Richard Feynman you of course. "Of course you are kidding, Mr. Feynman!" Chapter from the book (fragment). Far Rockway to MIT

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Feynman turned out to be a great lover of women, whores and taverns. He even conducts a master class on a pickup truck. He confessed that he spent in bars 5 days a week. He loved striptease bars and even was a witness in court on the side of the defense of one such bar, trying to prevent this wonderful establishment from closing. Confesses to cheating on his wife. It is confessed that he broke into safes with classified documents in a super secret research center in which a nuclear bomb was being developed and the safes of high-ranking military personnel employed in this field, and also gives a master class on breaking safes. He talks about his greater desire to use drugs, but pissed off that drugs allegedly dilute the brain (naive), although he still admits to using 1/10 of the "standard dose" of amphetamine purely for the "expansion of consciousness" which was given to him by one wonderful person, a guru of psychics, a teacher with a capital letter (and as you know, the first dose from teachers is always free ...) so that Feynman could catch glitches. And he did catch them. The teacher developed a special method. I had to lie in a large sealed tank, in salt water for 2-2.5 hours, and during which the patients started to have glitches. This was due to the fact that the teacher let his vibes to his adepts. In this case, drugs, of course, did not play any role in this process.
At the same time, Feynman was a famous physicist, professor at the university, winner of the Nobel Prize, sculpted a nuclear bomb and painted pictures (his favorite theme of pictures is naked women).
You can listen to the book, in some places it is very interesting, but I was sick of his constant stories about women, it feels like when he sees a woman there is an outflow of blood from the brain to more interesting places. And by the way, Feynman was rejected by the military medical board when they wanted to draft him into the army. He did not pass a psychotherapist and judging by his behavior, it is possible that it is not unreasonable.
In general, the book can be recommended for familiarization, but it is better for pregnant women, children, nursing mothers and persons with an unstable psyche (for the reasons described above) to refrain from reading.

A few words about sound. I would like to say a special thank you to the aunt who read it all (Artist: Irina Erisanova), the reading is amazing. It’s hard to believe that it’s "you can’t buy it anywhere". The sound quality is excellent. The only thing, the long arms of the enemies of progress and got here and cut some tracks right in the middle of the words.

BitCam56

purrr I wrote:

58187643 Apparently, Irina Erisanova is a person very far from technical sciences. I will not find fault with the wrong accents of the terms, but when the inverse function of the sine turned into sine x in the first degree - apparently Irina was confused by the minus in front of one - the exponent became "the number and", and the factorials were simply pronounced more solemnly - well, yes, 4 is four, and 4! that's FOUR !, - was pretty funny.

It's a pity. The reading of such books can only be trusted by specialists, but where to get them ... But factorials were studied at school. And in general, they should be included in the horizons of any philologist or artist.

Richard FEYNMAN
Translation by M. SHIFMAN, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences

At the very beginning of work at Los Alamos, we had terribly important secrets - we worked out all sorts of things about the bomb, uranium, figured out how it all worked, and so on. All these things were in documents, which were kept in wooden cabinets with drawers with the most common small padlocks on them. Of course, there were also some other tools made in the workshop - for example, a stick that went down, which was locked with a lock, but this was just a padlock. Moreover, it was possible to get the papers without even opening the lock. You just tilted the cabinet with the back wall towards the floor. There was a small bar on the bottom drawer - it was supposed to serve to keep the papers from scattering, and under it there was a long wide slot. The papers could be pulled straight from there.

And so I usually opened all sorts of locks and demonstrated to everyone that this is very easy to do. And every time we had general meetings, I would get up and say that since we have such important secrets, we cannot keep them in such things. One day at a meeting, Teller stood up and said:

“I don't keep my most important secret papers in a closet, I keep them in a drawer on my desk. It's better, isn't it?

I answered:

- I do not know. I haven't seen your table.

He sat in the front row of the meeting, and I was at the very end. The meeting went on, and I slipped out and went downstairs to look at his desk. I didn't even have to open the lock in the center drawer. It turned out that if you put your hand under the table from behind, you could pull out all the papers - each sheet drags the next one, just like in a box of toilet paper. You pull one piece of paper, she pulls another, she pulls a third ... I emptied this whole damn box, put everything in another place and went back up.

The meeting was just ending, everyone was leaving, and I joined the crowd, caught Teller and said:

“By the way, show me your desk.

“Of course,” he replied, and showed me his table.

I looked at this table and said:

- He seems very good to me. Let's see what you have there.

“I’ll be very happy to show you everything,” he said, inserting the key and opening the drawer. - Unless, of course, you have not watched it all yourself.

Pranking a man as intelligent as Mr. Teller is a waste of trouble. The fact is that the time it took him to understand everything - from the moment when he saw that something was wrong here, to the moment when he understood absolutely everything that had happened - this time is too damn short to deliver any pleasure for you!

Some of the special challenges I had to tackle at Los Alamos were quite interesting. One of them had to do with security issues in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In Los Alamos they were going to make a bomb, and in Oak Ridge they tried to separate the isotopes of uranium - uranium-238 and uranium-235, it was the second one that served as "explosive". The Oakridge specialists had just learned how to produce infinitesimal quantities of uranium-235 in an experimental plant, while practicing chemistry, and now they had to build a large plant with entire tanks of this substance. The Oak Ridge people set out to take the purified substance and purify it once more, preparing it for the next stage. (The mixture had to be purified in several stages.) This is how they, on the one hand, practiced, and on the other hand, little by little they obtained uranium-235 experimentally, using only one part of the installation. At the same time, physicists tried to learn how to analyze, how to determine how much uranium-235 had been obtained. At the same time, although we sent them instructions, they never followed them correctly.

Diagram of the atomic bomb "Kid" dropped on Hiroshima.
The nuclear explosive in the bomb was uranium-235, divided into two parts, the mass of which was less than critical. The critical mass of uranium-235 required for the explosion was created as a result of combining both parts "by the cannon method" using conventional explosives.

In the end, Emilio Segre said that the only way for him to ensure that the process was correct was to go and see how things were done. However, the army people said: "No, our policy is that all information about Los Alamos is in only one place - in Los Alamos."

