named Leo Lavatelli. It turns out that picking ordinary tumbler locks—like Yale locks—is easy. You try to turn the lock by putting a screwdriver in the hole (you have to push from the side in order to leave the hole open). It doesn’t turn because there are some pins inside which have to be lifted to just the right height (by the key). Because it is not made perfectly, the lock is held more by one pin than the others. Now, if you push a little wire gadget—maybe a paper clip with a slight bump at the end—and jiggle it back and forth inside the lock, you’ll eventually push that one pin that’s doing the most holding, up to the right height. The lock gives, just a little bit, so the first pin stays up—it’s caught on the edge. Now most of the load is held by another pin, and you repeat the same random process for a few more minutes, until all the pins are pushed up.
   What often happens is that the screwdriver will slip and you hear tic-tic-tic, and it makes you mad. There are little springs that push the pins back down when a key is removed, and you can hear them click when you let go of the screwdriver. (Sometimes you intentionally let go of the screwdriver to see if you’re getting anywhere—you might be pushing the wrong way, for instance.) The process is something like Sisyphus: you’re always falling back downhill.
   It’s a simple process, but practice helps a lot. You learn how hard to push on things—hard enough so the pins will stay up, but not so hard that they won’t go up in the first place. What is not really appreciated by most people is that they’re perpetually locking themselves in with locks everywhere, and it’s not very hard to pick them.
   When we started to work on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, everything was in such a hurry that it wasn’t really ready. All the secrets of the project—everything about the atomic bomb—were kept in filing cabinets which, if they had locks at all, were locked with padlocks which had maybe only three pins: they were as easy as pie to open.
   To improve security the shop ouffitted every filing cabinet with a long rod that went down through the handles of the drawers and that was fastened by a padlock.
   Some guy said to me, “Look at this new thing the shop put on—can you open the cabinet now?”
   I looked at the back of the cabinet and saw that the drawers didn’t have a solid bottom. There was a slot with a wire rod in each one that held a slidable piece (which holds the papers up inside the drawer). I poked in from the back, slid the piece back, and began pulling the papers out through the slot. “Look!” I said. “I don’t even have to pick the lock.”
   Los Alamos was a very cooperative place, and we felt it our responsibility to point out things that should be improved. I’d keep complaining that the stuff was unsafe, and although everybody thought it was safe because there were steel rods and padlocks, it didn’t mean a damn thing.
   To demonstrate that the locks meant nothing, whenever I wanted somebody’s report and they weren’t around, I’d just go in their office, open the filing cabinet, and take it out. When I was finished I would give it back to the guy: “Thanks for your report.”
   “Where’d you get it?”
   “Out of your filing cabinet.”
   “But I locked it!”
   “I know you locked it. The locks are no good.”
   Finally some filing cabinets came which had combination locks on them made by the Mosler Safe Company. They had three drawers. Pulling the top drawer out would release the other drawers by a catch. The top drawer was opened by turning a combination wheel to the left, right, and left for the combination, and then right to number ten, which would draw back a bolt inside. The whole filing cabinet could he locked by closing the bottom drawers first, then the top drawer, and spinning the combination wheel away from number ten, which pushed up the bolt.
   These new filing cabinets were an immediate challenge, naturally. I love puzzles. One guy tries to make something to keep another guy out; there must be a way to beat it!
   I had first to understand how the lock worked, so I took apart the one in my office. The way it worked is this: There are three discs on a single shaft, one behind the other; each has a notch in a different place. The idea is to line up the notches so that when you turn the wheel to ten, the little friction drive will draw the bolt down into the slot generated by the notches of the three discs.
   Now, to turn the discs, there’s a pin sticking out from the back of the combination wheel, and a pin sticking up from the first disc at the same radius. Within one turn of the combination wheel, you’ve picked up the first disc.
   On the back of the first disc there’s a pin at the same radius as a pin on the front of the second disc, so by the time you’ve spun the combination wheel around twice, you’ve picked up the second disc as well.
   Keep turning the wheel, and a pin on the back of the second disc will catch a pin on the front of the third disc, which you now set into the proper position with the first number of the combination.
   Now you have to turn the combination wheel the other way one full turn to catch the second disc from the other side, and then continue to the second number of the combination to set the second disc.
   Again you reverse direction and set the first disc to its proper place. Now the notches are lined up, and by turning the wheel to ten, you open the cabinet.
   Well, I struggled, and I couldn’t get anywhere. I bought a couple of safecracker books, but they were all the same. In the beginning of the book there are some stories of the fantastic achievements of the safecracker, such as the woman caught in a meat refrigerator who is freezing to death, but the safecracker, hanging upside down, opens it in two minutes. Or there are some precious furs or gold bullion under water, down in the sea, and the safecracker dives down and opens the chest.
   In the second part of the book, they tell you how to crack a safe. There are all kinds of ninny-pinny, dopey things, like “It might be a good idea to try a date for the combination, because lots of people like to use dates.” Or “Think of the psychology of the owner of the safe, and what he might use for the combination.” And “The secretary is often worried that she might forget the combination of the safe, so she might write it down in one of the following places—along the edge of her desk drawer, on a list of names and addresses … and so on.
   They did tell me something sensible about how to open ordinary safes, and it’s easy to understand. Ordinary safes have an extra handle, so if you push down on the handle while you’re turning the combination wheel, things being unequal (as with locks), the force of the handle trying to push the bolt down into the notches (which are not lined up) is held up more by one disc than another. When the notch on that disc comes under the bolt, there’s a tiny click that you can hear with a stethoscope, or a slight decrease in friction that you can feel (you don’t have to sandpaper your fingertips), and you know, “There’s a number!”
   You don’t know whether it’s the first, second, or third number, but you can get a pretty good idea of that by finding out how many times you have to turn the wheel the other way to hear the same click again. If it’s a little less than once, it’s the first disc; if it’s a little less than twice, it’s the second disc (you have to make a correction for the thickness of the pins).
   This useful trick only works on ordinary safes, which have the extra handle, so I was stymied.
   I tried all kinds of subsidiary tricks with the cabinets, such as finding out how to release the latches on the lower drawers, without opening the top drawer, by taking off a screw in front and poking around with a piece of hanger wire.
   I tried spinning the combination wheel very rapidly and then going to ten, thus putting a little friction on, which I hoped would stop a disc at the right point in some manner. I tried all kinds of things. I was desperate.
   I also did a certain amount of systematic study. For instance, a typical combination was 69-32-21. How far off could a number be when you’re opening the safe? If the number was 69, would 68 work? Would 67 work? On the particular locks we had, the answer was yes for both, but 66 wouldn’t work. You could he off by two in either direction. That meant you only had to try one out of five numbers, so you could try zero, five, ten, fifteen, and so on. With twenty such numbers on a wheel of 100, that was 8000 possibilities instead of the 1,000,000 you would get if you had to try every single number.
   Now the question was, how long would it take me to try the 8000 combinations? Suppose I’ve got the first two numbers right of a combination I’m trying to get. Say the numbers are 69-32, but I don’t know it—I’ve got them as 70-30. Now I can try the twenty possible third numbers without having to set up the first two numbers each time. Now let’s suppose I have only the first number of the combination right. After trying the twenty numbers on the third disc, I move the second wheel only a little bit, and then do another twenty numbers on the third wheel.
   I practiced all the time on my own safe so I could do this process as fast as I could and not get lost in my mind as to which number I was pushing and mess up the first number. Like a guy who practices sleight of hand, I got it down to an absolute rhythm so I could try the 400 possible back numbers in less than half an hour. That meant I could open a safe in a maximum of eight hours—with an average time of four hours.
   There was another guy there at Los Alamos named Staley who was also interested in locks. We talked about it from time to time, but we weren’t getting anywhere much. After I got this idea how to open a safe in an average time of four hours, I wanted to show Staley how to do it, so I went into a guy’s office over in the computing department and asked, “Do you mind if I use your safe? I’d like to show Staley something.”
   Meanwhile some guys in the computing department came around and one of them said, “Hey, everybody; Feynman’s gonna show Staley how to open a safe, ha, ha, ha!” I wasn’t going to actually open the safe; I was just going to show Staley this way of quickly trying the back two numbers without losing your place and having to set up the first number again.
   I began. “Let’s suppose that the first number is forty, and we’re trying fifteen for the second number. We go back and forth, ten; back five more and forth, ten; and so on. Now we’ve tried all the possible third numbers. Now we try twenty for the second number: we go back and forth, ten; back five more and forth, ten; back five more and forth, CLICK!” My jaw dropped: the first and second numbers happened to be right!
   Nobody saw my expression because my back was towards them. Staley looked very surprised, but both of us caught on Very quickly as to what happened, so I pulled the top drawer out with a flourish and said, “And there you are!”
   Staley said, “I see what you mean; it’s a very good scheme”—and we walked out. Everybody was amazed. It was complete luck. Now I really had a reputation for opening safes.
   It took me about a year and a half to get that far (of course, I was working on the bomb, too!) but I figured that I had the safes beaten, in the sense that if there was a real difficulty—if somebody was lost, or dead, and nobody else knew the combination but the stuff in the filing cabinet was needed—I could open it. After reading what preposterous things the safecrackers claimed, I thought that was a rather respectable accomplishment.
   We had no entertainment there at Los Alamos, and we had to amuse ourselves somehow, so fiddling with the Mosler lock on my filing cabinet was one of my entertainments. One day I made an interesting observation: When the lock is opened and the drawer has been pulled out and the wheel is left on ten (which is what people do when they’ve opened their filing cabinet and are taking papers out of it), the bolt is still down. Now what does that mean, the bolt is still down? It means the bolt is in the slot made by the three discs, which are still properly lined up. Ahhhh!
   Now, if I turn the wheel away from ten a little bit, the bolt comes up; if I immediately go back to ten, the bolt goes back down again, because I haven’t yet disturbed the slot. If I keep going away from ten in steps of five, at some point the bolt won’t go back down when I go back to ten: the slot has just been disturbed. The number just before, which still let the bolt go down, is the last number of the combination!
   I realized that I could do the same thing to find the second number: As soon as I know the last number, I can turn the wheel around the other way and again, in lumps of five, push the second disc bit by bit until the bolt doesn’t go down. The number just before would be the second number.
   If I were very patient I would he able to pick up all three numbers that way, but the amount of work involved in picking up the first number of the combination by this elaborate scheme would be much more than just trying the twenty possible first numbers with the other two numbers that you already know, when the filing cabinet is closed.
   I practiced and I practiced until I could get the last two numbers off an open filing cabinet, hardly looking at the dial. Then, when I’d be in some guy’s office discussing some physics problem, I’d lean against his opened filing cabinet, and just like a guy who’s jiggling keys absent-mindedly while he’s talking, I’d just wobble the dial back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes I’d put my finger on the bolt so I wouldn’t have to look to see if it’s coming up. In this way I picked off the last two numbers of various filing cabinets. When I got back to my office I would write the two numbers down on a piece of paper that I kept inside the lock of my filing cabinet. I took the lock apart each time to get the paper—I thought that was a very safe place for them.
   After a while my reputation began to sail, because things like this would happen: Somebody would say, “Hey, Feynman! Christy’s out of town and we need a document from his safe—can you open it?”
   If it was a safe I knew I didn’t have the last two numbers of, I would simply say, “I’m sorry, but I can’t do it now; I’ve got this work that I have to do.” Otherwise, I would say, “Yeah, but I gotta get my tools.” I didn’t need any tools, but I’d go back to my office, open my filing cabinet, and look at my little piece of paper: “Christy—35, 60.” Then I’d get a screwdriver and go over to Christy’s office and close the door behind me. Obviously not everybody is supposed to be allowed to know how to do this!
   I’d he in there alone and I’d open the safe in a few minutes. All I had to do was try the first number at most twenty times, then sit around, reading a magazine or something, for fifteen or twenty minutes. There was no use trying to make it look too easy; somebody would figure out there was a trick to it! After a while I’d open the door and say, “It’s open.”
