al error." Because
the next time I heard this same cackle, "Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh," from Mrs.
Eisenhart, somebody was kissing her hand as he left.
Another time, perhaps a year later, at another tea, I was talking to
Professor Wildt, an astronomer who had worked out some theory about the
clouds on Venus. They were supposed to be formaldehyde (it's wonderful to
know what we once worried about) and he had it all figured out, how the
formaldehyde was precipitating, and so on. It was extremely interesting. We
were talking about all this stuff, when a little lady came up and said, "Mr.
Feynman, Mrs. Eisenhart would like to see you."
"OK, just a minute..." and I kept talking to Wildt.
The little lady came back again and said, "Mr. Feynman, Mrs. Eisenhart
would like to see you."
"OK, OK!" and I go over to Mrs. Eisenhart, who's pouring tea.
"Would you like to have some coffee or tea, Mr. Feynman?"
"Mrs. So-and-so says you wanted to talk to me."
"Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Would you like to have coffee, or tea, Mr.
Feynman?"
"Tea," I said, "thank you."
A few moments later Mrs. Eisenhart's daughter and a schoolmate came
over, and we were introduced to each other. The whole idea of this
"heh-heh-heh" was: Mrs. Eisenhart didn't want to talk to me, she wanted me
over there getting tea when her daughter and friend came over, so they would
have someone to talk to. That's the way it worked. By that time I knew what
to do when I heard "Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh." I didn't say, "What do you mean,
'Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh'?"; I knew the "heh-heh-heh" meant "error," and I'd
better get it straightened out.
Every night we wore academic gowns to dinner. The first night it scared
the life out of me, because I didn't like formality. But I soon realized
that the gowns were a great advantage. Guys who were out playing tennis
could rush into their room, grab their academic gown, and put it on. They
didn't have to take time off to change their clothes or take a shower. So
underneath the gowns there were bare arms, T-shirts, everything.
Furthermore, there was a rule that you never cleaned the gown, so you could
tell a first-year man from a second-year man, from a third-year man, from a
pig! You never cleaned the gown and you never repaired it, so the first-year
men had very nice, relatively clean gowns, but by the time you got to the
third year or so, it was nothing but some kind of cardboard thing on your
shoulders with tatters hanging down from it.
So when I got to Princeton, I went to that tea on Sunday afternoon and
had dinner that evening in an academic gown at the "College." But on Monday,
the first thing I wanted to do was to see the cyclotron.
MIT had built a new cyclotron while I was a student there, and it was
just beautiful! The cyclotron itself was in one room, with the controls in
another room. It was beautifully engineered. The wires ran from the control
room to the cyclotron underneath in conduits, and there was a whole console
of buttons and meters. It was what I would call a gold-plated cyclotron.
Now I had read a lot of papers on cyclotron experiments, and there
weren't many from MIT. Maybe they were just starting. But there were lots of
results from places like Cornell, and Berkeley, and above all, Princeton.
Therefore what I really wanted to see, what I was looking forward to, was
the PRINCETON CYCLOTRON. That must be something.
So first thing on Monday, I go into the physics building and ask,
"Where is the cyclotron -- which building?"
"It's downstairs, in the basement -- at the end of the hall."
In the basement? It was an old building. There was no room in the
basement for a cyclotron. I walked down to the end of the hall, went through
the door, and in ten seconds I learned why Princeton was right for me -- the
best place for me to go to school. In this room there were wires strung all
over the place! Switches were hanging from the wires, cooling water was
dripping from the valves, the room was full of stuff, all out in the open.
Tables piled with tools were everywhere; it was the most godawful mess you
ever saw. The whole cyclotron was there in one room, and it was complete,
absolute chaos!
It reminded me of my lab at home. Nothing at MIT had ever reminded me
of my lab at home. I suddenly realized why Princeton was getting results.
They were working with the instrument. They built the instrument; they knew
where everything was, they knew how everything worked, there was no engineer
involved, except maybe he was working there too. It was much smaller than
the cyclotron at MIT, and "gold-plated"? -- it was the exact opposite. When
they wanted to fix a vacuum, they'd drip glyptal on it, so there were drops
of glyptal on the floor. It was wonderful! Because they worked with it. They
didn't have to sit in another room and push buttons! (Incidentally, they had
a fire in that room, because of all the chaotic mess that they had -- too
many wires -- and it destroyed the cyclotron. But I'd better not tell about
that!)
(When I got to Cornell I went to look at the cyclotron there. This
cyclotron hardly required a room: It was about a yard across -- the diameter
of the whole thing. It was the world's smallest cyclotron, but they had got
fantastic results. They had all kinds of special techniques and tricks. If
they wanted to change something in the "D's" -- the D-shaped half circles
that the particles go around -- they'd take a screwdriver, and remove the
D's by hand, fix them, and put them back. At Princeton it was a lot harder,
and at MIT you had to take a crane that came rolling across the ceiling,
lower the hooks, and it was a hellllll of a job.)
I learned a lot of different things from different schools. MIT is a
very good place; I'm not trying to put it down. I was just in love with it.
It has developed for itself a spirit, so that every member of the whole
place thinks that it's the most wonderful place in the world -- it's the
center, somehow, of scientific and technological development in the United
States, if not the world. It's like a New Yorker's view of New York: they
forget the rest of the country. And while you don't get a good sense of
proportion there, you do get an excellent sense of being with it and in it,
and having motivation and desire to keep on -- that you're specially chosen,
and lucky to be there.
So MIT was good, but Slater was right to warn me to go to another
school for my graduate work. And I often advise my students the same way.
Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.
I once did an experiment in the cyclotron laboratory at Princeton that
had some startling results. There was a problem in a hydrodynamics book that
was being discussed by all the physics students. The problem is this: You
have an S-shaped lawn sprinkler -- an S-shaped pipe on a pivot -- and the
water squirts out at right angles to the axis and makes it spin in a certain
direction. Everybody knows which way it goes around; it backs away from the
outgoing water. Now the question is this: If you had a lake, or swimming
pool -- a big supply of water -- and you put the sprinkler completely under
water, and sucked the water in, instead of squirting it out, which way would
it turn? Would it turn the same way as it does when you squirt water out
into the air, or would it turn the other way?