The people from Oak Ridge did not know anything about where uranium should be used - they just knew that it was necessary to do this and that, I mean that only the higher officials there knew why uranium was divided in Oak Ridge, but they had no idea how powerful the bomb would be, or how it was arranged - in general, about nothing. The people “below” did not know at all what they were doing. The army has always wanted things to go that way. There was no exchange of information between different groups at all, and this was done on purpose. However, Segre insisted that the people of Oak Ridge would never be able to do the tests correctly, and the whole idea would go down the drain. Therefore, in the end, he went to see their work and, as he walked through the territory, he suddenly saw that they were carrying a huge container with water - green water - that is, with a solution of uranium nitrate. He said:

- Blimey! So, are you going to handle this water in the same manner and when the uranium will be purified? Is that what you are going to do?

They stopped:

- Of course, why not?

- Won't everything explode?

- What? Will it explode?

Then the army people said:

- You see! We could not allow any infiltration into Oak Ridge. After all, now everyone is demoralized there.

It turned out that the army knew how much material is needed to make a bomb - 20 kilograms or something like that - and understood that such an amount of purified material would never be stored at the plant, so there seemed to be no danger. What they didn’t know at all was that neutrons, when slowed down in water, became monstrously efficient. In water, a tenth, no, one hundredth part of uranium-235 is enough for a reaction that gives rise to radioactive radiation. It kills people around and in general ... It was very, very dangerous, and in Oak Ridge, in general, they did not pay attention to the security measures.

Therefore, a telegram is soon sent from Oppenheimer to Segre: “Inspect the entire plant. Notice where it is supposed to concentrate the material, in the version when the whole process goes in accordance with their project. In the meantime, we will calculate how much material can be collected in one place before the explosion occurs. "

Two groups started working on this: Christie's group was working on aqueous solutions, and my group was counting dry powders in boxes. We figured out how much material could be saved without danger, and Christie had to travel to Oak Ridge and outline the situation to them. In the meantime, work at Oak Ridge was suspended, and now it was absolutely necessary to go there and tell about everything. I gladly gave all my calculations to Christie and said: all the data is in your hands, go. But Christie grabbed pneumonia, and I had to go.

Before that, I had never flown an airplane. Secret papers in a small bag stuck on my back! The plane in those days was like a bus, only stops farther apart. From time to time - parking, where you had to wait.

There was a guy dangling next to me, twirling a chain and grumbling something like: "In our time, it must be terribly difficult to fly somewhere without documents giving the right to extraordinary service."

Then I could not resist and said:

- Well, I don’t know, I have such documents.

A little later, he started his own again:

- Now the generals will come, they will certainly put out one of us, people of the third category.

“It's all right,” I said. - I am of the second category.

Perhaps he later wrote to his congressman, unless he himself was a congressman: "Why is this being done, they send snotty boys everywhere with documents giving the right to extraordinary service in the second category, in the very middle of the war."

Anyway, I arrived at Oak Ridge and the first thing I did was make me take me to the factory. I didn't say anything, I just looked at everything. It turned out that the situation is even worse than Segre said, because in one of the rooms he noticed some boxes in large quantities, but did not notice many boxes in another room, on the other hand, at the same wall - and others are the same things. But put too much of this substance in one place - and everything will fly into the air.

So I went through the whole plant. Actually, my memory is very bad, but with intensive work I get a good short-term memory, and therefore I remember all sorts of stupid things like the building number is 90 - 207, tank number is such and such nonsense.

In the evening I came to my room and once again mentally walked through the whole process, trying to understand where the dangers are hidden and what needs to be done to eliminate them. It's pretty straightforward. Neutrons in water are absorbed by cadmium solutions, and the boxes should be moved away from each other, according to certain rules, so that they are not too tightly packed. A big meeting was to take place the next day. I forgot to say that before I left Los Alamos, Oppenheimer told me:

“There, in Oak Ridge, Mr. Julian Webb, Mr. So-and-so, are well versed in our technology. I want you to make sure that all these people come to the meeting and tell them exactly how to make the process safe, but only so that they really understand.

I asked:

“What if they don’t come to the meeting?” What should I do then? He shrugged.

“Then you must say, 'Los Alamos cannot take responsibility for the safety of the Oak Ridge plant unless ...'

- You mean that I, little Richard, will go there and say ...? I interrupted him.

He replied:

“Yes, little Richard, you go and do it.

I grew up really fast!

When I arrived, be sure! - the big corporations and techies I wanted to see were there, along with the generals and everyone else with an interest in a very serious security issue. It was good, because the plant would definitely have exploded if no one paid attention to this problem.

There was also Lieutenant Zumwalt, who accompanied me. He told me that the colonel had said that I shouldn't say how neutrons and all the other details work, because different secrets must be kept in different places. "So just tell them exactly what they need to do for their safety."

I said:

- In my opinion, it is impossible to obey a set of rules without understanding their actions at all. The rules will only work if I tell them how things work - that's my opinion. Los Alamos cannot take responsibility for the safety of the Oak Ridge plant unless the people here are fully informed about how it all works!

It was great! The lieutenant takes me to the colonel and repeats my statement word for word. The colonel says:

- Give me five minutes, - he goes to the window and thinks. That's what they're really good at - making decisions! It seems to me remarkable that the problem, whether or not to give information about the atomic bomb device to the Oak Ridge plant, had to be solved and could be solved in five minutes. That is why I still have a lot of respect for these military guys - I myself can never make any important decision at any time.

After five minutes he said:

- Okay, Mr. Feynman, go ahead.