   People thought I was opening the safes from scratch. Now I could maintain the idea, which began with that accident with Staley, that I could open safes cold. Nobody figured out that I was picking the last two numbers off their safes, even though—perhaps because—I was doing it all the time, like a card sharp walking around all the time with a deck of cards,
   I often went to Oak Ridge to check up on the safety of the uranium plant. Everything was always in a hurry because it was wartime, and one time I had to go there on a weekend. It was Sunday, and we were in this fella’s office—a general, a head or a vice president of some company, a couple of other big muck-a-mucks, and me. We were gathered together to discuss a report that was in the fella’s safe—a secret safe—. when suddenly he realized that he didn’t know the combination. His secretary was the only one who knew it, so he called her home and it turned out she had gone on a picnic up in the hills.
   While all this was going on, I asked, “Do you mind if I fiddle with the safe?”
   “Ha, ha, ha—not at all!” So I went over to the safe and started to fool around.
   They began to discuss how they could get a car to try to find the secretary, and the guy was getting more and more embarrassed because he had all these people waiting and he was such a jackass he didn’t know how to open his own safe. Everybody was all tense and getting mad at him, when CLICK!—the safe opened.
   In 10 minutes I had opened the safe that contained all the secret documents about the plant. They were astonished. The safes were apparently not very safe. It was a terrible shock: All this “eyes only” stuff, top secret, locked in this wonderful secret safe, and this guy opens it in ten minutes!
   Of course I was able to open the safe because of my perpetual habit of taking the last two numbers off. While in Oak Ridge the month before, I was in the same office when the safe was open and I took the numbers off in an absentminded way—I was always practicing my obsession. Although I hadn’t written them down, I was able to vaguely remember what they were. First I tried 40-15, then 15-40, but neither of those worked. Then I tried 10-45 with all the first numbers, and it opened.
   A similar thing happened on another weekend when I was visiting Oak Ridge. I had written a report that had to be OKed by a colonel, and it was in his safe. Everybody else keeps documents in filing cabinets like the ones at Los Alamos, but he was a colonel, so he had a much fancier, two-door safe with big handles that pull four ѕ-inch-thick steel bolts from the frame. The great brass doors swung open and he took out my report to read.
   Not having had an opportunity to see any really good safes, I said to him, “Would you mind, while you’re reading my report, if I looked at your safe?”
   “Go right ahead,” he said, convinced that there was nothing I could do. I looked at the back of one of the solid brass doors, and I discovered that the combination wheel was connected to a little lock that looked exactly the same as the little unit that was on my filing cabinet at Los Alamos. Same company, same little bolt, except that when the bolt came down, the big handles on the safe could then move some rods sideways, and with a hunch of levers you could pull back all those ѕ-inch steel rods. The whole lever system, it appeared, depends on the same little bolt that locks filing cabinets.
   Just for the sake of professional perfection, to make sure it was the same, I took the two numbers off the same way I did with the filing cabinet safes.
   Meanwhile, he was reading the report. When he’d finished he said, “All right, it’s fine.” He put the report in the safe, grabbed the big handles, and swung the great brass doors together. It sounds so good when they close, but I know it’s all psychological, because it’s nothing but the same damn lock.
   I couldn’t help but needle him a little bit (I always had a thing about military guys, in such wonderful uniforms) so I said, “The way you close that safe, I get the idea that you think things are safe in there.”
   “Of course.”
   “The only reason you think they’re safe in there is because civilians call it a ‘safe.’” (I put the word “civilians” in there to make it sound as if he’d been had by civilians.)
   He got very angry. “What do you mean—it’s not safe?”
   “A good safecracker could open it in thirty minutes.”
   “Can you open it in thirty minutes?”
   “I said a good safecracker. It would take me about forty-five.”
   “Well!” he said. “My wife is waiting at home for me with supper, but I’m gonna stay here and watch you, and you’re gonna sit down there and work on that damn thing for forty-five minutes and not open it!” He sat down in his big leather chair, put his feet up on his desk, and read.
   With complete confidence I picked up a chair, carried it over to the safe and sat down in front of it. I began to turn the wheel at random, just to make some action.
   After about five minutes, which is quite a long time when you’re just sitting and waiting, he lost some patience: “Well, are you making any progress?”
   “With a thing like this, you either open it or you don’t.”
   I figured one or two more minutes would be about time, so I began to work in earnest and two minutes later, CLINK—it opened.
   The colonel’s jaw dropped and his eyes bugged out.
   “Colonel,” I said, in a serious tone, “let me tell you something about these locks: When the door to the safe or the top drawer of the filing cabinet is left open, it’s very easy for someone to get the combination. That’s what I did while you were reading my report, just to demonstrate the danger. You should insist that everybody keep their filing cabinet drawers locked while they’re working, because when they’re open, they’re very, very vulnerable.”
   “Yeah! I see what you mean! That’s very interesting!” We were on the same side after that.
   The next time I went to Oak Ridge, all the secretaries and people who knew who I was were telling me, “Don’t come through here! Don’t come through here!”
   The colonel had sent a note around to everyone in the plant which said, “During his last visit, was Mr. Feynman at any time in your office, near your office, or walking through your office?” Some people answered yes; others said no. The ones who said yes got another note: “Please change the combination of your safe.”
   That was his solution: I was the danger. So they all had to change their combinations on account of me. It’s a pain in the neck to change a combination and remember the new one, so they were all mad at me and didn’t want me to come near them: they might have to change their combination once again. Of course, their filing cabinets were still left open while they were working!
   A library at Los Alamos held all of the documents we had ever worked on: It was a solid, concrete room with a big, beautiful door which had a metal wheel that turns—like a safe-deposit vault. During the war I had tried to look at it closely. I knew the girl who was the librarian, and I begged her to let me play with it a little bit. I was fascinated by it: it was the biggest lock I ever saw! I discovered that I could never use my method of picking off the last two numbers to get in. In fact, while turning the knob while the door was open, I made the lock close, so it was sticking out, and they couldn’t close the door again until the girl came and opened the lock again. That was the end of my fiddling around with that lock. I didn’t have time to figure out how it worked; it was much beyond my capacity.
   During the summer after the war I had some documents to write and work to finish up, so I went back to Los Alamos from Cornell, where I had taught during the year. In the middle of my work I had to refer to a document that I had written before but couldn’t remember, and it was down in the library.
   I went down to get the document, and there was a soldier walking back and forth, with a gun. It was a Saturday, and after the war the library was closed on Saturdays.
   Then I remembered what a good friend of mine, Frederic de Hoffman, had done. He was in the Declassification Section. After the war the army was thinking of declassifying some documents, and he had to go back and forth to the library so much—look at this document, look at that document, check this, check that—that he was going nuts! So he had a copy of every document—all the secrets to the atomic bomb—in nine filing cabinets in his office.
   I went down to his office, and the lights were on. It looked as if whoever was there-perhaps his secretary—had just stepped out for a few minutes, so I waited. While 1 was waiting I started to fiddle around with the combination wheel on one of the filing cabinets. (By the way, I didn’t have the last two numbers for de Hoffman’s safes; they were put in after the war, after I had left.)
   I started to play with one of the combination wheels and began to think about the safecracker books. I thought to myself, “I’ve never been much impressed by the tricks described in those books, so I’ve never tried them, but let’s see if we can open de Hoffman’s safe by following the book.”
   First trick, the secretary: she’s afraid she’s going to forget the combination, so she writes it down somewhere. I started to look in some of the places mentioned in the book. The desk drawer was locked, but it was an ordinary lock like Leo Lavatelli taught me how to open—ping! I look along the edge: nothing.
   Then I looked through the secretary’s papers. I found a sheet of paper that all the secretaries had, with the Greek letters carefully made—so they could recognize them in mathematical formulas—and named. And there, carelessly written along the top of the paper, was pi = 3. 14159. Now, that’s six digits, and why does a secretary have to know the numerical value of pi? It was obvious; there was no other reason!
   I went over to the filing cabinets and tried the first one: 31-41-59. It didn’t open. Then I tried 59-41-31. That didn’t work either. Then 95-14-13. Backwards, forwards, upside down, turn it this way, turn it that—nothing!
   I closed the desk drawer and started to walk out the door, when I thought of the safecracker books again: Next, try the psychology method. I said to myself, “Freddy de Hoffman is just the kind of guy to use a mathematical constant for a safe combination.”
   I went back to the first filing cabinet and tried 27-18-28—CLICK! It opened! (The mathematical constant second in importance to pi is the base of natural logarithms, e:2.71828 …) There were nine filing cabinets, and I had opened the first one, but the document I wanted was in another one-they were in alphabetical order by author. I tried the second filing cabinet: 27-18-28–CLICK! It opened with the same combination. I thought, “This is wonderful! I’ve opened the secrets to the atomic bomb, but if I’m ever going to tell this story, I’ve got to make sure that all the combinations are really the same!” Some of the filing cabinets were in the next room, so I tried 27-18-28 on one of them, and it opened. Now I’d opened three safes—all the same.
   I thought to myself, “Now I could write a safecracker book that would beat every one, because at the beginning I would tell how I opened safes whose contents were bigger and more valuable than what any safecracker anywhere had opened—except for a life, of course—but compared to the furs or the gold bullion, I have them all beat: I opened the safes which contained all the secrets to the atomic bomb: the schedules for the production of the plutonium, the purification procedures, how much material is needed, how the bomb works, how the neutrons are generated, what the design is, the dimensions—the entire information that was known at Los Alamos: the whole shmeer! ”
   I went back to the second filing cabinet and took out the document I wanted. Then I took a red grease pencil and a piece of yellow paper that was lying around in the office and wrote, “I borrowed document no. LA4312—Feynman the safecracker.” I put the note on top of the papers in the filing cabinet and closed it.
   Then I went to the first one I had opened and wrote another note: “This one was no harder to open than the other one-Wise Guy” and shut the cabinet.
   Then in the other cabinet, in the other room, I wrote, “When the combinations are all the same, one is no harder to open than another—Same Guy” and I shut that one. I went back to my office and wrote my report.
   That evening I went to the cafeteria and ate supper. There was Freddy de Hoffman. He said he was going over to his office to work, so just for fun I went with him.
   He started to work, and soon he went into the other room to open one of the filing cabinets in there-something I hadn’t counted on—and he happened to open the filing cabinet I had put the third note in, first. He opened the drawer, and he saw this foreign object in there—this bright yellow paper with something scrawled on it in bright red crayon.
   I had read in books that when somebody is afraid, his face gets sallow, but I had never seen it before. Well, it’s absolutely true. His face turned a gray, yellow green—it was really frightening to see. He picked up the paper, and his hand was shaking. “L-l-look at this!” he said, trembling.
   The note said, “When the combinations are all the same, one is no harder to open than another—Same Guy.”
   “What does it mean?” I said.
   “All the c-c-combinations of my safes are the s-s-same!” he stammered.
   “That ain’t such a good idea.”
   “I-I know that n-now!” he said, completely shaken.
   Another effect of the blood draining from the face must be that the brain doesn’t work right. “He signed who it was! He signed who it was!” he said.
   “What?” (I hadn’t put my name on that one.)
   “Yes,” he said, “it’s the same guy who’s been trying to get into Building Omega!”
   All during the war, and even after, there were these perpetual rumors: “Somebody’s been trying to get into Building Omega!” You see, during the war they were doing experiments for the bomb in which they wanted to get enough material together for the chain reaction to just get started. They would drop one piece of material through another, and when it went through, the reaction would start and they’d measure how many neutrons they got. The piece would fall through so fast that nothing should build up and explode. Enough of a reaction would begin, however, so they could tell that things were really starting correctly, that the rates were right, and everything was going according to prediction—a very dangerous experiment!
   Naturally, they were not doing this experiment in the middle of Los Alamos, but off several miles, in a canyon several mesas over, all isolated. This Building Omega had its own fence around it with guard towers. In the middle of the night when everything’s quiet, some rabbit comes out of the brush and smashes against the fence and makes a noise. The guard shoots. The lieutenant in charge comes around. What’s the guard going to say—that it was only a rabbit? No. “Somebody’s been trying to get into Building Omega and I scared him off!”