The answer is perfectly clear at first sight. The trouble was, some guy
would think it was perfectly clear one way, and another guy would think it
was perfectly clear the other way. So everybody was discussing it. I
remember at one particular seminar, or tea, somebody went up to Prof. John
Wheeler and said, "Which way do you think it goes around?"
Wheeler said, "Yesterday, Feynman convinced me that it went backwards.
Today, he's convinced me equally well that it goes around the other way. I
don't know what he'll convince me of tomorrow!"
I'll tell you an argument that will make you think it's one way, and
another argument that will make you think it's the other way, OK?
One argument is that when you're sucking water in, you're sort of
pulling the water with the nozzle, so it will go forward, towards the
incoming water.
But then another guy comes along and says, "Suppose we hold it still
and ask what kind of a torque we need to hold it still. In the case of the
water going out, we all know you have to hold it on the outside of the
curve, because of the centrifugal force of the water going around the curve.
Now, when the water goes around the same curve the other way, it still makes
the same centrifugal force toward the outside of the curve. Therefore the
two cases are the same, and the sprinkler will go around the same way,
whether you're squirting water out or sucking it in."
After some thought, I finally made up my mind what the answer was, and
in order to demonstrate it, I wanted to do an experiment.
In the Princeton cyclotron lab they had a big carboy -- a monster
bottle of water. I thought this was just great for the experiment. I got a
piece of copper tubing and bent it into an S-shape. Then in the middle I
drilled a hole, stuck in a piece of rubber hose, and led it up through a
hole in a cork I had put in the top of the bottle. The cork had another
hole, into which I put another piece of rubber hose, and connected it to the
air pressure supply of the lab. By blowing air into the bottle, I could
force water into the copper tubing exactly as if I were sucking it in. Now,
the S-shaped tubing wouldn't turn around, but it would twist (because of the
flexible rubber hose), and I was going to measure the speed of the water
flow by measuring how far it squirted out of the top of the bottle.
I got it all set up, turned on the air supply, and it went "Puup!" The
air pressure blew the cork out of the bottle. I wired it in very well, so it
wouldn't jump out. Now the experiment was going pretty good. The water was
coming out, and the hose was twisting, so I put a little more pressure on
it, because with a higher speed, the measurements would be more accurate. I
measured the angle very carefully, and measured the distance, and increased
the pressure again, and suddenly the whole thing just blew glass and water
in all directions throughout the laboratory. A guy who had come to watch got
all wet and had to go home and change his clothes (it's a miracle he didn't
get cut by the glass), and lots of cloud chamber pictures that had been
taken patiently using the cyclotron were all wet, but for some reason I was
far enough away, or in some such position that I didn't get very wet. But
I'll always remember how the great Professor Del Sasso, who was in charge of
the cyclotron, came over to me and said sternly, "The freshman experiments
should be done in the freshman laboratory!"
--------
Meeeeeeeeeee!
On Wednesdays at the Princeton Graduate College, various people would
come in to give talks. The speakers were often interesting, and in the
discussions after the talks we used to have a lot of fun. For instance, one
guy in our school was very strongly anti-Catholic, so he passed out
questions in advance for people to ask a religious speaker, and we gave the
speaker a hard time.
Another time somebody gave a talk about poetry. He talked about the
structure of the poem and the emotions that come with it; he divided
everything up into certain kinds of classes. In the discussion that came
afterwards, he said, "Isn't that the same as in mathematics, Dr. Eisenhart?"
Dr. Eisenhart was the dean of the graduate school and a great professor
of mathematics. He was also very clever. He said, "I'd like to know what
Dick Feynman thinks about it in reference to theoretical physics." He was
always putting me on in this kind of situation.
I got up and said, "Yes, it's very closely related. In theoretical
physics, the analog of the word is the mathematical formula, the analog of
the structure of the poem is the interrelationship of the theoretical
bling-bling with the so-and-so" -- and I went through the whole thing,
making a perfect analogy. The speaker's eyes were beaming with happiness.
Then I said, "It seems to me that no matter what you say about poetry,
I could find a way of making up an analog with any subject, just as I did
for theoretical physics. I don't consider such analogs meaningful."
In the great big dining hall with stained-glass windows, where we
always ate, in our steadily deteriorating academic gowns, Dean Eisenhart
would begin each dinner by saying grace in Latin. After dinner he would
often get up and make some announcements. One night Dr. Eisenhart got up and
said, "Two weeks from now, a professor of psychology is coming to give a
talk about hypnosis. Now, this professor thought it would be much better if
we had a real demonstration of hypnosis instead of just talking about it.
Therefore he would like some people to volunteer to be hypnotized..."
I get all excited: There's no question but that I've got to find out
about hypnosis. This is going to be terrific!
Dean Eisenhart went on to say that it would be good if three or four
people would volunteer so that the hypnotist could try them out first to see
which ones would be able to be hypnotized, so he'd like to urge very much
that we apply for this. (He's wasting all this time, for God's sake!)
Eisenhart was down at one end of the hall, and I was way down at the
other end, in the back. There were hundreds of guys there. I knew that
everybody was going to want to do this, and I was terrified that he wouldn't
see me because I was so far back. I just had to get in on this
demonstration!
Finally Eisenhart said, "And so I would like to ask if there are going
to be any volunteers..."
I raised my hand and shot out of my seat, screaming as loud as I could,
to make sure that he would hear me: "MEEEEEEEEEEE!"
He heard me all right, because there wasn't another soul. My voice
reverberated throughout the hall -- it was very embarrassing. Eisenhart's
immediate reaction was, "Yes, of course, I knew you would volunteer, Mr.
Feynman, but I was wondering if there would be anybody else."
Finally a few other guys volunteered, and a week before the
demonstration the man came to practice on us, to see if any of us would be
good for hypnosis. I knew about the phenomenon, but I didn't know what it
was like to be hypnotized.
He started to work on me and soon I got into a position where he said,
"You can't open your eyes."
I said to myself, "I bet I could open my eyes, but I don't want to
disturb the situation: Let's see how much further it goes." It was an
interesting situation: You're only slightly fogged out, and although you've
lost a little bit, you're pretty sure you could open your eyes. But of
course, you're not opening your eyes, so in a sense you can't do it.
He went through a lot of stuff and decided that I was pretty good.