Fissile material is the main component of nuclear weapons; any nuclear charge contains at least a few kilograms of such material. The fission of about 10 kg of uranium-235 led to the complete destruction of Hiroshima, and another Japanese city, Nagasaki, was incinerated as a result of the fission of 7 kg of plutonium-239. Although uranium-235 is found in nature, its concentration in natural uranium is too low (about 0.7 percent) to immediately produce nuclear weapons from raw materials extracted in uranium mines. The remaining 99.3 percent is accounted for by uranium-238, in which a fission chain reaction does not occur. Therefore, for the manufacture of nuclear weapons, natural uranium must be enriched with fissile uranium-235. It is generally believed that the concentration of this explosive isotope in enriched uranium suitable for military use should be at least 20 percent. The uranium used to make nuclear weapons in the United States contains more than 90 percent uranium-235.
Another fissile isotope, plutonium-239, is also used in nuclear weapons. It is formed in nuclear reactors by the fission chain reaction of uranium-235. When a neutron hits the nucleus of uranium-235, it splits into two nuclei-fragments with a relatively small mass, and at the same time two or three new neutrons are emitted. The produced neutrons bombard other nuclei of uranium-235, causing another fission, and are also captured by the nuclei of uranium-238, as a result of a chain of nuclear transitions, converting it into plutonium-239. Fission of 1 kg of uranium-235 produces about 900 grams of plutonium. About six tons of plutonium is sufficient to produce a thousand warheads.

I sat down and told them all about neutrons, what effect they have, te-te-te, there are too many neutrons, you should keep materials away from each other, cadmium absorbs, slow neutrons are more efficient than fast ones, and la-la- la ... - it was all elementary and well-known in Los Alamos, but they had never heard anything like it, so it suddenly turned out that I was a great genius for them.

I was told to come back to them in a few months, and I did come when the engineers finished the design of the plant. Now I had to look at him.

But how do you look at a plant when it hasn't been built yet? I do not know. And then one day Lieutenant Zumwalt, who went everywhere with me, because I always had to have an escort, leads me into a room with two engineers and a long-and-for-and-in table heaped with a bunch of blueberries representing the various floors of the proposed plant.

I used to draw in school, but I'm not very good at reading blueprints. And here in front of me they unfold this whole pile of sinek and begin to explain to me, thinking that I am a genius. Well, okay, one of the things that should have been avoided in the plant is material build-up. They had this type of problem: let's say the evaporator is working, collecting the purified uranium, the valve gets stuck or something like that, too much material is accumulated, and then everything explodes. It was explained to me that the plant was designed so that if any of the valves jammed, nothing would happen. An accident will occur only if at least two valves are jammed everywhere.

Then they explained how the process is going. Carbon tetrachloride enters here, uranium nitrate goes from here to there, rises up and goes down, through the floor, passes through pipes, rising from the second floor, ta-ta-ta - we pass through a bunch of blue spots, up and down, up and down, quickly- words and explanations about a very, very complex chemical plant are pouring in quickly.

I am completely overwhelmed. Worse, I don't know what the symbols on the blue mean! There was something there that I initially took for windows. These are squares with a small cross in the middle, scattered all over this damn leaf. I thought they were windows, but no, they cannot be windows, since they are not always on the extreme lines that mark the walls of the building, and I want to ask them what they are.

You may have experienced a similar situation where you hesitate to ask a question right away. Immediately - that would be fine. But now they spoke perhaps too much. You have hesitated for too long. If you ask them now, they will say, "Why are we wasting our time here?"

What should I do? Then an idea comes to my mind. Maybe it's a valve. I point my finger at one of the mysterious little crosses on one of the blue marks on page three and ask:

- What happens if this valve gets stuck? - expecting them to react:

“It's not a valve, sir, it's a window. But one of the guys looks at the other and says:

- Well, if this valve gets stuck, - then he runs his finger along the blue up and down, up and down, the other guy leads back and forth, back and forth; they exchange glances, turn to me, open their mouths like astonished fish, and say: - You are absolutely right, sir.

Then they rolled the blue and left, and we went out after them. Mr Zumwalt, who followed me everywhere, said:

- You are a genius. I suspected you were a genius when you walked through the plant one day and were able to tell them the next morning about the C-21 vaporizer in building 90 ... 207, but what you just did is so fantastic that I would like to know , how did you do that?

I told him: try to find out for yourself whether it is a valve or not.

Another problem I was working on was this. We had to do a lot of calculations, and we did them on Marchand's calculating machines. It's interesting, by the way - just to give an idea of what Los Alamos was like. We had Marchand's "computers" - hand adding machines, calculators with numbers. You click on them, and they multiply, divide, add, etc., but not as easily as it is done now. These were mechanical devices that often broke and had to be sent back to the factory for repairs. Quite quickly, everyone was left without cars. Then some of us began to remove the covers. (It was believed that this should not be done - the rule was: "if the casing is removed, we are not responsible ..." Gradually, we became more and more successful in this craft, as the repairs became more sophisticated. When something too complicated was discovered, we sent the machines to the factory, but we eliminated minor malfunctions ourselves, keeping the adding machines in working order. I ended up fixing all these "computers" and one guy in the machine shop was taking care of the typewriters.

Well, in general, we all decided that the most important task - to understand exactly what exactly happens during a bomb explosion, so that you can accurately indicate how much energy is released, etc. - required a lot more calculations than we could do. ... But one clever man named Stanley Frenkel realized that the calculations could possibly be done on IBM machines. IBM made business machines — addition devices called tabulators, and multiplier machines — multipliers in which cards could be inserted: the machine read two numbers off the card and multiplied them. There were also devices that collated numbers, sorted them, etc.

And so Frenkel came up with a wonderful program. If we collected quite a few of these machines in one room, then we could take cards and start them in a loop. Anyone who does numerical calculations now knows exactly what I'm talking about, but then it was something new - a flow line of computers. We did things like this on folding machines. Usually you go step by step, doing all the calculations yourself. But here everything is not so - first you turn to the “adder”, then to the “multiplier”, again to the “adder”, and so on. In short, Frenkel designed such a system and ordered calculators from IBM, since we realized that this was a good way to solve our problems.

At the same time, we needed a person who would fix cars, keep them in order and all that. The military all the time were going to send us such a person from their ranks, but the case was constantly delayed. Now we were always in a rush. Everything we did, we tried to do as quickly as possible. In this particular case, we worked out all the numerical operations - machines were supposed to do them - multiply that, then do that, then subtract that. We developed a program, but we didn't have machines to actually test it yet. Therefore, we put the girls in the room and equipped each with a Marchand calculator: one was a "multiplier", the other a "composer." This one cubed: all she did was raise the number on the card to the third power and send it to the next girl.