   So de Hoffman was pale and shaking, and he didn’t realize there was a flaw in his logic: it was not clear that the same guy who’d been trying to get into Building Omega was the same guy who was standing next to him.
   He asked me what to do.
   “Well, see if any documents are missing.”
   “It looks all right,” he said. “I don’t see any missing.”
   I tried to steer him to the filing cabinet I took my document out of. “Well, uh, if all the combinations are the same, perhaps he’s taken something from another drawer.”
   “Right!” he said, and he went back into his office and opened the first filing cabinet and found the second note I wrote: “This one was no harder than the other one—Wise Guy.”
   By that time it didn’t make any difference whether it was “Same Guy” or “Wise Guy”: It was completely clear to him that it was the guy who was trying to get into Building Omega. So to convince him to open the filing cabinet with my first note in it was particularly difficult, and I don’t remember how I talked him into it.
   He started to open it, so I began to walk down the hall, because I was a little bit afraid that when he found out who did it to him, I was going to get my throat cut!
   Sure enough, he came running down the hall after me, but instead of being angry, he practically put his arms around me because he was so completely relieved that this terrible burden of the atomic secrets being stolen was only me doing mischief.
   A few days later de Hoffman told me that he needed something from Kerst’s safe. Donald Kerst had gone back to Illinois and was hard to reach. “If you can open all my safes using the psychological method,” de Hoffman said (I had told him how I did it), “maybe you could open Kerst’s safe that way.”
   By now the story had gotten around, so several people came to watch this fantastic process where I was going to open Kerst’s safe—cold. There was no need for me to be alone. I didn’t have the last two numbers to Kerst’s safe, and to use the psychology method I needed people around who knew Kerst.
   We all went over to Kerst’s office and I checked the drawers for clues; there was nothing. Then I asked them, “What kind of a combination would Kerst use—a mathematical constant?”
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   “Oh, no!” de Hoffman said. “Kerst would do something very simple.”
   I tried 10-20-30, 20-40-60, 60-40-20, 30-20-10. Nothing.
   Then I said, “Do you think he would use a date?”
   “Yeah!” they said. “He’s just the kind of guy to use a date.”
   We tried various dates: 8-6-45, when the bomb went off; 86-19-45; this date; that date; when the project started. Nothing worked.
   By this time most of the people had drifted off. They didn’t have the patience to watch me do this, but the only way to solve such a thing is patience!
   Then I decided to try everything from around 1900 until now. That sounds like a lot, but it’s not: the first number is a month, one through twelve, and I can try that using only three numbers: ten, five, and zero. The second number is a day, from one to thirty-one, which I can try with six numbers. The third number is the year, which was only forty-seven numbers at that time, which I could try with nine numbers. So the 8000 combinations had been reduced to 162, something I could try in fifteen or twenty minutes.
   Unfortunately I started with the high end of the numbers for the months, because when I finally opened it, the combination was 0-5-35.
   I turned to de Hoffman. “What happened to Kerst around January 5, 1935?”
   “His daughter was born in 1936,” de Hoffman said. “It must be her birthday.”
   Now I had opened two safes cold. I was getting good. Now I was professional.
   That same summer after the war, the guy from the property section was trying to take back some of the things the government had bought, to sell again as surplus. One of the things was a Captain’s safe. We all knew about this safe. The Captain, when he arrived during the war, decided that the filing cabinets weren’t safe enough for the secrets he was going to get, so he had to have a special safe.
   The Captain’s office was on the second floor of one of the flimsy wooden buildings that we all had our offices in, and the safe he ordered was a heavy steel safe. The workmen had to put down platforms of wood and use special jacks to get it up the steps. Since there wasn’t much amusement, we all watched this big safe being moved up to his office with great effort, and we all made jokes about what kind of secrets he was going to keep in there. Some fella said we oughta put our stuff in his safe, and let him put his stuff in ours. So everyone knew about this safe.
   The property section man wanted it for surplus, but first it had to be emptied, and the only people who knew the combination were the Captain, who was in Bikini, and Alvarez, who’d forgotten it. The man asked me to open it.
   I went up to his old office and said to the secretary, “Why don’t you phone the Captain and ask him the combination?”
   “I don’t want to bother him,” she said.
   “Well, you’re gonna bother me for maybe eight hours. I won’t do it unless you make an attempt to call him.”
   “OK, OK!” she said. She picked up the telephone and I went into the other room to look at the safe. There it was, that huge, steel safe, and its doors were wide open.
   I went back to the secretary. “It’s open.”
   “Marvelous!” she said, as she put down the phone.
   “No,” I said, “it was already open.”
   “Oh! I guess the property section was able to open it after all.”
   I went down to the man in the property section. “I went up to the safe and it was already open.”
   “Oh, yeah,” he said; “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I sent our regular locksmith up there to drill it, but before he drilled it he tried to open it, and he opened it.”
   So! First information: Los Alamos now has a regular locksmith. Second information: This man knows how to drill safes, something I know nothing about. Third information: He can open a safe cold—in a few minutes. This is a real professional, a real source of information. This guy I have to meet.
   I found out he was a locksmith they had hired after the war (when they weren’t as concerned about security) to take care of such things. It turned out that he didn’t have enough work to do opening safes, so he also repaired the Marchant calculators we had used. During the war I repaired those things all the time—so I had a way to meet him.
   Now I have never been surreptitious or tricky about meeting somebody; I just go right up and introduce myself. But in this case it was so important to meet this man, and I knew that before he would tell me any of his secrets on how to open safes, I would have to prove myself.
   I found out where his room was—in the basement of the theoretical physics section, where I worked—and I knew he worked in the evening, when the machines weren’t being used. So, at first I would walk past his door on my way to my office in the evening. That’s all; I’d just walk past.
   A few nights later, just a “Hi.” After a while, when he saw it was the same guy walking past, he’d say “Hi,” or “Good evening.”
   A few weeks of this slow process and I see he’s working on the Marchant calculators. I say nothing about them; it isn’t time yet.
   We gradually say a little more: “Hi! I see you’re working pretty hard!”
   “Yeah, pretty hard”—that kind of stuff.
   Finally, a breakthrough: he invites me for soup. It’s going very good now. Every evening we have soup together. Now I begin to talk a little bit about the adding machines, and he tells me he has a problem. He’s been trying to put a succession of spring-loaded wheels back onto a shaft, and he doesn’t have the right tool, or something; he’s been working on it for a week. I tell him that I used to work on those machines during the war, and “I’ll tell you what: you just leave the machine out tonight, and I’ll have a look at it tomorrow.”
   “OK,” he says, because he’s desperate.
   The next day I looked at the damn thing and tried to load it by holding all the wheels in my hand. It kept snapping back. I thought to myself, “If he’s been trying the same thing for a week, and I’m trying it and can’t do it, it ain’t the way to do it!” I stopped and looked at it very carefully, and I noticed that each wheel had a little hole—just a little hole. Then it dawned on me: I sprung the first one; then I put a piece of wire through the little hole. Then I sprung the second one and put the wire through it. Then the next one, the next one—like putting beads on a string—and I strung the whole thing the first time I tried it, got it all in line, pulled the wire out, and everything was OK.
   That night I showed him the little hole and how I did it, and from then on we talked a lot about machines; we got to be good friends. Now, in his office there were a lot of little cubbyholes that contained locks half taken apart, and pieces from safes, too. Oh, they were beautiful! But I still didn’t say a word about locks and safes.
   Finally, I figured the day was coming, so I decided to put out a little bit of bait about safes: I’d tell him the only thing worth a damn that I knew about them—that you can take the last two numbers off while it’s open. “Hey!” I said, looking over at the cubbyholes. “I see you’re working on Mosler safes.”
   “Yeah.”
   “You know, these locks are weak. If they’re open, you can take the last two numbers off..
   “You can?” he said, finally showing some interest.
   “Yeah.”
   “Show me how,” he said. I showed him how to do it, and he turned to me. “What’s your name?” All this time we had never exchanged names.
   “Dick Feynman,” I said.
   “God! You’re Feynman!” he said in awe. “The great safecracker! I’ve heard about you; I’ve wanted to meet you for so long! I want to learn how to crack a safe from you.”
   “What do you mean? You know how to open safes cold.”
   “I don’t.”
   “Listen, I heard about the Captain’s safe, and I’ve been working pretty hard all this time because I wanted to meet you. And you tell me you don’t know how to open a safe cold.”
   “That’s right.”
   “Well you must know how to drill a safe.”
   “I don’t know how to do that either.”
   “WHAT?” I exclaimed. “The guy in the property section said you picked up your tools and went up to drill the Captain’s safe.”
   “Suppose you had a job as a locksmith,” he said, “and a guy comes down and asks you to drill a safe. What would you do?”
   “Well,” I replied, “I’d make a fancy thing of putting my tools together, pick them up and take them to the safe. Then I’d put my drill up against the safe somewhere at random and I’d go vvvvvvvvvvv, so I’d save my job.”
   “That’s exactly what I was going to do.”
   “But you opened it! You must know how to crack safes.”
   “Oh, yeah. I knew that the locks come from the factory set at 25-0-25 or 50-25-50, so I thought, ‘Who knows; maybe the guy didn’t bother to change the combination,’ and the second one worked.”
   So I did learn something from him—that he cracked safes by the same miraculous methods that I did. But even funnier was that this big shot Captain had to have a super, super safe, and had people go to all that trouble to hoist the thing up into his office, and he didn’t even bother to set the combination.
   I went from office to office in my building, trying those two factory combinations, and I opened about one safe in five.
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   After the war the army was scraping the bottom of the barrel to get the guys for the occupation forces in Germany. Up until then the army deferred people for some reason other than physical first (I was deferred because I was working on the bomb), but now they reversed that and gave everybody a physical first.
   That summer I was working for Hans Bethe at General Electric in Schenectady, New York, and I remember that I had to go some distance-I think it was to Albany—to take the physical.
   I get to the draft place, and I’m handed a lot of forms to fill out, and then I start going around to all these different booths. They check your vision at one, your hearing at another, they take your blood sample at another, and so forth.
   Anyway, finally you come to booth number thirteen: psychiatrist. There you wait, sitting on one of the benches, and while I’m waiting I can see what is happening. There are three desks, with a psychiatrist behind each one, and the “culprit” sits across from the psychiatrist in his BVDs and answers various questions.
   At that time there were a lot of movies about psychiatrists. For example, there was Spellbound, in which a woman who used to be a great piano player has her hands stuck in some awkward position and she can’t move them, and her family calls in a psychiatrist to try to help her, and the psychiatrist goes upstairs into a room with her, and you see the door close behind them, and downstairs the family is discussing what’s going to happen, and then she comes out of the room, hands still stuck in the horrible position, walks dramatically down the stairs over to the piano and sits down, lifts her hands over the keyboard, and suddenly—dum diddle dum diddle dum, dum, dum–she can play again. Well, I can’t stand this kind of baloney, and I had decided that psychiatrists are fakers, and I’ll have nothing to do with them. So that was the mood I was in when it was my turn to talk to the psychiatrist.
   I sit down at the desk, and the psychiatrist starts looking through my papers. “Hello, Dick!” he says in a cheerful voice. “Where do you work?”
   I’m thinking, “Who does he think he is, calling me by my first name?” and I say coldly, “Schenectady.”
   “Who do you work for, Dick?” says the psychiatrist, smiling again.
   “General Electric.”
   “Do you like your work, Dick?” he says, with that same big smile on his face.
   “So-so.” I just wasn’t going to have anything to do with him.
   Three nice questions, and then the fourth one is completely different. “Do you think people talk about you?” he asks, in a low, serious tone.
   I light up and say, “Sure! When I go home, my mother often tells me how she was telling her friends about me.” He isn’t listening to the explanation; instead, he’s writing something down on my paper.
   Then again, in a low, serious tone, he says, “Do you think people stare at you?”
   I’m all ready to say no, when he says, “For instance, do you think any of the boys waiting on the benches are staring at you now?”
   While I had been waiting to talk to the psychiatrist, I had noticed there were about twelve guys on the benches waiting for the three psychiatrists, and they’ve got nothing else to look at, so I divide twelve by three—that makes four each—but I’m conservative, so I say, “Yeah, maybe two of them are looking at us.”