When the real demonstration came he had us walk on stage, and he
hypnotized us in front of the whole Princeton Graduate College. This time
the effect was stronger; I guess I had learned how to become hypnotized. The
hypnotist made various demonstrations, having me do things that I couldn't
normally do, and at the end he said that after I came out of hypnosis,
instead of returning to my seat directly, which was the natural way to go, I
would walk all the way around the room and go to my seat from the back.
All through the demonstration I was vaguely aware of what was going on,
and cooperating with the things the hypnotist said, but this time I decided,
"Damn it, enough is enough! I'm gonna go straight to my seat."
When it was time to get up and go off the stage, I started to walk
straight to my seat. But then an annoying feeling came over me: I felt so
uncomfortable that I couldn't continue. I walked all the way around the
hall.
I was hypnotized in another situation some time later by a woman. While
I was hypnotized she said, "I'm going to light a match, blow it out, and
immediately touch the back of your hand with it. You will feel no pain."
I thought, "Baloney!" She took a match, lit it, blew it out, and
touched it to the back of my hand. It felt slightly warm. My eyes were
closed throughout all of this, but I was thinking, "That's easy. She lit one
match, but touched a different match to my hand. There's nothin' to that;
it's a fake!"
When I came out of the hypnosis and looked at the back of my hand, I
got the biggest surprise: There was a burn on the back of my hand. Soon a
blister grew, and it never hurt at all, even when it broke.
So I found hypnosis to be a very interesting experience. All the time
you're saying to yourself, "I could do that, but I won't" -- which is just
another way of saying that you can't.
--------
A Map of the Cat?
In the Graduate College dining room at Princeton everybody used to sit
with his own group. I sat with the physicists, but after a bit I thought: It
would be nice to see what the rest of the world is doing, so I'll sit for a
week or two in each of the other groups.
When I sat with the philosophers I listened to them discuss very
seriously a book called Process and Reality by Whitehead. They were using
words in a funny way, and I couldn't quite understand what they were saying.
Now I didn't want to interrupt them in their own conversation and keep
asking them to explain something, and on the few occasions that I did,
they'd try to explain it to me, but I still didn't get it. Finally they
invited me to come to their seminar.
They had a seminar that was like a class. It had been meeting once a
week to discuss a new chapter out of Process and Reality -- some guy would
give a report on it and then there would be a discussion. I went to this
seminar promising myself to keep my mouth shut, reminding myself that I
didn't know anything about the subject, and I was going there just to watch.
What happened there was typical -- so typical that it was unbelievable,
but true. First of all, I sat there without saying anything, which is almost
unbelievable, but also true. A student gave a report on the chapter to be
studied that week. In it Whitehead kept using the words "essential object"
in a particular technical way that presumably he had defined, but that I
didn't understand.
After some discussion as to what "essential object" meant, the
professor leading the seminar said something meant to clarify things and
drew something that looked like lightning bolts on the blackboard. "Mr.
Feynman," he said, "would you say an electron is an 'essential object'?"
Well, now I was in trouble. I admitted that I hadn't read the book, so
I had no idea of what Whitehead meant by the phrase; I had only come to
watch. "But," I said, "I'll try to answer the professor's question if you
will first answer a question from me, so I can have a better idea of what
'essential object' means. Is a brick an essential object?"
What I had intended to do was to find out whether they thought
theoretical constructs were essential objects. The electron is a theory that
we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can
almost call it real. I wanted to make the idea of a theory clear by analogy.
In the case of the brick, my next question was going to be, "What about the
inside of the brick?" -- and I would then point out that no one has ever
seen the inside of a brick. Every time you break the brick, you only see the
surface. That the brick has an inside is a simple theory which helps us
understand things better. The theory of electrons is analogous. So I began
by asking, "Is a brick an essential object?"
Then the answers came out. One man stood up and said, "A brick as an
individual, specific brick. That is what Whitehead means by an essential
object."
Another man said, "No, it isn't the individual brick that is an
essential object; it's the general character that all bricks have in common
-- their 'brickness' -- that is the essential object."
Another guy got up and said, "No, it's not in the bricks themselves.
'Essential object' means the idea in the mind that you get when you think of
bricks."
Another guy got up, and another, and I tell you I have never heard such
ingenious different ways of looking at a brick before. And, just like it
should in all stories about philosophers, it ended up in complete chaos. In
all their previous discussions they hadn't even asked themselves whether
such a simple object as a brick, much less an electron, is an "essential
object."
After that I went around to the biology table at dinner time. I had
always had some interest in biology, and the guys talked about very
interesting things. Some of them invited me to come to a course they were
going to have in cell physiology. I knew something about biology, but this
was a graduate course. "Do you think I can handle it? Will the professor let
me in?" I asked.
They asked the instructor, E. Newton Harvey, who had done a lot of
research on light-producing bacteria. Harvey said I could join this special,
advanced course provided one thing -- that I would do all the work, and
report on papers just like everybody else.
Before the first class meeting, the guys who had invited me to take the
course wanted to show me some things under the microscope. They had some
plant cells in there, and you could see some little green spots called
chloroplasts (they make sugar when light shines on them) circulating around.
I looked at them and then looked up: "How do they circulate? What pushes
them around?" I asked.
Nobody knew. It turned out that it was not understood at that time. So
right away I found out something about biology: it was very easy to find a
question that was very interesting, and that nobody knew the answer to. In
physics you had to go a little deeper before you could find an interesting
question that people didn't know.
When the course began, Harvey started out by drawing a great, big
picture of a cell on the blackboard and labeling all the things that are in
a cell. He then talked about them, and I understood most of what he said.
After the lecture, the guy who had invited me said, "Well, how did you
like it?"
"Just fine," I said. "The only part I didn't understand was the part
about lecithin. What is lecithin?"
The guy begins to explain in a monotonous voice: "All living creatures,
both plant and animal, are made of little bricklike objects called
'cells'..."
"Listen," I said, impatiently, "I know all that; otherwise I wouldn't
be in the course. What is lecithin?"
"I don't know."
I had to report on papers along with everyone else, and the first one I
was assigned was on the effect of pressure on cells -- Harvey chose that
topic for me because it had something that had to do with physics. Although
I understood what I was doing, I mispronounced everything when I read my
paper, and the class was always laughing hysterically when I'd talk about
"blastospheres" instead of "blastomeres," or some other such thing.