So we went through the whole cycle, until we "licked" it, got rid of all the hidden errors. It turned out that the speed with which we were now able to calculate became devilishly high - much more than with the other method, when each person did all the steps himself. Using this system, we got the computation speed that coincides with the predicted speed for the IBM machine. The only difference was that the IBM machines did not get tired and could work in three shifts. But the girls got tired after a while.

In general, during this rehearsal, we debugged everything, and finally the cars arrived, but without a repairman. These were, perhaps, the most complex machines in the technology of that time - huge (they came partially disassembled) with many wires and drawings, which showed how and what to do. We went downstairs and started collecting cars, Stan Frenkel, me and another guy, but we had some trouble, and the most serious of them was that the big bumps came all the time and said, “You’ll break something ! "

We assembled the machines, and sometimes they worked, and sometimes they were assembled incorrectly and did not work. In the end, I started to work on one of the multipliers and saw some kind of bent part inside, but I was afraid to straighten it, because it might break off - and after all, we were told all the time that we would screw up something so that it would not fix it. When the repairman finally arrived, he assembled the cars that were not yet ready, and everything went like clockwork. However, he also had difficulties with the car that I could not cope with. After three days of work, he was still fiddling with this last machine.

I went downstairs and said: - I noticed that it is bent here.

He was delighted: - Oh, well, of course, all because of this bend.

As for Mr. Frenkel, who started all this activity, he began to suffer from a computer disease - today everyone who worked with computers knows about it. This is a very serious illness and it is impossible to work with it. The trouble with computers is that you play with them. They are so beautiful, so many possibilities - if it’s an even number, you do it, if it’s odd, you do that, and very soon, on a single machine, you can do more and more sophisticated things, if only you are smart enough.

After a while, the whole system collapsed. Frenkel did not pay any attention to her, he did not lead anyone else. The system acted very, very slowly, and at that time he was sitting in the room, figuring out how to make one of the tabulators automatically print the arctangent X. Then the tabulator turned on, printed the columns, then - bam, bam, bam - he calculated the arctangent automatically by integration and compiled the entire table in one operation.

Absolutely useless exercise. After all, we already had tables of arctangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand what this disease is - the excitement of seeing how much you can do. Frenkel got this disease for the first time, poor guy, poor guy who invented this whole thing.

I was asked to interrupt the work that I was doing in my group, go downstairs and receive the group that was working on the machines of IBM. I tried to avoid getting sick. Although the calculators only completed three tasks in nine months, I had a very good group.

The real trouble was that no one ever told these guys anything. The military selected them from all over the country for a team they called the "Special Engineering Unit" - they were smart guys who had graduated from high school and had engineering skills. Then they were sent to Los Alamos and placed in the barracks. And they were not told anything.

Then the guys came to work, and the only thing they had to do was work on IBM machines - punch holes in cards, manipulate numbers that they did not understand. Nobody explained to them what all this was for. The case moved very slowly. I said that the first thing to do is to make people understand what they are doing. Then Oppenheimer spoke to the security department and got special permission, and as a result I was able to give the technical staff a good lecture on what exactly we are doing. They all became terribly excited: "We, too, are fighting in the war, we understand what it is!" Now they knew what the numbers meant. If it turned out that the pressure was getting higher, then more energy was released, etc. etc. They knew what they were doing.

Complete reincarnation! They began to invent ways to make the process better. They refined the circuit. They worked at night. They did not need to be guided at night, they did not need anything. They understood everything, they invented several programs, which we then used.

Yes, my guys really had a breakthrough and all it took was to tell them what we all do. As a result, if earlier it took nine months for three tasks, now we have missed nine tasks in three months, which is almost ten times faster.

One of the secret tricks in solving problems was this. The tasks were contained in a deck of cards, which had to go through a cycle. First add, then multiply - so it went through the cycle of machines in the room, slowly moving in a circle. We came up with in parallel, but in a different phase, to run a set of cards of a different color in a loop. We would be doing two or three tasks at the same time!

However, this got us into a different problem. At the end of the war, for example, right before the tests in Albuquerque, the question arose: how much energy would be released? We calculated the energy release for various projects, but not for the specific project that was ultimately used. Then Bob Christie came down to us and said: “We would like to have the results of this thing in a month,” or after another, also very short time, like three weeks.

I said, “It’s impossible.

He said: - Look, you issue almost two problems a month. Each only takes two or three weeks.

I objected: “I know. In fact, each task takes a lot more, but we are doing them in parallel. While they move in a cycle, it takes a long time, and there is a way to make them move faster. "

He came out, and I began to think. Is there a way to make the task move faster?

What if we didn’t do anything else on the machines, so nothing would get in our way? I challenged our fellows by writing on the board, "Can we do this?" They started yelling: - Yes, we will work in two shifts, we will work overtime! - and all that stuff. We will try, we will try!

So, it was decided: all other tasks - out! Only one task, and full concentration on it. They started to work.

My wife Arlene was sick with tuberculosis - in fact, very, very seriously. It seemed like anything could happen at any moment, so I arranged with my dorm friend in advance that in an emergency I would take his car to quickly get to Albuquerque. His name was Klaus Fuchs. He was a spy and used his car to transfer atomic secrets from Los Alamos to Santa Fe. But then no one knew it.

One day an emergency came. I borrowed a car from Fuchs and picked up a couple of fellow travelers in case something happened to the car on the way to Albuquerque. And, of course, right at the entrance to Santa Fe a flat tire. Two fellow travelers helped me change it, but right at the exit from Santa Fe another tire deflated. We pulled the car to the nearest gas station.

About thirty miles before Albuquerque, the third tire went flat, so I left the car on the road and we hiked the rest of the way. I called the garage and asked to take the car while I was in the hospital to visit my wife.

Arlen died a few hours after I got there. The nurse came in to fill out the death certificate and left again. I spent a little more time with my wife. Then I looked at the watch I gave her seven years ago, when she just got sick with tuberculosis. The little thing was very nice in those days; digital clock - numbers changed due to mechanical rotation. The device was very delicate and the watch stopped frequently for one reason or another. I had to fix them from time to time, and all these years I have kept them on track. Now they stopped again - at 9:22, the time indicated on the death certificate!