   He says, “Well just turn around and look”—and he’s not even bothering to look himself!
   So I turn around, and sure enough, two guys are looking. So I point to them and I say, “Yeah—there’s that guy, and that guy over there looking at us.” Of course, when I’m turned around and pointing like that, other guys start to look at us, so I say, “Now him, and those two over there-and now the whole bunch.” He still doesn’t look up to check. He’s busy writing more things on my paper.
   Then he says, “Do you ever hear voices in your head?”
   “Very rarely,” and I’m about to describe the two occasions on which it happened when he says, “Do you talk to yourself?”
   “Yeah, sometimes when I’m shaving, or thinking; once in a while.” He’s writing down more stuff.
   “I see you have a deceased wife—do you talk to her?”
   This question really annoyed me, but I contained myself and said, “Sometimes, when I go up on a mountain and I’m thinking about her.”
   More writing. Then he asks, “Is anyone in your family in a mental institution?”
   “Yeah, I have an aunt in an insane asylum.”
   “Why do you call it an insane asylum?” he says, resentfully. “Why don’t you call it a mental institution?”
   “I thought it was the same thing.”
   “Just what do you think insanity is?” he says, angrily.
   “It’s a strange and peculiar disease in human beings,” I say honestly.
   “There’s nothing any more strange or peculiar about it than appendicitis!” he retorts.
   “I don’t think so. In appendicitis we understand the causes better, and something about the mechanism of it, whereas with insanity it’s much more complicated and mysterious.” I won’t go through the whole debate; the point is that I meant insanity is physiologically peculiar, and he thought I meant it was socially peculiar.
   Up until this time, although I had been unfriendly to the psychiatrist, I had nevertheless been honest in everything I said. But when he asked me to put out my hands, I couldn’t resist pulling a trick a guy in the “bloodsucking line” had told me about. I figured nobody was ever going to get a chance to do this, and as long as I was halfway under water, I would do it. So I put out my hands with one palm up and the other one down.
   The psychiatrist doesn’t notice. He says, “Turn them over.”
   I turn them over. The one that was up goes down, and the one that was down goes up, and he still doesn’t notice, because he’s always looking very closely at one hand to see if it is shaking. So the trick had no effect.
   Finally, at the end of all these questions, he becomes friendly again. He lights up and says, “I see you have a Ph.D., Dick. Where did you study?”
   “MIT and Princeton. And where did you study!”
   “Yale and London. And what did you study, Dick?”
   “Physics. And what did you study?”
   “Medicine.”
   “And this is medicine?”
   “Well, yes. What do you think it is? You go and sit down over there and wait a few minutes!”
   So I sit on the bench again, and one of the other guys waiting sidles up to me and says, “Gee! You were in there twenty-five minutes! The other guys were in there only five minutes!”
   “Yeah.”
   “Hey,” he says. “You wanna know how to fool the psychiatrist? All you have to do is pick your nails, like this.”
   “Then why don’t you pick your nails like that?”
   “Oh,” he says, “I wanna get in the army!”
   “You wanna fool the psychiatrist?” I say. “You just tell him that!”
   After a while I was called over to a different desk to see another psychiatrist. While the first psychiatrist had been rather young and innocent-looking, this one was gray-haired and distinguished-looking—obviously the superior psychiatrist. I figure all of this is now going to get straightened out, but no matter what happens, I’m not going to become friendly.
   The new psychiatrist looks at my papers, puts a big smile on his face, and says, “Hello, Dick. I see you worked at Los Alamos during the war.”
   “Yeah.”
   “There used to be a boys’ school there, didn’t there?”
   “That’s right.”
   “Were there a lot of buildings in the school?”
   “Only a few.”
   Three questions—same technique-and the next question is completely different. “You said you hear voices in your head. Describe that, please.”
   “It happens very rarely, when I’ve been paying attention to a person with a foreign accent. As I’m falling asleep I can hear his voice very clearly. The first time it happened was while I was a student at MIT. I could hear old Professor Vallarta say, ‘Dee-a dee-a electric field-a.’ And the other time was in Chicago during the war, when Professor Teller was explaining to me how the bomb worked. Since I’m interested in all kinds of phenomena, I wondered how I could hear these voices with accents so precisely, when I couldn’t imitate them that well … Doesn’t everybody have something like that happen once in a while?”
   The psychiatrist put his hand over his face, and I could see through his fingers a little smile (he wouldn’t answer the question).
   Then the psychiatrist checked into something else. “You said that you talk to your deceased wife. What do you say to her?”
   I got angry. I figure it’s none of his damn business, and I say, “I tell her I love her, if it’s all right with you!”
   After some more bitter exchanges he says, “Do you believe in the supernormal?”
   I say, “I don’t know what the ‘supernormal’ is.”
   “What? You, a Ph.D. in physics, don’t know what the supernormal is?”
   “That’s right.”
   “It’s what Sir Oliver Lodge and his school believe in.”
   That’s not much of a clue, but I knew it. “You mean the supernatural.”
   “You can call it that if you want.”
   “All right, I will.”
   “Do you believe in mental telepathy?”
   “No. Do you?”
   “Well, I’m keeping an open mind.”
   “What? You, a psychiatrist, keeping an open mind? Ha!” It went on like this for quite a while.
   Then at some point near the end he says, “How much do you value life?”
   “Sixty-four.”
   “Why did you say ‘sixty-four’?”
   “How are you supposed to measure the value of life?”
   “No! I mean, why did you say ‘sixty-four,’ and not ‘seventy-three,’ for instance?”
   “If I had said ‘seventy-three,’ you would have asked me the same question!”
   The psychiatrist finished with three friendly questions, just as the other psychiatrist had done, handed me my papers, and I went off to the next booth.
   While I’m waiting in the line, I look at the paper which has the summary of all the tests I’ve taken so far. And just for the hell of it I show my paper to the guy next to me, and I ask him in a rather stupid-sounding voice, “Hey! What did you get in ‘Psychiatric’? Oh! You got an ‘N.’ I got an ‘N’ in everything else, but I got a ‘D’ in ‘Psychiatric.’ What does that mean?” I knew what it meant: “N” is normal, “D” is deficient.
   The guy pats me on the shoulder and says, “Buddy, it’s perfectly all right. It doesn’t mean anything. Don’t worry about it!” Then he walks way over to the other corner of the room, frightened: It’s a lunatic!
   I started looking at the papers the psychiatrists had written, and it looked pretty serious! The first guy wrote:
   Thinks people talk about him.
   Thinks people stare at him.
   Auditory hypnogogic hallucinations.
   Talks to self.
   Talks to deceased wife.
   Maternal aunt in mental institution.
   Very peculiar stare. (I knew what that was—that was when I said, “And this is medicine?”)
   The second psychiatrist was obviously more important, because his scribble was harder to read. His notes said things like “auditory hypnogogic hallucinations confirmed.” (“Hypnogogic” means you get them while you’re falling asleep.)
   He wrote a lot of other technical-sounding notes, and I looked them over, and they looked pretty bad. I figured I’d have to get all of this straightened out with the army somehow.
   At the end of the whole physical examination there’s an army officer who decides whether you’re in or you’re out. For instance, if there’s something the matter with your hearing, he has to decide if it’s serious enough to keep you out of the army. And because the army was scraping the bottom of the barrel for new recruits, this officer wasn’t going to take anything from anybody. He was tough as nails. For instance, the fellow ahead of me had two bones sticking out from the back of his neck—some kind of displaced vertebra, or something—and this army officer had to get up from his desk and feel them—he had to make sure they were real!
   I figure this is the place I’ll get this whole misunderstanding straightened out. When it’s my turn, I hand my papers to the officer, and I’m ready to explain everything, but the officer doesn’t look up. He sees the “D” next to “Psychiatric,” immediately reaches for the rejection stamp, doesn’t ask me any questions, doesn’t say anything; he just stamps my papers “REJECTED,” and hands me my 4-F paper, still looking at his desk.
   So I went out and got on the bus for Schenectady, and while I was riding on the bus I thought about the crazy thing that had happened, and I started to laugh—out loud—and I said to myself, “My God! If they saw me now, they would be sure!”
   When I finally got back to Schenectady I went in to see Hans Bethe. He was sitting behind his desk, and he said to me in a joking voice, “Well, Dick, did you pass?”
   I made a long face and shook my head slowly. “No.”
   Then he suddenly felt terrible, thinking that they had discovered some serious medical problem with me, so he said in a concerned voice, “What’s the matter, Dick?”
   I touched my finger to my forehead.
   He said, “No!”
   “Yes!”
   He cried, “No-o-o-o-o-o-o!!!” and he laughed so hard that the roof of the General Electric Company nearly came off.
   I told the story to many other people, and everybody laughed, with a few exceptions.
   When I got back to New York, my father, mother, and sister called for me at the airport, and on the way home in the car I told them all the story. At the end of it my mother said, “Well, what should we do, Mel?”
   My father said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Lucille. It’s absurd!”
   So that was that, but my sister told me later that when we got home and they were alone, my father said, “Now, Lucille, you shouldn’t have said anything in front of him. Now what should we do?”
   By that time my mother had sobered up, and she said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Mel!”
   One other person was bothered by the story. It was at a Physical Society meeting dinner, and Professor Slater, my old professor at MIT, said, “Hey, Feynman! Tell us that story about the draft I heard.”
   I told the whole story to all these physicists—I didn’t know any of them except Slater—and they were all laughing throughout, but at the end one guy said, “Well, maybe the psychiatrist had something in mind.”
   I said resolutely, “And what profession are you, sir?” Of course, that was a dumb question, because we were all physicists at a professional meeting. But I was surprised that a physicist would say something like that.
   He said, “Well, uh, I’m really not supposed to be here, but I came as the guest of my brother, who’s a physicist. I’m a psychiatrist.” I smoked him right out!
   After a while I began to worry. Here’s a guy who’s been deferred all during the war because he’s working on the bomb, and the draft board gets letters saying he’s important, and now he gets a “D” in “Psychiatric”—it turns out he’s a nut! Obviously he isn’t a nut; he’s just trying to make us believe he’s a nut—we’ll get him!
   The situation didn’t look good to me, so I had to find a way out. After a few days, I figured out a solution. I wrote a letter to the draft board that went something like this:


   Dear Sirs:
   I do not think I should be drafted because I am teaching science students, and it is partly in the strength of our future scientists that the national welfare lies. Nevertheless, you may decide that I should be deferred because of the result of my medical report, namely, that I am psychiatrically unfit. I feel that no weight whatsoever should be attached to this report because I consider it to be a gross error.
   I am calling this error to your attention because I am insane enough not to wish to take advantage of it.

Sincerely,
R. P Feynman

   Result: “Deferred. 4F Medical Reasons.”
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Part 4.
From Cornell to Caltech, With a Touch of Brazil

The Dignified Professor

   I don’t believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere I can say to myself, “At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something; I’m making some contribution”—it’s just psychological.
   When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.
   Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!
   In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you’ve got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it’s the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer periods of time when not much is coming to you. You’re not getting any ideas, and if you’re doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can’t even say “I’m teaching my class.”
   If you’re teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn’t do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? Are there any new problems associated with them? Are there any new thoughts you can make about them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can’t think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you’re rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.
   The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things.
   So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don’t have to teach. Never.
   But once I was offered such a position.
   During the war, when I was still in Los Alamos, Hans Bethe got me this job at Cornell, for $3700 a year. I got an offer from some other place for more, but I like Bethe, and I had decided to go to Cornell and wasn’t worried about the money. But Bethe was always watching out for me, and when he found out that others were offering more, he got Cornell to give me a raise to $4000 even before I started.
   Cornell told me that I would be teaching a course in mathematical methods of physics, and they told me what day I should come—November 6, I think, but it sounds funny that it could be so late in the year. I took the train from Los Alamos to Ithaca, and spent most of my time writing final reports for the Manhattan Project. I still remember that it was on the night train from Buffalo to Ithaca that I began to work on my course.