The next paper selected for me was by Adrian and Bronk. They
demonstrated that nerve impulses were sharp, single-pulse phenomena. They
had done experiments with cats in which they had measured voltages on
nerves.
I began to read the paper. It kept talking about extensors and flexors,
the gastrocnemius muscle, and so on. This and that muscle were named, but I
hadn't the foggiest idea of where they were located in relation to the
nerves or to the cat. So I went to the librarian in the biology section and
asked her if she could find me a map of the cat.
"A map of the cat, sir?" she asked, horrified. "You mean a zoological
chart!" From then on there were rumors about some dumb biology graduate
student who was looking for a "map of the cat."
When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off
by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!"
"Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast
after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time
memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
After the war, every summer I would go traveling by car somewhere in
the United States. One year, after I was at Caltech, I thought, "This
summer, instead of going to a different place, I'll go to a different
field."
It was right after Watson and Crick's discovery of the DNA spiral.
There were some very good biologists at Caltech because Delbrück had his lab
there, and Watson came to Caltech to give some lectures on the coding
systems of DNA. I went to his lectures and to seminars in the biology
department and got full of enthusiasm. It was a very exciting time in
biology, and Caltech was a wonderful place to be.
I didn't think I was up to doing actual research in biology, so for my
summer visit to the field of biology I thought I would just hang around the
biology lab and "wash dishes," while I watched what they were doing. I went
over to the biology lab to tell them my desire, and Bob Edgar, a young
post-doc who was sort of in charge there, said he wouldn't let me do that.
He said, "You'll have to really do some research, just like a graduate
student, and we'll give you a problem to work on." That suited me fine.
I took a phage course, which told us how to do research with
bacteriophages (a phage is a virus that contains DNA and attacks bacteria).
Right away I found that I was saved a lot of trouble because I knew some
physics and mathematics. I knew how atoms worked in liquids, so there was
nothing mysterious about how the centrifuge worked. I knew enough statistics
to understand the statistical errors in counting little spots in a dish. So
while all the biology guys were trying to understand these "new" things, I
could spend my time learning the biology part.
There was one useful lab technique I learned in that course which I
still use today. They taught us how to hold a test tube and take its cap off
with one hand (you use your middle and index fingers), while leaving the
other hand free to do something else (like hold a pipette that you're
sucking cyanide up into). Now, I can hold my toothbrush in one hand, and
with the other hand, hold the tube of toothpaste, twist the cap off, and put
it back on.
It had been discovered that phages could have mutations which would
affect their ability to attack bacteria, and we were supposed to study those
mutations. There were also some phages that would have a second mutation
which would reconstitute their ability to attack bacteria. Some phages which
mutated back were exactly the same as they were before. Others were not:
There was a slight difference in their effect on bacteria -- they would act
faster or slower than normal, and the bacteria would grow slower or faster
than normal. In other words, there were "back mutations," but they weren't
always perfect; sometimes the phage would recover only part of the ability
it had lost.
Bob Edgar suggested that I do an experiment which would try to find out
if the back mutations occurred in the same place on the DNA spiral. With
great care and a lot of tedious work I was able to find three examples of
back mutations which had occurred very close together -- closer than
anything they had ever seen so far -- and which partially restored the
phage's ability to function. It was a slow job. It was sort of accidental:
You had to wait around until you got a double mutation, which was very rare.
I kept trying to think of ways to make a phage mutate more often and
how to detect mutations more quickly, but before I could come up with a good
technique the summer was over, and I didn't feel like continuing on that
problem.
However, my sabbatical year was coming up, so I decided to work in the
same biology lab but on a different subject. I worked with Matt Meselson to
some extent, and then with a nice fella from England named J. D. Smith. The
problem had to do with ribosomes, the "machinery" in the cell that makes
protein from what we now call messenger RNA. Using radioactive substances,
we demonstrated that the RNA could come out of ribosomes and could be put
back in.
I did a very careful job in measuring and trying to control everything,
but it took me eight months to realize that there was one step that was
sloppy. In preparing the bacteria, to get the ribosomes out, in those days
you ground it up with alumina in a mortar. Everything else was chemical and
all under control, but you could never repeat the way you pushed the pestle
around when you were grinding the bacteria. So nothing ever came of the
experiment.
Then I guess I have to tell about the time I tried with Hildegarde
Lamfrom to discover whether peas could use the same ribosomes as bacteria.
The question was whether the ribosomes of bacteria can manufacture the
proteins of humans or other organisms. She had just developed a scheme for
getting the ribosomes out of peas and giving them messenger RNA so that they
would make pea proteins. We realized that a very dramatic and important
question was whether ribosomes from bacteria, when given the peas' messenger
RNA, would make pea protein or bacteria protein. It was to be a very
dramatic and fundamental experiment.
Hildegarde said, "I'll need a lot of ribosomes from bacteria."
Meselson and I had extracted enormous quantities of ribosomes from E.
coli for some other experiment. I said, "Hell, I'll just give you the
ribosomes we've got. We have plenty of them in my refrigerator at the lab."
It would have been a fantastic and vital discovery if I had been a good
biologist. But I wasn't a good biologist. We had a good idea, a good
experiment, the right equipment, but I screwed it up: I gave her infected
ribosomes -- the grossest possible error that you could make in an
experiment like that. My ribosomes had been in the refrigerator for almost a
month, and had become contaminated with some other living things. Had I
prepared those ribosomes promptly over again and given them to her in a
serious and careful way, with everything under control, that experiment
would have worked,, and we would have been the first to demonstrate the
uniformity of life: the machinery of making proteins, the ribosomes, is the
same in every creature. We were there at the right place, we were doing the
right things, but I was doing things as an amateur -- stupid and sloppy.
You know what it reminds me of? The husband of Madame Bovary in
Flaubert's book, a dull country doctor who had some idea of how to fix club
feet, and all he did was screw people up. I was similar to that unpracticed
surgeon. The other work on the phage I never wrote up -- Edgar kept asking
me to write it up, but I never got around to it. That's the trouble with not
being in your own field: You don't take it seriously.
I did write something informally on it. I sent it to Edgar, who laughed
when he read it. It wasn't in the standard form that biologists use --
first, procedures, and so forth. I spent a lot of time explaining things
that all the biologists knew. Edgar made a shortened version, but I couldn't
understand it. I don't think they ever published it. I never published it
directly.