I remembered one time I was in the MIT dorm when suddenly the thought occurred to me, out of nothing, that my grandmother had died. Immediately thereafter, the phone rang. They asked for Pete Bernays on the phone - nothing happened to my grandmother. I kept that in mind in case someone else told me a story with a different ending. I understood that these things can sometimes happen by accident - after all, my grandmother was very old, although people would think that such cases happen for some supernatural reason.

Arlene kept the watch by her bed the entire time she was sick, and now it stopped just as she died. I can understand how someone who half believes in the possibility of such things and does not have a critical mind - especially in a situation like mine - does not immediately try to figure out what happened, but instead tells himself that no one has touched the clock, and there is no way to explain their sudden stop by natural causes. The clock just stopped. And this would be a dramatic illustration of some fantastic phenomena.

I saw that the light in the room had become dim, then I remembered that my sister had taken the watch and turned it to face the light in order to better see the dial. Because of this, the clock could easily stop.

I didn't know how I would appear in front of my friends in Los Alamos. I didn't want people to talk to me about this with long faces. When I arrived back (another tire flattened on the way), they asked me what had happened.

- She died. How is the program going?

They knew immediately that I didn’t want to be reminded. (Obviously, something happened to me psychologically. Reality was so important to me - I had to understand what really, physiologically happened to Arlen - that I did not cry until the day when, a few months later, I was in Oak Ridge. Passing a large shop with dresses in the window, I thought that Arlen would have liked one of them. I couldn't stand it anymore.)

When I returned to my computational work, I found a complete mess. There were white cards, blue cards, yellow cards, and I began to be indignant: - After all, we agreed - no more than one task, only one task! - I was told: - Go away, get out of here. Wait, we'll explain everything to you.

I had to wait, and this is what happened. When cards were missed, the machine sometimes made a mistake, or the wrong number was stuffed on the card. Usually in such cases we had to go back and start all over again. But my colleagues noticed that an error at some point in this cycle affects only adjacent numbers, in the next cycle - again on nearby numbers, etc. This is how it goes throughout the deck of cards. If you have 50 cards and a mistake is made in card number 39, it affects cards number 37, 38 and 39. In the next cycle - on cards number 36, 37, 38, 39 and 40. And then it spreads like a disease ...

My co-workers discovered a mistake in what had already been done before, and they had the idea to re-calculate for a small deck of ten cards around the mistake. And since ten cards will go through the machine faster than a deck of fifty cards, they will skip the small deck, continuing to operate with fifty cards, in which, like a plague, the error is spreading. But since ten cards will be ready faster, they will isolate the error and fix it. Very clever.

This is how these guys worked to get the speed up. There was no other way. If they had to stop to correct the mistake, we would have wasted time, and we had nowhere to take it. This is how they worked.

Of course, you guessed what happened while they acted this way. They found a mistake in the blue deck. And then they added a yellow deck with slightly fewer cards - it could be scrolled faster than a blue deck. And just at that moment, when they were on the verge of insanity, since after fixing the blue deck they still have to edit the white one, the boss comes.

“Don’t interfere,” they say. I leave them alone and everything works out. We solved the problem on time. That's how it was.

In the beginning I was a small fry. Then I became the leader of the group. And I have met some very great people. Meetings with remarkable physicists made a strong impression on me.

There was, of course, Enrico Fermi. He came one day from Chicago to advise us a little bit, to help if we have any difficulties. I had a meeting with him, and before that I did some calculations and got some results. The calculations were so time-consuming that it was very difficult to arrive at the results. True, in this I was considered an expert: I could always say what the answer would look like approximately, or, when the answer was received, explain why it was exactly that. But this time the task was so difficult that I could not explain why the result turned out like this.

So I told Fermi that I was solving the problem and began to describe the results. He said: - Wait, before you tell the result, let me think. It will come out something like this (he was right) and it will come out like this because this and that and this and that. And there is a perfectly obvious explanation ...

He did what was thought I was strong, ten times better. This was a good lesson for me.

There was also John von Neumann, the great mathematician. We used to go for walks on Sundays. We walked through the canyons, often with Bethe and Bob Bacher. This gave us great pleasure. And von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: you don't have to be responsible for the world in which you live. As a result of von Neumann's advice, I developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility. It has made me a happy person ever since. It was von Neumann who sowed the seeds that grew into my proactive attitude of irresponsibility!

I also met Niels Bohr. In those days, his name was Nicholas Baker, and he came to Los Alamos with Jim Baker, his son, who was actually called Oge Bohr. They came from Denmark and were, as you know, very famous physicists. Even for the big shots, Bor was a great god.

One day we had a meeting - this was when he came for the first time - and everyone wanted to see the great Bohr. So there were a lot of people there, and we were discussing the problem of the bomb. They pushed me back somewhere, into a corner. Bohr walked in and passed by, and all I saw was a little bit between the heads of the people.

On the morning of the next day he was due to arrive, my phone rang.

- Hello, is this Feynman?

- I'm Jim Baker. - This is his son. - My father and I would like to talk to you.

- With me? I'm Feynman, I'm just ...

- Yes, yes, at eight o'clock, okay?

So, at eight in the morning, no one has woken up yet, I'm going to the agreed place! We move to an office in the technical area, and he says: - We were thinking about how to make the bomb more effective, and the following idea came to my mind ...

I say: - No, it won't work, it is ineffective, etc., etc.

And he argues: - What if so and so?

I said, “It sounds a little better, but it's all based on the same damn stupid idea.

This went on for about two hours, we sorted out a lot of ideas, moving forward and returning back in disputes. The great Niels lit his pipe all the time, and it was constantly extinguished. And he spoke in such a way that it is impossible to understand - he mumbled, mumbled - it is very difficult to understand. I understood his son better.

“Well,” he said finally, lighting the pipe, “now I think we can call the big bumps. “Then they called everyone else and had a discussion with them.