   You have to understand the pressures at Los Alamos. You did everything as fast as you could; everybody worked very, very hard; and everything was finished at the last minute. So, working out my course on the train a day or two before the first lecture seemed natural to me.
   Mathematical methods of physics was an ideal course for me to teach. It was what I had done during the war—apply mathematics to physics. I knew which methods were really useful, and which were not. I had lots of experience by that time, working so hard for four years using mathematical tricks. So I laid out the different subjects in mathematics and how to deal with them, and I still have the papers—the notes I made on the train.
   I got off the train in Ithaca, carrying my heavy suitcase on my shoulder, as usual. A guy called out, “Want a taxi, sir?”
   I had never wanted to take a taxi: I was always a young fella, short on money, wanting to be my own man. But I thought to myself, “I’m a professor–I must be dignified.” So I took my suitcase down from my shoulder and carried it in my hand, and said, “Yes.”
   “Where to?”
   “The hotel.”
   “Which hotel?”
   “One of the hotels you’ve got in Ithaca.”
   “Have you got a reservation?”
   “No.”
   “It’s not so easy to get a room.”
   “We’ll just go from one hotel to another. Stay and wait for me.”
   I try the Hotel Ithaca: no room. We go over to the Traveller’s Hotel: they don’t have any room either. I say to the taxi guy, “No use driving around town with me; it’s gonna cost a lot of money, I’ll walk from hotel to hotel.” I leave my suitcase in the Traveller’s Hotel and I start to wander around, looking for a room. That shows you how much preparation I had, a new professor.
   I found some other guy wandering around looking for a room too. It turned out that the hotel room situation was utterly impossible. After a while we wandered up some sort of a hill, and gradually realized we were coming near the campus of the university.
   We saw something that looked like a rooming house, with an open window, and you could see bunk beds in there. By this time it was night, so we decided to ask if we could sleep there. The door was open, but there was nobody in the whole place. We walked up into one of the rooms, and the other guy said, “Come on, let’s just sleep here!”
   I didn’t think that was so good. It seemed like stealing to me. Somebody had made the beds; they might come home and find us sleeping in their beds, and we’d get into trouble.
   So we go out. We walk a little further, and we see, under a streetlight, an enormous mass of leaves that had been collected—it was autumn—from the lawns. I say, “Hey! We could crawl in these leaves and sleep here!” I tried it; they were rather soft, I was tired of walking around, it would have been perfectly all right. But I didn’t want to get into trouble right away. Back at Los Alamos people had teased me (when I played drums and so on) about what kind of “professor” Cornell was going to get. They said I’d get a reputation right off by doing something silly, so I was trying to be a little dignified. I reluctantly gave up the idea of sleeping in the pile of leaves.
   We wandered around a little more, and came to a big building, some important building of the campus. We went in, and there were two couches in the hallway. The other guy said, “I’m sleeping here!” and collapsed onto the couch.
   I didn’t want to get into trouble, so I found a janitor down in the basement and asked him whether I could sleep on the couch, and he said “Sure.”
   The next morning I woke up, found a place to eat breakfast, and started rushing around as fast as I could to find out when my first class was going to be. I ran into the physics department: “What time is my first class? Did I miss it?”
   The guy said, “You have nothing to worry about. Classes don’t start for eight days.”
   That was a shock to me! The first thing I said was, “Well, why did you tell me to be here a week ahead?”
   “I thought you’d like to come and get acquainted, find a place to stay and settle down before you begin your classes.”
   I was back to civilization, and I didn’t know what it was!
   Professor Gibbs sent me to the Student Union to find a place to stay. It’s a big place, with lots of students milling around. I go up to a big desk that says HOUSING and I say, “I’m new, and I’m looking for a room.”
   The guy says, “Buddy, the housing situation in Ithaca is tough. In fact, it’s so tough that, believe it or not, a professor had to sleep on a couch in this lobby last night!”
   I look around, and it’s the same lobby! I turn to him and I say, “Well, I’m that professor, and the professor doesn’t want to do it again!”
   My early days at Cornell as a new professor were interesting and sometimes amusing. A few days after I got there, professor Gibbs came into my office and explained to me that ordinarily we don’t accept students this late in the term, but in a few cases, when the applicant is very, very good, we can accept him. He handed me an application and asked me to look it over.
   He comes back: “Well, what do you think?”
   “I think he’s first rate, and I think we ought to accept him. I think we’re lucky to get him here.”
   “Yes, but did you look at his picture?”
   “What possible difference could that make? ” I exclaimed.
   “Absolutely none, sir! Glad to hear you say that. I wanted to see what kind of a man we had for our new professor.” Gibbs liked the way I came right back at him without thinking to myself, “He’s the head of the department, and I’m new here, so I’d better be careful what I say.” I haven’t got the speed to think like that; my first reaction is immediate, and I say the first thing that comes into my mind.
   Then another guy came into my office. He wanted to talk to me about philosophy, and I can’t really quite remember what he said, but he wanted me to join some kind of a club of professors. The club was some sort of anti-Semitic club that thought the Nazis weren’t so bad. He tried to explain to me how there were too many Jews doing this and that—some crazy thing. So I waited until he got all finished, and said to him, “You know, you made a big mistake: I was brought up in a Jewish family.” He went out, and that was the beginning of my loss of respect for some of the professors in the humanities, and other areas, at Cornell University.
   I was starting over, after my wife’s death, and I wanted to meet some girls. In those days there was a lot of social dancing. So there were a lot of dances at Cornell, mixers to get people together, especially for the freshmen and others returning to school.
   I remember the first dance that I went to. I hadn’t been dancing for three or four years while I was at Los Alamos; I hadn’t even been in society. So I went to this dance and danced as best I could, which I thought was reasonably all right. You can usually tell somebody’s dancing with you and they feel pretty good about it.
   As we danced I would talk with the girl a little bit; she would ask me some questions about myself, and I would ask some about her. But when I wanted to dance with a girl I had danced with before, I had to look for her.
   “Would you like to dance again?”
   “No, I’m sorry; I need some air.” Or, “Well, I have to go to the ladies’ room”—this and that excuse, from two or three girls in a row! What was the matter with me? Was my dancing lousy? Was my personality lousy?
   I danced with another girl, and again came the usual questions: “Are you a student, or a graduate student?” (There were a lot of students who looked old then because they had been in the army.)
   “No, I’m a professor.”
   “Oh? A professor of what?”
   “Theoretical physics.”
   “I suppose you worked on the atomic bomb.”
   “Yes, I was at Los Alamos during the war.”
   She said, “You’re a damn liar!”—and walked off.
   That relieved me a great deal. It explained everything. I had been telling all the girls the simple-minded, stupid truth, and I never knew what the trouble was. It was perfectly obvious that I was being shunned by one girl after another when I did everything perfectly nice and natural and was polite, and answered the questions. Everything would look very pleasant, and then thwoop—it wouldn’t work. I didn’t understand it until this woman fortunately called me a damn liar.
   So then I tried to avoid all the questions, and it had the opposite effect: “Are you a freshman?”
   “Well, no.”
   “Are you a graduate student?”
   “No.”
   “What are you?”
   “I don’t want to say.”
   “Why won’t you tell us what you are?”
   “I don’t want to …—and they’d keep talking to me!
   I ended up with two girls over at my house and one of them told me that I really shouldn’t feel uncomfortable about being a freshman; there were plenty of guys my age who were starting out in college, and it was really all right. They were sophomores, and were being quite motherly, the two of them. They worked very hard on my psychology, but I didn’t want the situation to get so distorted and so misunderstood, so I let them know I was a professor. They were very upset that I had fooled them. I had a lot of trouble being a young professor at Cornell.
   Anyway, I began to teach the course in mathematical methods in physics, and I think I also taught another course—electricity and magnetism, perhaps. I also intended to do research. Before the war, while I was getting my degree, I had many ideas: I had invented new methods of doing quantum mechanics with path integrals, and I had a lot of stuff I wanted to do.
   At Cornell, I’d work on preparing my courses, and I’d go over to the library a lot and read through the Arabian Nights and ogle the girls that would go by. But when it came time to do some research, I couldn’t get to work. I was a little tired; I was not interested; I couldn’t do research! This went on for what I felt was a few years, but when I go back and calculate the timing, it couldn’t have been that long. Perhaps nowadays I wouldn’t think it was such a long time, but then, it seemed to go on for a very long time. I simply couldn’t get started on any problem: I remember writing one or two sentences about some problem in gamma rays and then I couldn’t go any further. I was convinced that from the war and everything else (the death of my wife) I had simply burned myself out.
   I now understand it much better. First of all, a young man doesn’t realize how much time it takes to prepare good lectures, for the first time, especially—and to give the lectures, and to make up exam problems, and to check that they’re sensible ones. I was giving good courses, the kind of courses where I put a lot of thought into each lecture. But I didn’t realize that that’s a lot of work! So here I was, “burned out,” reading the ArabianNights and feeling depressed about myself.
   During this period I would get offers from different places—universities and industry—with salaries higher than my own. And each time I got something like that I would get a little more depressed. I would say to myself, “Look, they’re giving me these wonderful offers, but they don’t realize that I’m burned out! Of course I can’t accept them. They expect me to accomplish something, and I can’t accomplish anything! I have no ideas …”
   Finally there came in the mail an invitation from the Institute for Advanced Study: Einstein.. von Neumann … Wyl … all these great minds! They write to me, and invite me to be a professor there! And not just a regular professor. Somehow they knew my feelings about the Institute: how it’s too theoretical; how there’s not enough real activity and challenge. So they write, “We appreciate that you have a considerable interest in experiments and in teaching, so we have made arrangements to create a special type of professorship, if you wish: half professor at Princeton University, and half at the Institute.”
   Institute for Advanced Study! Special exception! A position better than Einstein, even! It was ideal; it was perfect; it was absurd!
   It was absurd. The other offers had made me feel worse, up to a point. They were expecting me to accomplish something. But this offer was so ridiculous, so impossible for me ever to live up to, so ridiculously out of proportion. The other ones were just mistakes; this was an absurdity! I laughed at it while I was shaving, thinking about it.
   And then I thought to myself, “You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it’s impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!”
   It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.
   It wasn’t a failure on my part that the Institute for Advanced Study expected me to be that good; it was impossible. It was clearly a mistake-and the moment I appreciated the possibility that they might be wrong, I realized that it was also true of all the other places, including my own university. I am what I am, and if they expected me to be good and they’re offering me some money for it, it’s their hard luck.
   Then, within the day, by some strange miracle-perhaps he overheard me talking about it, or maybe he just understood me—Bob Wilson, who was head of the laboratory there at Cornell, called me in to see him. He said, in a serious tone, “Feynman, you’re teaching your classes well; you’re doing a good job, and we’re very satisfied. Any other expectations we might have are a matter of luck. When we hire a professor, we’re taking all the risks. If it comes out good, all right. If it doesn’t, too bad. But you shouldn’t worry about what you’re doing or not doing.” He said it much better than that, and it released me from the feeling of guilt.
   Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing—it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference: I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.
   So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the ArabianNights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.
   Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.
   I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?”
   I don’t remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it come out two to one.
   I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, “Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is …” and I showed him the accelerations.
   He says, “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?”
   “Hah!” I say. “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.
   I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was “playing”—working, really—with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.
   It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.
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   When I was at Cornell I was asked to give a series of lectures once a week at an aeronautics laboratory in Buffalo. Cornell had made an arrangement with the laboratory which included evening lectures in physics to be given by somebody from the university. There was some guy already doing it, but there were complaints, so the physics department came to me. I was a young professor at the time and I couldn’t say no very easily, so I agreed to do it.
   To get to Buffalo they had me go on a little airline which consisted of one airplane. It was called Robinson Airlines (it later became Mohawk Airlines) and I remember the first time I flew to Buffalo, Mr. Robinson was the pilot. He knocked the ice off the wings and we flew away.
   All in all, I didn’t enjoy the idea of going to Buffalo every Thursday night. The university was paying me $35 in addition to my expenses. I was a Depression kid, and I figured I’d save the $35, which was a sizable amount of money in those days.