Watson thought the stuff I had done with phages was of some interest,
so he invited me to go to Harvard. I gave a talk to the biology department
about the double mutations which occurred so close together. I told them my
guess was that one mutation made a change in the protein, such as changing
the pH of an amino acid, while the other mutation made the opposite change
on a different amino acid in the same protein, so that it partially balanced
the first mutation -- not perfectly, but enough to let the phage operate
again. I thought they were two changes in the same protein, which chemically
compensated each other.
That turned out not to be the case. It was found out a few years later
by people who undoubtedly developed a technique for producing and detecting
the mutations faster, that what happened was, the first mutation was a
mutation in which an entire DNA base was missing. Now the "code" was shifted
and could not be "read" any more. The second mutation was either one in
which an extra base was put back in, or two more were taken out. Now the
code could be read again. The closer the second mutation occurred to the
first, the less message would be altered by the double mutation, and the
more completely the phage would recover its lost abilities. The fact that
there are three "letters" to code each amino acid was thus demonstrated.
While I was at Harvard that week, Watson suggested something and we did
an experiment together for a few days. It was an incomplete experiment, but
I learned some new lab techniques from one of the best men in the field.
But that was my big moment: I gave a seminar in the biology department
of Harvard! I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go.
I learned a lot of things in biology, and I gained a lot of experience.
I got better at pronouncing the words, knowing what not to include in a
paper or a seminar, and detecting a weak technique in an experiment. But I
love physics, and I love to go back to it.
--------
Monster Minds
While I was still a graduate student at Princeton, I worked as a
research assistant under John Wheeler. He gave me a problem to work on, and
it got hard, and I wasn't getting anywhere. So I went back to an idea that I
had had earlier, at MIT. The idea was that electrons don't act on
themselves, they only act on other electrons.
There was this problem: When you shake an electron, it radiates energy,
and so there's a loss. That means there must be a force on it. And there
must be a different force when it's charged than when it's not charged. (If
the force were exactly the same when it was charged and not charged, in one
case it would lose energy, and in the other it wouldn't. You can't have two
different answers to the same problem.)
The standard theory was that it was the electron acting on itself that
made that force (called the force of radiation reaction), and I had only
electrons acting on other electrons. So I was in some difficulty, I
realized, by that time. (When I was at MIT, I got the idea without noticing
the problem, but by the time I got to Princeton, I knew that problem.)
What I thought was: I'll shake this electron. It will make some nearby
electron shake, and the effect back from the nearby electron would be the
origin of the force of radiation reaction. So I did some calculations and
took them to Wheeler.
Wheeler, right away, said, "Well, that isn't right because it varies
inversely as the square of the distance of the other electrons, whereas it
should not depend on any of these variables at all. It'll also depend
inversely upon the mass of the other electron; it'll be proportional to the
charge on the other electron."
What bothered me was, I thought he must have done the calculation. I
only realized later that a man like Wheeler could immediately see all that
stuff when you give him the problem. I had to calculate, but he could see.
Then he said, "And it'll be delayed -- the wave returns late -- so all
you've described is reflected light."
"Oh! Of course," I said.
"But wait," he said. "Let's suppose it returns by advanced waves --
reactions backward in time -- so it comes back at the right time. We saw the
effect varied inversely as the square of the distance, but suppose there are
a lot of electrons, all over space: the number is proportional to the square
of the distance. So maybe we can make it all compensate."
We found out we could do that. It came out very nicely, and fit very
well. It was a classical theory that could be right, even though it differed
from Maxwell's standard, or Lorentz's standard theory. It didn't have any
trouble with the infinity of self-action, and it was ingenious. It had
actions and delays, forwards and backwards in time -- we called it
"half-advanced and half-retarded potentials."
Wheeler and I thought the next problem was to turn to the quantum
theory of electrodynamics, which had difficulties (I thought) with the
self-action of the electron. We figured if we could get rid of the
difficulty first in classical physics, and then make a quantum theory out of
that, we could straighten out the quantum theory as well.
Now that we had got the classical theory right, Wheeler said, "Feynman,
you're a young fella -- you should give a seminar on this. You need
experience in giving talks. Meanwhile, I'll work out the quantum theory part
and give a seminar on that later."
So it was to be my first technical talk, and Wheeler made arrangements
with Eugene Wigner to put it on the regular seminar schedule.
A day or two before the talk I saw Wigner in the hall. "Feynman," he
said, "I think that work you're doing with Wheeler is very interesting, so
I've invited Russell to the seminar." Henry Norris Russell, the famous,
great astronomer of the day, was coming to the lecture!
Wigner went on. "I think Professor von Neumann would also be
interested." Johnny von Neumann was the greatest mathematician around. "And
Professor Pauli is visiting from Switzerland, it so happens, so I've invited
Professor Pauli to come" -- Pauli was a very famous physicist -- and by this
time, I'm turning yellow. Finally, Wigner said, "Professor Einstein only
rarely comes to our weekly seminars, but your work is so interesting that
I've invited him specially, so he's coming, too."
By this time I must have turned green, because Wigner said, "No, no!
Don't worry! I'll just warn you, though: If Professor Russell falls asleep
-- and he will undoubtedly fall asleep -- it doesn't mean that the seminar
is bad; he falls asleep in all the seminars. On the other hand, if Professor
Pauli is nodding all the time, and seems to be in agreement as the seminar
goes along, pay no attention. Professor Pauli has palsy."
I went back to Wheeler and named all the big, famous people who were
coming to the talk he got me to give, and told him I was uneasy about it.
"It's all right," he said. "Don't worry. I'll answer all the
questions."
So I prepared the talk, and when the day came, I went in and did
something that young men who have had no experience in giving talks often do
-- I put too many equations up on the blackboard. You see, a young fella
doesn't know how to say, "Of course, that varies inversely, and this goes
this way..." because everybody listening already knows; they can see it. But
he doesn't know. He can only make it come out by actually doing the algebra
-- and therefore the reams of equations.
As I was writing these equations all over the blackboard ahead of time,
Einstein came in and said pleasantly, "Hello, I'm coming to your seminar.
But first, where is the tea?"
I told him, and continued writing the equations.