Then Niels Bohr's son told me what had happened. The last time Bohr was here, he told his son: “Remember the name of this little guy back there. He is the only one who is not afraid of me and will honestly tell when I have a crazy thought. And the next time we want to discuss new ideas, with these people who say to everyone: "Yes, yes, Dr. Bohr" - it is not worth doing business. Let's call this guy and talk to him first. "

It so happened that I was always naive. I never felt who I was talking to. I was always concerned only with physics. If the idea seemed phony, I said it looked phony. If she looked good, I said so: good. Simple business.

I've always lived like this. It is good and pleasant if you can do this. I was lucky in life - I could do it.

After the calculations were completed, the next thing that happened was, of course, testing. It so happened that at that time I was at home, on a short vacation after the death of my wife, and it was there that I received the message, which said: "We are expecting the birth of a child on such and such a date."

I flew back and arrived right at the moment when the buses were leaving, so I was immediately at the test site, and we waited there, twenty miles away. We had a radio: we were supposed to be told when this thing exploded, but the radio did not work, and we did not know what was happening. Suddenly, a few minutes before the supposed moment of the explosion, the radio started talking, and we were told that there were 20 seconds left - for people who were far away, like us. Others were closer, six miles away.

We were given dark glasses through which we supposedly could observe everything. Sunglasses! Twenty miles away with dark glasses, you couldn't see, damn it, nothing at all. I decided that the only thing that could harm the eyes was ultraviolet light (bright light can never harm the eyes). I positioned myself behind the windshield of the truck, calculating that since UV light does not pass through the glass, it was safe and the damn thing could be seen.

The time has come, and the sudden monstrous burst of flame there is so bright that I instantly bend my head and see a purple spot on the floor of the car. I said, "This is not this, this is a vision." I look up again and see the white light changing to yellow and then orange. Clouds form and disappear - all from the compression and expansion of the shock wave.

Finally, a huge orange ball - its center is inconceivably bright - begins to rise, gradually becoming slightly wavy, black appears near its edges, and then you see that it is a huge smoke ball, with flames bursting out from the inside, the heat is so hot!

All this lasted for about a minute. It was a chain of transitions from bright to dark, and I saw everything. I was almost the only one who actually looked at this damn thing, the first Trinity trial. Everyone else was wearing dark glasses, and the people on the sixth mile couldn't see anything because they were all ordered to lie on the floor. I may be the only person who saw this with the naked eye.

Finally, after about a minute and a half, an awful noise - fuck! - then a crash like a thunderclap, and that was what convinced me. For all the time no one said a word. We just watched quietly. But this sound freed everyone, and me in particular, because the power of the sound at such a distance meant that the device really worked.

The man next to me asked: - What is this?

I said, “It was a bomb.

This man turned out to be William Lawrence. He went there to write an article describing the whole situation. I was one of those assigned to bring him up to date. Then it turned out that for him it was too difficult, "technical", so later Smith came and I showed him everything. We did one thing: we went into a room where a small silver ball was lying on the edge of a narrow stand. You could put your hand on it. The ball was warm. It was radioactive. It was plutonium. And we stood at the door of the room and talked about it. It was a new element obtained by man, a substance that had never existed on earth before, except perhaps for a very short period at the very beginning. And here he is, isolated and radioactive, with all the amazing properties. And we got it. And so it was incredibly valuable.

In the meantime - you know what people do when they talk - pushing back and forth - my interlocutor kicked the restraint that restrains the movement of the door: and I said: - Yes, the restraint, of course, comes to this door. “It was a ten-inch hemisphere of yellowish metal - gold, in fact, pure gold!

This is why it happened: we had to conduct an experiment to see how many neutrons are reflected by different materials. This was necessary so that we could save neutrons and not use too much fissile matter. We tested a lot of carved materials: tested platinum, tested zinc, brass, gold. And when testing gold, we ended up with whole pieces of it, and someone came up with the clever idea of using a large ball of gold as a door stop in the room that contained the plutonium.

When it was over, there was a tremendous excitement in Los Alamos. Everyone was having parties and we were running all over the place. I huddled in the corner of the jeep and beat the drum and all that. But one man, I remember, Bob Wilson, sat depressed and impassive.

- Why are you moping? I asked him.

He said, “What we have done is terrible.

I was surprised: - But you yourself started it. It was you who brought us all into this.

Do you understand what happened to me, what happened to all of us? We started out with good intentions, then worked hard to complete something important. It’s a pleasure, it’s very exciting. And you stop thinking, you know, you just stop. Bob Wilson was the only one who still thought about it at that moment.

I soon returned to civilization and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was very strange. I cannot fully understand him, but my feeling was very strong. For example, I was sitting in a restaurant in New York, looking at buildings and, you know, starting to think about what was the radius of destruction from the bomb in Hiroshima and the like ... How far from here 34th Street ... All these buildings - destroyed, razed to the ground and all that. And when I passed by and saw people building a bridge or building a new road, I thought - they are crazy, they just don’t understand, they don’t understand. Why are they doing new things? It's so useless.

But, fortunately, this uselessness has been dragging on for almost forty years, hasn't it? I turned out to be wrong in thinking that it is useless to build bridges, and I am glad that those other people were smart enough to move forward.

Science and life. 1988. No. 8.

About the book "You, of course, are kidding, Mr. Feynman!" Richard Phillips Feynman

Richard Feynman is one of the most famous American physicists of the 20th century. Nobel laureate, one of the founders of quantum electrodynamics, participant in the development of the atomic bomb, reformer of teaching physics in higher educational institutions - in a word, a very serious person. Is it possible to believe that this outstanding scientist adored jokes and practical jokes, casually opening the safes of his colleagues to leave joke notes there, playing exotic musical instruments, and during a business meeting he could tell his superiors that they were doing complete nonsense?

"You, of course, are kidding, Mr. Feynman" is a collection of autobiographical stories about a unique person who by his existence destroyed the stereotype that a real talented scientist is a cracker with no sense of humor, completely devoid of simple human weaknesses, and all his time devoted exclusively to scientific research in the laboratory.