   Suddenly I got an idea: I realized that the purpose of the $35 was to make the trip to Buffalo more attractive, and the way to do that is to spend the money. So I decided to spend the $35 to entertain myself each time I went to Buffalo, and see if I could make the trip worthwhile.
   I didn’t have much experience with the rest of the world. Not knowing how to get started, I asked the taxi driver who picked me up at the airport to guide me through the ins and outs of entertaining myself in Buffalo. He was very helpful, and I still remember his name—Marcuso, who drove car number 169. I would always ask for him when I came into the airport on Thursday nights.
   As I was going to give my first lecture I asked Marcuso, “Where’s an interesting bar where lots of things are going on?” I thought that things went on in bars.
   “The Alibi Room,” he said. “It’s a lively place where you can meet lots of people. I’ll take you there after your lecture.”
   After the lecture Marcuso picked me up and drove me to the Alibi Room. On the way, I say, “Listen, I’m gonna have to ask for some kind of drink. What’s the name of a good whiskey?”
   “Ask for Black and White, water on the side,” he counseled.
   The Alibi Room was an elegant place with lots of people and lots of activity. The women were dressed in furs, everybody was friendly, and the phones were ringing all the time.
   I walked up to the bar and ordered my Black and White, water on the side. The bartender was very friendly quickly found a beautiful woman to sit next to me, and introduced her. I bought her drinks. I liked the place and decided to come back the following week.
   Every Thursday night I’d come to Buffalo and be driven in car number 169 to my lecture and then to the Alibi Room. I’d walk into the bar and order my Black and White, water on the side. After a few weeks of this it got to the point where as soon as I would come in, before I reached the bar, there would be a Black and White, water on the side, waiting for me. “Your regular, sir;’ was the bartender’s greeting.
   I’d take the whole shot glass down at once, to show I was a tough guy, like I had seen in the movies, and then I’d sit around for about twenty seconds before I drank the water. After a while I didn’t even need the water.
   The bartender always saw to it that the empty chair next to mine was quickly filled by a beautiful woman, and everything would start off all right, but just before the bar closed, they all had to go off somewhere. I thought it was possibly because I was getting pretty drunk by that time.
   One time, as the Alibi Room was closing, the girl I was buying drinks for that night suggested we go to another place where she knew a lot of people. It was on the second floor of some other building which gave no hint that there was a bar upstairs. All the bars in Buffalo had to close at two o’clock, and all the people in the bars would get sucked into this big hall on the second floor, and keep right on going—illegally, of course.
   I tried to figure out a way that I could stay in bars and watch what was going on without getting drunk. One night I noticed a guy who had been there a lot go up to the bar and order a glass of milk. Everybody knew what his problem was: he had an ulcer, the poor fella. That gave me an idea.
   The next time I come into the Alibi Room the bartender says, “The usual, sir?”
   “No. Coke. Just plain Coke,” I say, with a disappointed look on my face.
   The other guys gather around and sympathize: “Yeah, I was on the wagon three weeks ago,” one says. “It’s really tough, Dick, it’s really tough,” says another.
   They all honored me. I was “on the wagon” now, and had the guts to enter that bar, with all its “temptations,” and just order Coke—because, of course, I had to see my friends. And I maintained that for a month! I was a real tough bastard.
   One time I was in the men’s room of the bar and there was a guy at the urinal. He was kind of drunk, and said to me in a mean-sounding voice, “I don’t like your face. I think I’ll push it in.”
   I was scared green. I replied in an equally mean voice, “Get out of my way, or I’ll pee right through ya!”
   He said something else, and I figured it was getting pretty close to a fight now. I had never been in a fight. I didn’t know what to do, exactly, and I was afraid of getting hurt. I did think of one thing: I moved away from the wall, because I figured if I got hit, I’d get hit from the back, too.
   Then I felt a sort of funny crunching in my eye—it didn’t hurt much—and the next thing I know, I’m slamming the son of a gun right back, automatically. It was remarkable for me to discover that I didn’t have to think; the “machinery” knew what to do.
   “OK. That’s one for one,” I said. “Ya wanna keep on goin’?”
   The other guy backed off and left. We would have killed each other if the other guy was as dumb as I was.
   I went to wash up, my hands are shaking, blood is leaking out of my gums—I’ve got a weak place in my gums—and my eye hurt. After I calmed down I went back into the bar and swaggered up to the bartender: “Black and White, water on the side,” I said. I figured it would calm my nerves.
   I didn’t realize it, but the guy I socked in the men’s room was over in another part of the bar, talking with three other guys. Soon these three guys—big, tough guys—came over to where I was sitting and leaned over me. They looked down threateningly, and said, “What’s the idea of pickin’ a fight with our friend?”
   Well I’m so dumb I don’t realize I’m being intimidated; all I know is right and wrong. I simply whip around and snap at them, “Why don’t ya find out who started what first, before ya start makin’ trouble?”
   The big guys were so taken aback by the fact that their intimidation didn’t work that they backed away and left.
   After a while one of the guys came back and said to me, “You’re right, Curly’s always doin’ that. He’s always gettin’ into fights and askin’ us to straighten it out.”
   “You’re damn tootin’ I’m right!” I said, and the guy sat down next to me.
   Curly and the other two fellas came over and sat down on the other side of me, two seats away. Curly said something about my eye not looking too good, and I said his didn’t look to be in the best of shape either.
   I continue talking tough, because I figure that’s the way a real man is supposed to act in a bar.
   The situation’s getting tighter and tighter, and people in the bar are worrying about what’s going to happen. The bartender says, “No fighting in here, boys! Calm down!”
   Curly hisses, “That’s OK; we’ll get ‘im when he goes out.”
   Then a genius comes by. Every field has its first-rate experts. This fella comes over to me and says, “Hey, Dan! I didn’t know you were in town! It’s good to see you!”
   Then he says to Curly, “Say, Paul! I’d like you to meet a good friend of mine, Dan, here. I think you two guys would like each other. Why don’t you shake?”
   We shake hands. Curly says, “Uh, pleased to meet you.”
   Then the genius leans over to me and very quietly whispers, “Now get out of here fast!”
   “But they said they would …”
   “Just go!” he says.
   I got my coat and went out quickly. I walked along near the walls of the buildings, in case they went looking for me. Nobody came out, and I went to my hotel. It happened to be the night of the last lecture, so I never went back to the Alibi Room, at least for a few years.
   (I did go back to the Alibi Room about ten years later, and it was all different. It wasn’t nice and polished like it was before; it was sleazy and had seedy-looking people in it. I talked to the bartender, who was a different man, and told him about the old days. “Oh, yes!” he said. “This was the bar where all the bookmakers and their girls used to hang out.” I understood then why there were so many friendly and elegant-looking people there, and why the phones were ringing all the time.)
   The next morning, when I got up and looked in the mirror, I discovered that a black eye takes a few hours to develop fully. When I got back to Ithaca that day, I went to deliver some stuff over to the dean’s office. A professor of philosophy saw my black eye and exclaimed, “Oh, Mr. Feynman! Don’t tell me you got that walking into a door?”
   “Not at all,” I said. “I got it in a fight in the men’s room of a bar in Buffalo.”
   “Ha, ha, ha!” he laughed.
   Then there was the problem of giving the lecture to my regular class. I walked into the lecture hall with my head down, studying my notes. When I was ready to start, I lifted my head and looked straight at them, and said what I always said before I began my lecture-but this time, in a tougher tone of voice: “Any questions?”
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I Want My Dollar!

   When I was at Cornell I would often come back home to Far Rockaway to visit. One time when I happened to be home, the telephone rings: it’s LONG DISTANCE, from California. In those days, a long distance call meant it was something very important, especially a long distance call from this marvelous place, California, a million miles away.
   The guy on the other end says, “Is this Professor Feynman, of Cornell University?”
   “That’s right.”
   “This is Mr. So-and-so from the Such-and-such Aircraft Company.” It was one of the big airplane companies in California, but unfortunately I can’t remember which one. The guy continues: “We’re planning to start a laboratory on nuclear-propelled rocket airplanes. It will have an annual budget of so-and-so-many million dollars …” Big numbers.
   I said, “Just a moment, sir; I don’t know why you’re telling me all this.”
   “Just let me speak to you,” he says; “just let me explain everything. Please let me do it my way.” So he goes on a little more, and says how many people are going to be in the laboratory, so-and-so-many people at this level, and so-and-so-many Ph.D’s at that level …
   “Excuse me, sir,” I say, “but I think you have the wrong fella.”
   “Am I talking to Richard Feynman, Richard P. Feynman?”
   “Yes, but you’re..
   “Would you please let me present what I have to say, sir, and then we’ll discuss it.”
   “All right!” I sit down and sort of close my eyes to listen to all this stuff, all these details about this big project, and I still haven’t the slightest idea why he’s giving me all this information,
   Finally, when he’s all finished, he says, “I’m telling you about our plans because we want to know if you would like to be the director of the laboratory.”
   “Have you really got the right fella?” I say. “I’m a professor of theoretical physics. I’m not a rocket engineer, or an airplane engineer, or anything like that.”
   “We’re sure we have the right fellow.’
   “Where did you get my name then? Why did you decide to call me?”
   “Sir, your name is on the patent for nuclear-powered, rocket-propelled airplanes.”
   “Oh,” I said, and I realized why my name was on the patent, and I’ll have to tell you the story. I told the man, “I’m sorry, but I would like to continue as a professor at Cornell University.”
   What had happened was, during the war, at Los Alamos, there was a very nice fella in charge of the patent office for the government, named Captain Smith. Smith sent around a notice to everybody that said something like, “We in the patent office would like to patent every idea you have for the United States government, for which you are working now. Any idea you have on nuclear energy or its application that you may think everybody knows about, everybody doesn’t know about: Just come to my office and tell me the idea.”
   I see Smith at lunch, and as we’re walking back to the technical area, I say to him, “That note you sent around: That’s kind of crazy to have us come in and tell you every idea.”
   We discussed it back and forth—by this time we’re in his office-and I say, “There are so many ideas about nuclear energy that are so perfectly obvious, that I’d be here all day telling you stuff.”
   “LIKE WHAT?”
   “Nothin’ to it!” I say. “Example: nuclear reactor … under water.. water goes in … steam goes out the other side … Pshshshsht–it’s a submarine. Or: nuclear reactor … air comes rushing in the front… heated up by nuclear reaction … out the back it goes … Boom! Through the air—it’s an airplane. Or: nuclear reactor.. you have hydrogen go through the thing … Zoom!—it’s a rocket. Or: nuclear reactor … only instead of using ordinary uranium, you use enriched uranium with beryllium oxide at high temperature to make it more efficient … It’s an electrical power plant. There’s a million ideas!” I said, as I went out the door.
   Nothing happened.
   About three months later, Smith calls me in the office and says, “Feynman, the submarine has already been taken. But the other three are yours.” So when the guys at the airplane company in California are planning their laboratory, and try to find out who’s an expert in rocket-propelled whatnots, there’s nothing to it: They look at who’s got the patent on it!
   Anyway, Smith told me to sign some papers for the three ideas I was giving to the government to patent. Now, it S some dopey legal thing, but when you give the patent to the government, the document you sign is not a legal document unless there’s some exchange, so the paper I signed said, “For the sum of one dollar, I, Richard P. Feynman, give this idea to the government …”
   I sign the paper.
   “Where’s my dollar?”
   “That’s just a formality,” he says. “We haven’t got any funds set up to give a dollar.”
   “You’ve got it all set up that I’m signing for the dollar,” I say. “I want my dollar!”
   “This is silly,” Smith protests.
   “No, it’s not,” I say. “It’s a legal document, You made me sign it, and I’m an honest man. There’s no fooling around about it.”
   “All right, all right!” he says, exasperated. “I’ll give you a dollar, from my pocket!”
   “OK.”
   I take the dollar, and I realize what I’m going to do. I go down to the grocery store, and I buy a dollar’s worth—which was pretty good, then—of cookies and goodies, those chocolate goodies with marshmallow inside, a whole lot of stuff.
   I come back to the theoretical laboratory, and I give them out: “I got a prize, everybody! Have a cookie! I got a prize! A dollar for my patent! I got a dollar for my patent!”