Then the time came to give the talk, and here are these monster minds
in front of me, waiting! My first technical talk -- and I have this
audience! I mean they would put me through the wringer! I remember very
clearly seeing my hands shaking as they were pulling out my notes from a
brown envelope.
But then a miracle occurred, as it has occurred again and again in my
life, and it's very lucky for me: the moment I start to think about the
physics, and have to concentrate on what I'm explaining, nothing else
occupies my mind -- I'm completely immune to being nervous. So after I
started to go, I just didn't know who was in the room. I was only explaining
this idea, that's all.
But then the end of the seminar came, and it was time for questions.
First off, Pauli, who was sitting next to Einstein, gets up and says, "I do
not sink dis teory can be right, because of dis, and dis, and dis," and he
turns to Einstein and says, "Don't you agree, Professor Einstein?"
Einstein says, "Nooooooooooooo," a nice, German-sounding "No," -- very
polite. "I find only that it would be very difficult to make a corresponding
theory for gravitational interaction." He meant for the general theory of
relativity, which was his baby. He continued: "Since we have at this time
not a great deal of experimental evidence, I am not absolutely sure of the
correct gravitational theory." Einstein appreciated that things might be
different from what his theory stated; he was very tolerant of other ideas.
I wish I had remembered what Pauli said, because I discovered years
later that the theory was not satisfactory when it came to making the
quantum theory. It's possible that that great man noticed the difficulty
immediately and explained it to me in the question, but I was so relieved at
not having to answer the questions that I didn't really listen to them
carefully. I do remember walking up the steps of Palmer Library with Pauli,
who said to me, "What is Wheeler going to say about the quantum theory when
he gives his talk?"
I said, "I don't know. He hasn't told me. He's working it out himself."
"Oh?" he said. "The man works and doesn't tell his assistant what he's
doing on the quantum theory?" He came closer to me and said in a low,
secretive voice, "Wheeler will never give that seminar."
And it's true. Wheeler didn't give the seminar. He thought it would be
easy to work out the quantum part; he thought he had it, almost. But he
didn't. And by the time the seminar came around, he realized he didn't know
how to do it, and therefore didn't have anything to say.
I never solved it, either -- a quantum theory of half-advanced,
half-retarded potentials -- and I worked on it for years.
--------
Mixing Paints
The reason why I say I'm "uncultured" or "anti-intellectual" probably
goes all the way back to the time when I was in high school. I was always
worried about being a sissy; I didn't want to be too delicate. To me, no
real man ever paid any attention to poetry and such things. How poetry ever
got written -- that never struck me! So I developed a negative attitude
toward the guy who studies French literature, or studies too much music or
poetry -- all those "fancy" things. I admired better the steel-worker, the
welder, or the machine shop man. I always thought the guy who worked in the
machine shop and could make things, now he was a real guy! That was my
attitude. To be a practical man was, to me, always somehow a positive
virtue, and to be "cultured" or "intellectual" was not. The first was right,
of course, but the second was crazy.
I still had this feeling when I was doing my graduate study at
Princeton, as you'll see. I used to eat often in a nice little restaurant
called Papa's Place. One day, while I was eating there, a painter in his
painting clothes came down from an upstairs room he'd been painting, and sat
near me. Somehow we struck up a conversation and he started talking about
how you've got to learn a lot to be in the painting business. "For example,"
he said, "in this restaurant, what colors would you use to paint the walls,
if you had the job to do?"
I said I didn't know, and he said, "You have a dark band up to
such-and-such a height, because, you see, people who sit at the tables rub
their elbows against the walls, so you don't want a nice, white wall there.
It gets dirty too easily. But above that, you do want it white to give a
feeling of cleanliness to the restaurant."
The guy seemed to know what he was doing, and I was sitting there,
hanging on his words, when he said, "And you also have to know about colors
-- how to get different colors when you mix the paint. For example, what
colors would you mix to get yellow?"
I didn't know how to get yellow by mixing paints. If it's light, you
mix green and red, but I knew he was talking paints. So I said, "I don't
know how you get yellow without using yellow."
"Well," he said, "if you mix red and white, you'll get yellow."
"Are you sure you don't mean pink?" "No," he said, "you'll get yellow"
-- and I believed that he got yellow, because he was a professional painter,
and I always admired guys like that. But I still wondered how he did it.
I got an idea. "It must be some kind of chemical change. Were you using
some special kind of pigments that make a chemical change?"
"No," he said, "any old pigments will work. You go down to the
five-and-ten and get some paint -- just a regular can of red paint and a
regular can of white paint -- and I'll mix 'em, and I'll show how you get
yellow."
At this juncture I was thinking, "Something is crazy. I know enough
about paints to know you won't get yellow, but he must know that you do get
yellow, and therefore something interesting happens. I've got to see what it
is!" So I said, "OK, I'll get the paints." The painter went back upstairs to
finish his painting job, and the restaurant owner came over and said to me,
"What's the idea of arguing with that man? The man is a painter; he's been a
painter all his life, and he says he gets yellow. So why argue with him?"
I felt embarrassed. I didn't know what to say. Finally I said, "All my
life, I've been studying light. And I think that with red and white you
can't get yellow -- you can only get pink."
So I went to the five-and-ten and got the paint, and brought it back to
the restaurant. The painter came down from upstairs, and the restaurant
owner was there too. I put the cans of paint on an old chair, and the
painter began to mix the paint. He put a little more red, he put a little
more white -- it still looked pink to me -- and he mixed some more. Then he
mumbled something like, "I used to have a little tube of yellow here to
sharpen it up -- a bit -- then this'll be yellow."
"Oh!" I said. "Of course! You add yellow, and you can get yellow, but
you couldn't do it without the yellow."
The painter went back upstairs to paint.
The restaurant owner said, "That guy has his nerve, arguing with a guy
who's studied light all his life!"
But that shows you how much I trusted these "real guys." The painter
had told me so much stuff that was reasonable that I was ready to give a
certain chance that there was an odd phenomenon I didn't know. I was
expecting pink, but my set of thoughts were, "The only way to get yellow
will be something new and interesting, and I've got to see this."
I've very often made mistakes in my physics by thinking the theory
isn't as good as it really is, thinking that there are lots of complications
that are going to spoil it -- an attitude that anything can happen, in spite
of what you're pretty sure should happen.