Among other things, Richard Feynman was known as an excellent speaker. His lectures, exciting, like a detective novel, were sought not only by students and colleagues, but also by people who are passionate about physics. With the same artistry, the physicist talked about his own life in a circle of friends. Feynman's friend Ralph Leighton recorded these stories on a tape recorder for seven years, later deciphered them and translated them into text form, and in 1985 they formed the basis of the book "You are kidding, Mr. Feynman", which we strongly recommend that you read.

In fact, this collection is the very stories that bosom friends share with each other. They cover all the main periods of Feynman's life - his student years, work in the so-called "Manhattan Project", within the framework of which leading scientists from the USA, Great Britain, Germany and Canada developed nuclear weapons, participation in psychological experiments, cooperation with the commission that investigated the Challenger shuttle disaster. ".

Who just needs to read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman? First of all, for those who are used to taking life too seriously. Richard Feynman is an illustration of the fact that real success can only be achieved by a person who is seriously interested in his work, but is not obsessed with it. Moreover, only a comprehensively developed personality, open to everything new and ready to constantly comprehend the unknown, is able to appreciate the beauty of life.

In addition, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman is a great motivator for those who have lost interest in the activities they are forced to do. She returns faith in her own strength, awakens curiosity and desire, following the example of her protagonist, to also try her hand at the most unexpected areas.

On our site about books, you can download the site for free without registration or read the online book "You are, of course, joking, Mr. Feynman!" Richard Phillips Feynman in epub, fb2, txt, rtf, pdf formats for iPad, iPhone, Android and Kindle. The book will give you a lot of pleasant moments and real pleasure from reading. You can buy the full version from our partner. Also, here you will find the latest news from the literary world, find out the biography of your favorite authors. For novice writers, there is a separate section with useful tips and advice, interesting articles, thanks to which you yourself can try your hand at literary skill.

Quotes from the book "Of course you are kidding, Mr. Feynman!" Richard Phillips Feynman

It is not the property that we have that matters, but the ability to create this property.

Of course, you only live once, you make all the mistakes you have to make, you learn what you don’t have to do, and this is the best thing you can learn.

The main principle is not to fool yourself. And yourself is just the easiest to fool. You have to be very careful here.

I have a poor idea of what is happening to people: they do not learn by understanding. They learn in some other way - by rote memorization or otherwise. Their knowledge is so fragile!

You keep telling yourself, “I can do it, but I won't,” but this is nothing more than another way of saying that you cannot.

To add one second to your life, you have to fly around the earth 400 million times, but all these airplane breakfasts will shorten your life much more significantly.

How much do you value life?
- Sixty four.
- Why did you say sixty-four?
- How do you think you can measure the value of life?
- No! I mean, why did you say sixty-four and not seventy-three, for example?
- If I said seventy three. You would ask me the same question!

You are not responsible for what other people expect from you. If too much is expected of you, then it is their fault, not your fault.
(You don’t have to be at the level of other people's idea of what you are capable of achieving. I don’t have to be the way they want me to be. This is their mistake, not my flaw.)

I slowed down - in the first place I saw - and carefully read the next sentence. I don't remember it exactly, but it was very similar to this: "An individual member of a social community often receives information through visual, symbolic channels." I turned the sentence this way and that, and finally translated it into normal language. Do you know what it meant? "People are reading."

When I was eleven or twelve years old, I set up a laboratory in my home. It consisted of an old wooden packing box, into which I inserted shelves. I also had an electric stove (on which I often fried potatoes cut into strips in oil), as well as a battery and a lamp unit.

To build it, I went to the store, where each item was worth five to ten cents, bought lamp holders that could be screwed onto a wooden base, and connected them with pieces of bell wire. I knew that with different combinations of switches - series or parallel - different voltage values could be obtained. What I didn’t know was that the resistance of a light bulb depends on its temperature, and as a result, the results of my calculations did not correspond to the voltages that the circuit actually created. Well, nothing, when the bulbs were connected in parallel, they burned in full smoldering, it turned out very beautifully - just great!

There was also a fuse in this system, so if I short-circuited something, it just burned out. I must say that I needed fuses weaker than those in the house, and I made them myself - I took staniol and wrapped it around the fuse that had already flown. I connected in series a five-watt light bulb to it - when the fuse burned out, the voltage of the buffer rectifier, which constantly recharged the battery, was supplied to the light bulb. This light was located on the control panel, covered with a piece of brown paper from the pastry shop (when the light flashed behind the paper, it turned red) - if something burned out, I just had to look at the shield, and I saw a big red spot where the fuse went off ... In general, I had a very interesting time!

I loved radios. I started with a detector one, bought it in a store and at night in bed, listened to transmissions through headphones until I fell asleep. If my father and mother came home late, they would come into my room and take off my headphones, worrying about what was going on in my head while I slept.

Around this time, I invented a burglar alarm, very simple: a large battery and an electric bell, connected by a wire. When the door to my room opened, she pressed the wire to the battery terminal, closed the circuit, and the bell would ring.

One day my father and mother returned home late in the evening and, fearing to wake me up, quietly opened my door ajar to come in and take off my headphones. And suddenly the bell raised a devilish noise - DZIN-DZIN-DZIN !!! And I jumped out of bed, yelling: “It works! Works!"

I had a Ford induction coil — a common car ignition coil — with which I built spark contacts on top of my control panel. I connected in series with them a rheostat lamp filled with argon from those produced by the Raytheon company: when spark discharges passed, the gas in it began to glow purple - beauty!

Once I was playing with a Ford coil, punching holes in the paper with sparks, and the paper suddenly caught fire. Soon I could no longer hold it in my hand — the fire burned my fingers — and dropped it into a metal rubbish bin full of newspapers. Newspapers are known to burn briskly, and soon a flame was already blazing in the room. I closed the door so that my mother, who was playing bridge with her friends in the living room, would not notice that I was on fire, grabbed the first magazine that came under my arm and covered a bucket with it in order to extinguish the fire.

The flame went out, I removed the magazine, but now the room was filling with smoke. The bucket was too hot to handle, so I picked it up with the pliers, carried it across the room, and put it out the window, hoping the breeze would blow the smoke away.