   Everybody who had one of those patents—a lot of people had been sending them in—everybody comes down to Captain Smith: they want their dollar!
   He starts shelling them out of his pocket, but soon realizes that it’s going to be a hemorrhage! He went crazy trying to set up a fund where he could get the dollars these guys were insisting on. I don’t know how he settled up.
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You Just Ask Them?

   When I was first at Cornell I corresponded with a girl I had met in New Mexico while I was working on the bomb. I got to thinking, when she mentioned some other fella she knew, that I had better go out there quickly at the end of the school year and try to save the situation. But when I got out there, I found it was too late, so I ended up in a motel in Albuquerque with a free summer and nothing to do.
   The Casa Grande Motel was on Route 66, the main highway through town. About three places further down the road there was a little nightclub that had entertainment. Since I had nothing to do, and since I enjoyed watching and meeting people in bars, I very often went to this nightclub.
   When I first went there I was talking with some guy at the bar, and we noticed a wholetable full of nice young ladies—TWA hostesses, I think they were-who were having some sort of birthday party. The other guy said, “Come on, let’s get up our nerve and ask them to dance.”
   So we asked two of them to dance, and afterwards they invited us to sit with the other girls at the table. After a few drinks, the waiter came around: “Anybody want anything?”
   I liked to imitate being drunk, so although I was completely sober, I turned to the girl I’d been dancing with and asked her in a drunken voice, “YaWANanything?”
   “What can we have?” she asks.
   “Annnnnnnnnnnnything you want—ANYTHING!”
   “All right! We’ll have champagne!” she says happily.
   So I say in a loud voice that everybody in the bar can hear, “OK! Ch-ch-champagne for evvverybody!”
   Then I hear my friend talking to my girl, saying what a dirty trick it is to “take all that dough from him because he’s drunk,” and I’m beginning to think maybe I made a mistake.
   Well, nicely enough, the waiter comes over to me, leans down, and says in a low voice, “Sir, that’s sixteen dollars a bottle.”
   I decide to drop the idea of champagne for everybody, so I say in an even louder voice than before, “NEVER MIND!”
   I was therefore quite surprised when, a few moments later, the waiter came back to the table with all his fancy stuff—a white towel over his arm, a tray full of glasses, an ice bucket full of ice, and a bottle of champagne. He thought I meant, “Never mind the price,” when I meant, “Never mind the champagne!”
   The waiter served champagne to everybody, I paid out the sixteen dollars, and my friend was mad at my girl because he thought she had got me to pay all this dough. But as far as I was concerned, that was the end of it—though it turned out later to be the beginning of a new adventure.
   I went to that nightclub quite often and as the weeks went by, the entertainment changed. The performers were on a circuit that went through Amarillo and a lot of other places in Texas, and God knows where else. There was also a permanent singer who was at the nightclub, whose name was Tamara. Every time a new group of performers came to the club, Tamara would introduce me to one of the girls from the group. The girl would come and sit down with me at my table, I would buy her a drink, and we’d talk. Of course I would have liked to do more than just talk, but there was always something the matter at the last minute. So I could never understand why Tamara always went to the trouble of introducing me to all these nice girls, and then, even though things would start out all right, I would always end up buying drinks, spending the evening talking, but that was it. My friend, who didn’t have the advantage of Tamara’s introductions, wasn’t getting anywhere either—we were both clunks.
   After a few weeks of different shows and different girls, a new show came, and as usual Tamara introduced me to a girl from the group, and we went through the usual thing—I’m buying her drinks, we’re talking, and she’s being very nice. She went and did her show, and afterwards she came back to me at my table, and I felt pretty good. People would look around and think, “What’s he got that makes this girl come to him?”
   But then, at some stage near the close of the evening, she said something that by this time I had heard many times before: “I’d like to have you come over to my room tonight, but we’re having a party, so perhaps tomorrow night …”—and I knew what this “perhaps tomorrow night” meant: NOTHING.
   Well, I noticed throughout the evening that this girl—her name was Gloria—talked quite often with the master of ceremonies, during the show, and on her way to and from the ladies’ room. So one time, when she was in the ladies’ room and the master of ceremonies happened to be walking near my table, I impulsively took a guess and said to him, “Your wife is a very nice woman.”
   He said, “Yes, thank you,” and we started to talk a little. He figured she had told me. And when Gloria returned, she figured he had told me. So they both talked to me a little bit, and invited me to go over to their place that night after the bar closed.
   At two o’clock in the morning I went over to their motel with them. There wasn’t any party, of course, and we talked a long time. They showed me a photo album with pictures of Gloria when her husband first met her in Iowa, a cornfed, rather fattish-looking woman; then other pictures of her as she reduced, and now she looked really nifty! He had taught her all kinds of stuff, but he couldn’t read or write, which was especially interesting because he had the job, as master of ceremonies, of reading the names of the acts and the performers who were in the amateur contest, and I hadn’t even noticed that he couldn’t read what he was “reading”! (The next night I saw what they did. While she was bringing a person on or off the stage, she glanced at the slip of paper in his hand and whispered the names of the next performers and the title of the act to him as she went by.)
   They were a very interesting, friendly couple, and we had many interesting conversations. I recalled how we had met, and I asked them why Tamara was always introducing the new girls to me.
   Gloria replied, “When Tamara was about to introduce me to you, she said, ‘Now I’m going to introduce you to the real spender around here!’
   I had to think a moment before I realized that the sixteen-dollar bottle of champagne bought with such a vigorous and misunderstood “never mind! ” turned out to be a good investment. I apparently had the reputation of being some kind of eccentric who always came in not dressed up, not in a neat suit, but always ready to spend lots of money on the girls.
   Eventually I told them that I was struck by something: “I’m fairly intelligent,” I said, “but probably only about physics. But in that bar there are lots of intelligent guys—oil guys, mineral guys, important businessmen, and so forth—and all the time they’re buying the girls drinks, and they get nothin’ for it!” (By this time I had decided that nobody else was getting anything out of all those drinks either.) “How is it possible,” I asked, “that an ‘intelligent’ guy can be such a goddamn fool when he gets into a bar?”
   The master said, “This I know all about. I know exactly how it all works. I will give you lessons, so that hereafter you can get something from a girl in a bar like this. But before I give you the lessons, I must demonstrate that I really know what I’m talking about. So to do that, Gloria will get a man to buy you a champagne cocktail.”
   I say, “OK,” though I’m thinking, “How the hell are they gonna do it?”
   The master continued: “Now you must do exactly as we tell you. Tomorrow night you should sit some distance from Gloria in the bar, and when she gives you a sign, all you have to do is walk by.”
   “Yes,” says Gloria. “It’ll be easy.”
   The next night I go to the bar and sit in the corner, where I can keep my eye on Gloria from a distance. After a while, sure enough, there’s some guy sitting with her, and after a little while longer the guy’s happy and Gloria gives me a wink. I get up and nonchalantly saunter by. Just as I’m passing, Gloria turns around and says in a real friendly and bright voice, “Oh, hi, Dick! When did you get back into town? Where have you been?”
   At this moment the guy turns around to see who this “Dick” is, and I can see in his eyes something I understand completely, since I have been in that position so often myself.
   First look: “Oh-oh, competition coming up. He’s gonna take her away from me after I bought her a drink! What’s gonna happen?”
   Next look: “No, it’s just a casual friend. They seem to know each other from some time back.” I could see all this. I could read it on his face. I knew exactly what he was going through.
   Gloria turns to him and says, “Jim, I’d like you to meet an old friend of mine, Dick Feynman.”
   Next look: “I know what I’ll do; I’ll be kind to this guy so that she’ll like me more.”
   Jim turns to me and says, “Hi, Dick. How about a drink?”
   “Fine!” I say.
   “What’ll ya have?”
   “Whatever she’s having.”
   “Bartender, another champagne cocktail, please.”
   So it was easy; there was nothing to it. That night after the bar closed I went again over to the master and Gloria’s motel. They were laughing and smiling, happy with how it worked out. “All right,” I said, “I’m absolutely convinced that you two know exactly what you’re talking about. Now, what about the lessons?”
   “OK,” he says. “The whole principle is this: The guy wants to be a gentleman. He doesn’t want to be thought of as impolite, crude, or especially a cheapskate. As long as the girl knows the guy’s motives so well, it’s easy to steer him in the direction she wants him to go.
   “Therefore,” he continued, “under no circumstances be a gentleman! You must disrespect the girls. Furthermore, the very first rule is, don’t buy a girl anything–not even a package of cigarettes—until you’ve asked her if she’ll sleep with you, and you’re convinced that she will, and that she’s not lying.”
   “Uh … you mean … you don’t … uh … you just ask them?”
   “OK,” he says, “I know this is your first lesson, and it may be hard for you to be so blunt. So you might buy her one thing—just one little something—before you ask. But on the other hand, it will only make it more difficult.”
   Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.
   Then that night I was ready to try it out. I go into the bar as usual, and right away my friend says, “Hey, Dick! Wait’ll you see the girl I got tonight! She had to go change her clothes, but she’s coming right back.”
   “Yeah, yeah,” I say, unimpressed, and I sit at another table to watch the show. My friend’s girl comes in just as the show starts, and I’m thinking, “I don’t give a damn how pretty she is; all she’s doing is getting him to buy her drinks, and she’s going to give him nothing!”
   After the first act my friend says, “Hey, Dick! I want you to meet Ann. Ann, this is a good friend of mine, Dick Feynman.”
   I say “Hi” and keep looking at the show.
   A few moments later Ann says to me, “Why don’t you come and sit at the table here with us?”
   I think to myself, “Typical bitch: he’s buying her drinks, and she’s inviting somebody else to the table.” I say, “I can see fine from here.”
   A little while later a lieutenant from the military base nearby comes in, dressed in a nice uniform. It isn’t long before we notice that Ann is sitting over on the other side of the bar with the lieutenant!
   Later that evening I’m sitting at the bar, Ann is dancing with the lieutenant, and when the lieutenant’s back is toward me and she’s facing me, she smiles very pleasantly to me. I think again, “Some bitch! Now she’s doing this trick on the lieutenant even!”
   Then I get a good idea: I don’t look at her until the lieutenant can also see me, and then I smile back at her, so the lieutenant will know what’s going on. So her trick didn’t work for long.
   A few minutes later she’s not with the lieutenant any more, but asking the bartender for her coat and handbag, saying in a loud, obvious voice, “I’d like to go for a walk. Does anybody want to go for a walk with me?”
   I think to myself, “You can keep saying no and pushing them off, but you can’t do it permanently, or you won’t get anywhere. There comes a time when you have to go along.” So I say coolly, “I’ll walk with you.” So we go out. We walk down the street a few blocks and see a cafй, and she says, “I’ve got an idea—let’s get some coffee and sandwiches, and go over to my place and eat them.”
   The idea sounds pretty good, so we go into the cafй and she orders three coffees and three sandwiches and I pay for them.
   As we’re going out of the cafй, I think to myself, “Something’s wrong: too many sandwiches!”
   On the way to her motel she says, “You know, I won’t have time to eat these sandwiches with you, because a lieutenant is coming over..
   I think to myself, “See, I flunked. The master gave me a lesson on what to do, and I flunked. I bought her $1.10 worth of sandwiches, and hadn’t asked her anything, and now I know I’m gonna get nothing! I have to recover, if only for the pride of my teacher.”
   I stop suddenly and I say to her, “You … are worse than a WHORE!”
   “Whaddya mean?”
   “You got me to buy these sandwiches, and what am I going to get for it? Nothing!”
   “Well, you cheapskate!” she says. “If that’s the way you feel, I’ll pay you back for the sandwiches!”
   I called her bluff: “Pay me back, then.”
   She was astonished. She reached into her pocketbook, took out the little bit of money that she had and gave it to me. I took my sandwich and coffee and went off.
   After I was through eating, I went back to the bar to report to the master. I explained everything, and told him I was sorry that I flunked, but I tried to recover.
   He said very calmly, “It’s OK, Dick; it’s all right. Since you ended up not buying her anything, she’s gonna sleep with you tonight.”