--------
A Different Box of Tools
At the Princeton graduate school, the physics department and the math
department shared a common lounge, and every day at four o'clock we would
have tea. It was a way of relaxing in the afternoon, in addition to
imitating an English college. People would sit around playing Go, or
discussing theorems. In those days topology was the big thing.
I still remember a guy sitting on the couch, thinking very hard, and
another guy standing in front of him, saying, "And therefore such-and-such
is true."
"Why is that?" the guy on the couch asks.
"It's trivial! It's trivial!" the standing guy says, and he rapidly
reels off a series of logical steps: "First you assume thus-and-so, then we
have Kerchoff's this-and-that; then there's Waffenstoffer's Theorem, and we
substitute this and construct that. Now you put the vector which goes around
here and then thus-and-so..." The guy on the couch is struggling to
understand all this stuff, which goes on at high speed for about fifteen
minutes!
Finally the standing guy comes out the other end, and the guy on the
couch says, "Yeah, yeah. It's trivial."
We physicists were laughing, trying to figure them out. We decided that
"trivial" means "proved." So we joked with the mathematicians: "We have a
new theorem -- that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because
every theorem that's proved is trivial."
The mathematicians didn't like that theorem, and I teased them about
it. I said there are never any surprises -- that the mathematicians only
prove things that are obvious. Topology was not at all obvious to the
mathematicians. There were all kinds of weird possibilities that were
"counterintuitive." Then I got an idea. I challenged them: "I bet there
isn't a single theorem that you can tell me -- what the assumptions are and
what the theorem is in terms I can understand -- where I can't tell you
right away whether it's true or false."
It often went like this: They would explain to me, "You've got an
orange, OK? Now you cut the orange into a finite number of pieces, put it
back together, and it's as big as the sun. True or false?"
"No holes?"
"No holes."
"Impossible! There ain't no such a thing."
"Ha! We got him! Everybody gather around! It's So-and-so's theorem of
immeasurable measure!"
Just when they think they've got me, I remind them, "But you said an
orange! You can't cut the orange peel any thinner than the atoms."
"But we have the condition of continuity: We can keep on cutting!"
"No, you said an orange, so I assumed that you meant a real orange."
So I always won. If I guessed it right, great. If I guessed it wrong,
there was always something I could find in their simplification that they
left out.
Actually, there was a certain amount of genuine quality to my guesses.
I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining
something that I'm trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For
instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and
they're all excited. As they're telling me the conditions of the theorem, I
construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set
(one ball) -- disjoint (two balls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs,
or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state
the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn't true for my
hairy green ball thing, so I say, "False!"
If it's true, they get all excited, and I let them go on for a while.
Then I point out my counterexample.
"Oh. We forgot to tell you that it's Class 2 Hausdorff homomorphic."
"Well, then," I say, "It's trivial! It's trivial!" By that time I know
which way it goes, even though I don't know what Hausdorff homomorphic
means.
I guessed right most of the time because although the mathematicians
thought their topology theorems were counterintuitive, they weren't really
as difficult as they looked. You can get used to the funny properties of
this ultra-fine cutting business and do a pretty good job of guessing how it
will come out.
Although I gave the mathematicians a lot of trouble, they were always
very kind to me. They were a happy bunch of boys who were developing things,
and they were terrifically excited about it. They would discuss their
"trivial" theorems, and always try to explain something to you if you asked
a simple question.
Paul Olum and I shared a bathroom. We got to be good friends, and he
tried to teach me mathematics. He got me up to homotopy groups, and at that
point I gave up. But the things below that I understood fairly well.
One thing I never did learn was contour integration. I had learned to
do integrals by various methods shown in a book that my high school physics
teacher Mr. Bader had given me.
One day he told me to stay after class. "Feynman," he said, "you talk
too much and you make too much noise. I know why. You're bored. So I'm going
to give you a book. You go up there in the back, in the corner, and study
this book, and when you know everything that's in this book, you can talk
again."
So every physics class, I paid no attention to what was going on with
Pascal's Law, or whatever they were doing. I was up in the back with this
book: Advanced Calculus, by Woods. Bader knew I had studied Calculus for the
Practical Man a little bit, so he gave me the real works -- it was for a
junior or senior course in college. It had Fourier series, Bessel functions,
determinants, elliptic functions -- all kinds of wonderful stuff that I
didn't know anything about.
That book also showed how to differentiate parameters under the
integral sign -- it's a certain operation. It turns out that's not taught
very much in the universities; they don't emphasize it. But I caught on how
to use that method, and I used that one damn tool again and again. So
because I was self-taught using that book, I had peculiar methods of doing
integrals.
The result was, when guys at MIT or Princeton had trouble doing a
certain integral, it was because they couldn't do it with the standard
methods they had learned in school. If it was contour integration, they
would have found it; if it was a simple series expansion, they would have
found it. Then I come along and try differentiating under the integral sign,
and often it worked. So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only
because my box of tools was different from everybody else's, and they had
tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.
--------
Mindreaders
My father was always interested in magic and carnival tricks, and
wanting to see how they worked. One of the things he knew about was
mindreaders. When he was a little boy, growing up in a small town called
Patchogue, in the middle of Long Island, it was announced on advertisements
posted all over that a mindreader was coming next Wednesday. The posters
said that some respected citizens -- the mayor, a judge, a banker -- should
take a five-dollar bill and hide it somewhere, and when the mindreader came
to town, he would find it.
When he came, the people gathered around to watch him do his work. He
takes the hands of the banker and the judge, who had hidden the five-dollar
bill, and starts to walk down the street. He gets to an intersection, turns
the corner, walks down another street, then another, to the correct house.
He goes with them, always holding their hands, into the house, up to the
second floor, into the right room, walks up to a bureau, lets go of their
hands, opens the correct drawer, and there's the five-dollar bill. Very
dramatic!
In those days it was difficult to get a good education, so the
mindreader was hired as a tutor for my father. Well, my father, after one of
his lessons, asked the mindreader how he was able to find the money without
anyone telling him where it was.