However, the breeze blowing outside revived the fire, and now I could not reach the magazine. I had to drag the burning bucket into the room again to take the magazine, and by the way, there were curtains on the windows - it was very dangerous!

One way or another, I picked up the magazine, smothered the flame with it again and this time kept it with me while I shook the ash out of the bucket from a height of three, it seems, floors. Then he left the room, closed the door behind him and told my mother: "I'll go outside and play." Smoke was gradually drawn out of the room through the open windows.

In addition to all this, I built all sorts of things from electric motors and assembled an amplifier for the photocell I bought - when I held my hand in front of it, the amplifier made the bell ring. I didn’t have time to do everything I wanted, because my mother sent me out to play all the time. Nevertheless, I often stayed at home and fiddled with my laboratory.

I bought radios at an old-clothes sale. I had practically no money, but the receivers were inexpensive - old, broken - I bought them and tried to fix them. As a rule, the breakdowns were unpretentious - in some receivers, wires that were immediately conspicuous were hanging down, in others the coil was damaged or simply unwound - so I was able to quickly revive some of them. One night I caught a WACO station on one of these receivers — from Waco, Texas — and I was terribly excited about it!

It was with the help of this tube receiver that I managed to catch the UGN station from Schenectady. I must say that we, the children - my two cousins, my sister and the neighbour's children - listened on the ground floor on the radio to an exciting program called "The INO Crime Club" - it was impossible to tear yourself away! So, I found that I can listen to this program in my laboratory on "UGN" an hour earlier than it is broadcast in New York! I found out what was going to happen in it, and then, when we all sat down in front of the receiver, who was standing below, to listen to the new release, I said: “You know, we haven't heard of such and such for a long time. We bet he will appear now and help everyone out. "

And a couple of seconds later - bang! - he appeared. Everyone was completely delighted, and after that I predicted a couple more events. In the end, they guessed that there was some kind of trick - that I would know everything from somewhere in advance. I had to admit that I was listening to the program at my place an hour earlier.

The result is naturally clear to you even without my explanations. Now no one wanted to wait for the usual start time of the program. Everyone strove to go upstairs, to my laboratory, and sit for half an hour in front of a small crackling receiver, listening to the transmission of the INO Crime Club from Schenectady.

At that time we lived in a large house - my grandfather left it to his children, and they did not have any special wealth, except for this house. The house was huge, wooden, I stretched wires along it from the outside and stuck sockets throughout the rooms so that I could, wherever I was, listen to the receivers that worked in my laboratory upstairs. And I also got a loudspeaker - not a whole one, but a part of it, without a large upper speaker.

Once, putting on headphones, I connected them to the speaker and made a small discovery: when I swiped the speaker with my finger, I heard the sound of this movement. That is, it turned out that the speaker can work as a microphone and does not even require any power supply. We were at Alexander Graham Bell School at the time, and I demonstrated the speaker-to-earphone connection. I think, although I did not know it then, that it was this type of phone that he originally used.

Therefore, I had a microphone, and I could, using the speakers of the receivers bought at the sale, broadcast programs from one floor of our house to another. At that time, my sister Joan, who was nine years later than me, was two or three years old, and she loved to listen to the radio programs of a certain "Uncle Don". He sang songs about "good children" and the like, read letters from his parents: "This Saturday will celebrate the birthday of Mary So-and-so at 25 Flatbush Avenue."

One fine day, my cousin Francis and I sat Joan downstairs, saying there was going to be a special show that she should listen to, and we ran upstairs and started broadcasting: “This is Uncle Don speaking. We know of a very nice little girl named Joan who lives on New Broadway; soon her birthday - not today, but on such and such a date. A very nice girl. " Then we sang a song, followed by the music: "Didley-didli, tram-pam-pam ..."

How is it? Did you like the program?

Good, - she answered, - but why did you play music with your mouth?

Once I got a phone call:

Mister, are you Richard Feynman?

You are harassed from the hotel. Our radio is not working here, we would like to fix it. As far as we know, you know how.

But I'm just a boy, ”I replied. - Do not know how...

Yes, we know that, and yet, do a favor, come.

The hotel was run by my aunt, but I did not know about it. And he came - the story is still being told there - with a hefty screwdriver sticking out of the back pocket of his trousers. However, I was small in stature, so no matter what screwdriver I put in my back pocket, any one would seem hefty.

I walked over to the receiver intending to fix it. How this is done, I had no idea at all, but the hotel had its own jack of all trades, and either he or I, in general, one of us noticed that the knob of the rheostat - the volume control - got loose and began to scroll on the axis. The master took it off, sawed something in it, put it back in place - and everything worked.

The next receiver, which I undertook to fix, did not work at all. But everything turned out to be simple with him: he was connected to the wrong power supply. My further repairs became more and more difficult, I coped with them more and more sensibly, gaining skill. I bought a milliammeter in New York and converted it into a multi-scale voltmeter using pieces of very thin copper wire of different lengths (calculated by me). My voltmeter was not particularly accurate, but it made it possible to find out whether the voltages in different nodes of the receivers had the correct order of magnitude.

The main reason people approached me was Depression. They had no money to actually repair the radios, but then they heard rumors about a boy who fixes the receivers, taking almost nothing to work. So I also had to climb roofs - tidy up the antennas - and do a lot of other things. I've learned a variety of lessons, one more difficult than the other. In the end, I was asked to redo the power supply of one receiver - from constant to variable, - as a result, the whole system began to flicker, and I could not cope with this. The task was simply beyond me, and I had no idea about it.

One of my fixes made a splash. I was then working in a printing house, and a friend of its owner, upon learning that I was undertaking to repair radios, came to pick me up right at work. He was clearly not a rich man - the car in which we drove to his house in the cheap quarter of the city just did not fall apart on the move. Dear I ask:

So what about the receiver?

He answers:

When you turn it on, it hisses. Then the hiss dies down and everything works fine. The hiss just annoys me.

Due to the restrictions imposed by copyright, we have to end quoting the chapter "He fixes the radio in his mind" at this point. Continuation of this chapter (albeit in a different translation), as well as the full text of the book by Richard Feynman "Of course you are kidding, Mr. Feynman!" can be read.