   “What?”
   “That’s right,” he said confidently; “she’s gonna sleep with you. I know that.”
   “But she isn’t even here! She’s at her place with the lieu—”
   “It’s all right.”
   Two o’clock comes around, the bar closes, and Ann hasn’t appeared. I ask the master and his wife if I can come over to their place again. They say sure.
   Just as we’re coming out of the bar, here comes Ann, running across Route 66 toward me. She puts her arm in mine, and says, “Come on, let’s go over to my place.
   The master was right. So the lesson was terrific!
   When I was back at Cornell in the fall, I was dancing with the sister of a grad student, who was visiting from Virginia. She was very nice, and suddenly I got this idea: “Let’s go to a bar and have a drink,” I said.
   On the way to the bar I was working up nerve to try the master’s lesson on an ordinary girl. After all, you don’t feel so bad disrespecting a bar girl who’s trying to get you to buy her drinks—but a nice, ordinary, Southern girl?
   We went into the bar, and before I sat down, I said, “Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?”
   “Yes.”
   So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn’t enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up.
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   One day at Princeton I was sitting in the lounge and overheard some mathematicians talking about the series for e^x, which is 1 + x + x^2/2! + x^3/3! Each term you get by multiplying the preceding term by x and dividing by the next number. For example, to get the next term after x^4/4! you multiply that term by x and divide by 5. It’s very simple.
   When I was a kid I was excited by series, and had played with this thing. I had computed e using that series, and had seen how quickly the new terms became very small.
   I mumbled something about how it was easy to calculate e to any power using that series (you just substitute the power for x).
   “Oh yeah?” they said. “Well, then what’s e to the 3.3?” said some joker—I think it was Tukey.
   I say, “That’s easy. It’s 27.11.”
   Tukey knows it isn’t so easy to compute all that in your head. “Hey! How’d you do that?”
   Another guy says, “You know Feynman, he’s just faking it. It’s not really right.”
   They go to get a table, and while they’re doing that, I put on a few more figures.: “27.1126,” I say.
   They find it in the table. “It’s right! But how’d you do it!”
   “I just summed the series.”
   “Nobody can sum the series that fast. You must just happen to know that one. How about e to the 3?”
   “Look,” I say. “It’s hard work! Only one a day!”
   “Hah! It’s a fake!” they say, happily.
   “All right,” I say, “It’s 20.085.”
   They look in the book as I put a few more figures on. They’re all excited now, because I got another one right.
   Here are these great mathematicians of the day, puzzled at how I can compute e to any power! One of them says, “He just can’t be substituting and summing—it’s too hard. There’s some trick. You couldn’t do just any old number like e to the 1.4.”
   I say, “It’s hard work, but for you, OK. It’s 4.05.”
   As they’re looking it up, I put on a few more digits and say, “And that’s the last one for the day!” and walk out.
   What happened was this: I happened to know three numbers—the logarithm of 10 to the base e (needed to convert numbers from base 10 to base e), which is 2.3026 (so I knew that e to the 2.3 is very close to 10), and because of radioactivity (mean-life and half-life), I knew the log of 2 to the base e, which is.69315 (so I also knew that e to the.7 is nearly equal to 2). I also knew e (to the 1), which is 2. 71828.
   The first number they gave me was e to the 3.3, which is e to the 2.3—ten—times e, or 27.18. While they were sweating about how I was doing it, I was correcting for the extra.0026—2.3026 is a little high.
   I knew I couldn’t do another one; that was sheer luck. But then the guy said e to the 3: that’s e to the 2.3 times e to the.7, or ten times two. So I knew it was 20. something, and while they were worrying how I did it, I adjusted for the.693.
   Now I was sure I couldn’t do another one, because the last one was again by sheer luck. But the guy said e to the 1.4, which is e to the.7 times itself. So all I had to do is fix up 4 a little bit!
   They never did figure out how I did it.
   When I was at Los Alamos I found out that Hans Bethe was absolutely topnotch at calculating. For example, one time we were putting some numbers into a formula, and got to 48 squared. I reach for the Marchant calculator, and he says, “That’s 2300.” I begin to push the buttons, and he says, “If you want it exactly, it’s 2304.”
   The machine says 2304. “Gee! That’s pretty remarkable!” I say.
   “Don’t you know how to square numbers near 50?” he says. “You square 50—that’s 2500—and subtract 100 times the difference of your number from 50 (in this case it’s 2), so you have 2300. If you want the correction, square the difference and add it on. That makes 2304.”
   A few minutes later we need to take the cube root of 2Ѕ. Now to take cube roots on the Marchant you had to use a table for the first approximation. I open the drawer to get the table—it takes a little longer this time—and he says, “It’s about 1.35.”
   I try it out on the Marchant and it’s right. “How did you do that one?” I ask. “Do you have a secret for taking cube roots of numbers?”
   “Oh,” he says, “the log of 2Ѕ is so-and-so. Now one third of that log is between the logs of 1.3, which is this, and 1.4, which is that, so I interpolated.”
   So I found out something: first, he knows the log tables; second, the amount of arithmetic he did to make the interpolation alone would have taken me longer to do than reach for the table and punch the buttons on the calculator. I was very impressed.
   After that, I tried to do those things. I memorized a few logs, and began to notice things. For instance, if somebody says, “What is 28 squared?” you notice that the square root of 2 is 1.4, and 28 is 20 times 1.4, so the square of 28 must be around 400 times 2, or 800.
   If somebody comes along and wants to divide 1 by 1.73, you can tell them immediately that it’s .577, because you notice that 1.73 is nearly the square root of 3, so 1/1.73 must be one-third of the square root of 3. And if it’s ‘/1.75, that’s equal to the inverse of 7/4, and you’ve memorized the repeating decimals for sevenths: .571428.
   I had a lot of fun trying to do arithmetic fast, by tricks, with Hans. It was very rare that I’d see something he didn’t see and beat him to the answer, and he’d laugh his hearty laugh when I’d get one. He was nearly always able to get the answer to any problem within a percent. It was easy for him—every number was near something he knew.
   One day I was feeling my oats. It was lunch time in the technical area, and I don’t know how I got the idea, but I announced, “I can work out in sixty seconds the answer to any problem that anybody can state in ten seconds, to 10 percent!”
   People started giving me problems they thought were difficult, such as integrating a function like 1/(1 + x), which hardly changed over the range they gave me. The hardest one somebody gave me was the binomial coefficient of x^10 in (1 + x)^20; I got that just in time.
   They were all giving me problems and I was feeling great, when Paul Olum walked by in the hall. Paul had worked with me for a while at Princeton before coming out to Los Alamos, and he was always cleverer than I was. For instance, one day I was absent-mindedly playing with one of those measuring tapes that snap back into your hand when you push a button. The tape would always slap over and hit my hand, and it hurt a little bit. “Geez!” I exclaimed. “What a dope I am. I keep playing with this thing, and it hurts me every time.”
   He said, “You don’t hold it right,” and took the damn thing, pulled out the tape, pushed the button, and it came right back. No hurt.
   “Wow! How do you do that?” I exclaimed.
   “Figure it out!”
   For the next two weeks I’m walking all around Princeton, snapping this tape back until my hand is absolutely raw. Finally I can’t take it any longer. “Paul! I give up! How the hell do you hold it so it doesn’t hurt?”
   “Who says it doesn’t hurt? It hurts me too!”
   I felt so stupid. He had gotten me to go around and hurt my hand for two weeks!
   So Paul is walking past the lunch place and these guys are all excited. “Hey, Paul!” they call out. “Feynman’s terrific! We give him a problem that can be stated in ten seconds, and in a minute he gets the answer to 10 percent. Why don’t you give him one?”
   Without hardly stopping, he says, “The tangent of 10 to the 100th.”
   I was sunk: you have to divide by pi to 100 decimal places! It was hopeless.
   One time I boasted, “I can do by other methods any integral anybody else needs contour integration to do.”
   So Paul puts up this tremendous damn integral he had obtained by starting out with a complex function that he knew the answer to, taking out the real part of it and leaving only the complex part. He had unwrapped it so it was only possible by contour integration! He was always deflating me like that. He was a very smart fellow.
   The first time I was in Brazil I was eating a noon meal at I don’t know what time—I was always in the restaurants at the wrong time—and I was the only customer in the place. I was eating rice with steak (which I loved), and there were about four waiters standing around.
   A Japanese man came into the restaurant. I had seen him before, wandering around; he was trying to sell abacuses. He started to talk to the waiters, and challenged them: He said he could add numbers faster than any of them could do.
   The waiters didn’t want to lose face, so they said, “Yeah, yeah. Why don’t you go over and challenge the customer over there?”
   The man came over. I protested, “But I don’t speak Portuguese well!”
   The waiters laughed. “The numbers are easy,” they said.
   They brought me a pencil and paper.
   The man asked a waiter to call out some numbers to add. He beat me hollow, because while I was writing the numbers down, he was already adding them as he went along.
   I suggested that the waiter write down two identical lists of numbers and hand them to us at the same time. It didn’t make much difference. He still beat me by quite a bit.
   However, the man got a little bit excited: he wanted to prove himself some more. “Multiplicao!” he said.
   Somebody wrote down a problem. He beat me again, but not by much, because I’m pretty good at products.
   The man then made a mistake: he proposed we go on to division. What he didn’t realize was, the harder the problem, the better chance I had.
   We both did a long division problem. It was a tie.
   This bothered the hell out of the Japanese man, because he was apparently very well trained on the abacus, and here he was almost beaten by this customer in a restaurant.
   “Raios cubicos!” he says, with a vengeance. Cube roots! He wants to do cube roots by arithmetic! It’s hard to find a more difficult fundamental problem in arithmetic. It must have been his topnotch exercise in abacus-land.
   He writes a number on some paper—any old number—and I still remember it: 1729.03. He starts working on it, mumbling and grumbling: “Mmmmmmagmmmmbrrr ”—he’s working like a demon! He’s poring away, doing this cube root.
   Meanwhile I’m just sitting there.
   One of the waiters says, “What are you doing?”
   I point to my head. “Thinking!” I say. I write down 12 on the paper. After a little while I’ve got 12.002.
   The man with the abacus wipes the sweat off his forehead: “Twelve!” he says.
   “Oh, no!” I say. “More digits! More digits!” I know that in taking a cube root by arithmetic, each new digit is even more work than the one before. It’s a hard job.
   He buries himself again, grunting, “Rrrrgrrrrmmmmmm …”
   while I add on two more digits. He finally lifts his head to say, “12.0!”
   The waiters are all excited and happy. They tell the man, “Look! He does it only by thinking, and you need an abacus! He’s got more digits!”
   He was completely washed out, and left, humiliated. The waiters congratulated each other.
   How did the customer beat the abacus? The number was 1729.03. I happened to know that a cubic foot contains 1728 cubic inches, so the answer is a tiny bit more than 12. The excess, 1.03, is only one part in nearly 2000, and I had learned in calculus that for small fractions, the cube root’s excess is one-third of the number’s excess. So all I had to do is find the fraction 1/1728, and multiply by 4 (divide by 3 and multiply by 12). So I was able to pull out a whole lot of digits that way.
   A few weeks later the man came into the cocktail lounge of the hotel I was staying at. He recognized me and came over. “Tell me,” he said, “how were you able to do that cube-root problem so fast?”
   I started to explain that it was an approximate method, and had to do with the percentage of error. “Suppose you had given me 28. Now, the cube root of 27 is 3..
   He picks up his abacus: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz–
   “Oh yes,” he says.
   I realized something: he doesn’t know numbers. With the abacus, you don’t have to memorize a lot of arithmetic combinations; all you have to do is learn how to push the little beads up and down. You don’t have to memorize 9 + 7 = 16; you just know that when you add 9 you push a ten’s bead up and pull a one’s bead down. So we’re slower at basic arithmetic, but we know numbers.
   Furthermore, the whole idea of an approximate method was beyond him, even though a cube root often cannot be computed exactly by any method. So I never could teach him how I did cube roots or explain how lucky I was that he happened to choose 1729.03.
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