The mindreader explained that you hold onto their hands, loosely, and
as you move, you jiggle a little bit. You come to an intersection, where you
can go forward, to the left, or to the right. You jiggle a little bit to the
left, and if it's incorrect, you feel a certain amount of resistance,
because they don't expect you to move that way. But when you move in the
right direction, because they think you might be able to do it, they give
way more easily, and there's no resistance. So you must always be jiggling a
little bit, testing out which seems to be the easiest way.
My father told me the story and said he thought it would still take a
lot of practice. He never tried it himself.
Later, when I was doing graduate work at Princeton, I decided to try it
on a fellow named Bill Woodward. I suddenly announced that I was a
mindreader, and could read his mind. I told him to go into the "laboratory"
-- a big room with rows of tables covered with equipment of various kinds,
with electric circuits, tools, and junk all over the place -- pick out a
certain object, somewhere, and come out. I explained, "Now I'll read your
mind and take you right up to the object."
He went into the lab, noted a particular object, and came out. I took
his hand and started jiggling. We went down this aisle, then that one, right
to the object. We tried it three times. One time I got the object right on
-- and it was in the middle of a whole bunch of stuff. Another time I went
to the right place but missed the object by a few inches -- wrong object.
The third time, something went wrong. But it worked better than I thought.
It was very easy.
Some time after that, when I was about twenty-six or so, my father and
I went to Atlantic City, where they had various carnival things going on
outdoors. While my father was doing some business, I went to see a
mindreader. He was seated on the stage with his back to the audience,
dressed in robes and wearing a great big turban. He had an assistant, a
little guy who was running around through the audience, saying things like,
"Oh, Great Master, what is the color of this pocketbook?"
"Blue!" says the master.
"And oh, Illustrious Sir, what is the name of this woman?"
"Marie!"
Some guy gets up: "What's my name?"
"Henry."
I get up and say, "What's my name?"
He doesn't answer. The other guy was obviously a confederate, but I
couldn't figure out how the mindreader did the other tricks, like telling
the color of the pocketbook. Did he wear earphones underneath the turban?
When I met up with my father, I told him about it. He said, "They have
a code worked out, but I don't know what it is. Let's go back and find out."
We went back to the place, and my father said to me, "Here's fifty
cents. Go get your fortune read in the booth back there, and I'll see you in
half an hour."
I knew what he was doing. He was going to tell the man a story, and it
would go smoother if his son wasn't there going, "Ooh, ooh!" all the time.
He had to get me out of the way.
When he came back he told me the whole code: "Blue is 'Oh, Great
Master,' Green is 'Oh, Most Knowledgeable One,'" and so forth. He explained,
"I went up to him, afterwards, and told him I used to do a show in
Patchogue, and we had a code, but it couldn't do many numbers, and the range
of colors was shorter. I asked him, 'How do you carry so much information?'"
The mindreader was so proud of his code that he sat down and explained
the whole works to my father. My father was a salesman. He could set up a
situation like that. I can't do stuff like that.
--------
The Amateur Scientist
When I was a kid I had a "lab." It wasn't a laboratory in the sense
that I would measure, or do important experiments.
Instead, I would play: I'd make a motor, I'd make a gadget that would
go off when something passed a photocell. I'd play around with selenium; I
was piddling around all the time. I did calculate a little bit for the lamp
bank, a series of switches and bulbs I used as resistors to control
voltages. But all that was for application. I never did any laboratory kind
of experiments.
I also had a microscope and loved to watch things under the microscope.
It took patience: I would get something under the microscope and I would
watch it interminably. I saw many interesting things, like everybody sees --
a diatom slowly making its way across the slide, and so on.
One day I was watching a paramecium and I saw something that was not
described in the books I got in school -- in college, even. These books
always simplify things so the world will be more like they want it to be:
When they're talking about the behavior of animals, they always start out
with, "The paramecium is extremely simple; it has a simple behavior. It
turns as its slipper shape moves through the water until it hits something,
at which time it recoils, turns through an angle, and then starts out
again."
It isn't really right. First of all, as everybody knows, the paramecia,
from time to time, conjugate with each other -- they meet and exchange
nuclei. How do they decide when it's time to do that? (Never mind; that's
not my observation.)
I watched these paramecia hit something, recoil, turn through an angle,
and go again. The idea that it's mechanical, like a computer program -- it
doesn't look that way. They go different distances, they recoil different
distances, they turn through angles that are different in various cases;
they don't always turn to the right; they're very irregular. It looks
random, because you don't know what they're hitting; you don't know all the
chemicals they're smelling, or what.
One of the things I wanted to watch was what happens to the paramecium
when the water that it's in dries up. It was claimed that the paramecium can
dry up into a sort of hardened seed. I had a drop of water on the slide
under my microscope, and in the drop of water was a paramecium and some
"grass" -- at the scale of the paramecium, it looked like a network of
jackstraws. As the drop of water evaporated, over a time of fifteen or
twenty minutes, the paramecium got into a tighter and tighter situation:
there was more and more of this back-and-forth until it could hardly move.
It was stuck between these "sticks," almost jammed.
Then I saw something I had never seen or heard of: the paramecium lost
its shape. It could flex itself, like an amoeba. It began to push itself
against one of the sticks, and began dividing into two prongs until the
division was about halfway up the paramecium, at which time it decided that
wasn't a very good idea, and backed away.
So my impression of these animals is that their behavior is much too
simplified in the books. It is not so utterly mechanical or one-dimensional
as they say. They should describe the behavior of these simple animals
correctly. Until we see how many dimensions of behavior even a one-celled
animal has, we won't be able to fully understand the behavior of more
complicated animals.
I also enjoyed watching bugs. I had an insect book when I was about
thirteen. It said that dragonflies are not harmful; they don't sting. In our
neighborhood it was well known that "darning needles," as we called them,
were very dangerous when they'd sting. So if we were outside somewhere
playing baseball, or something, and one of these things would fly around,
everybody would run for cover, waving their arms, yelling, "A darning
needle! A darning needle!"
So one day I was on the beach, and I'd just read this book that said
dragonflies don't sting. A darning needle came along, and everybody was
screaming and running around, and I just sat there. "Don't worry!" I said.
"Darning needles don't sting!"
The thing landed on my foot. Everybody was yelling and it was a big
mess, because this darning needle was sitting on my foot. And there I was,
this scientific wonder, saying it wasn't going to sting me.
You're sure this is a story that's going to come out that it stings me
-- but it didn't. The book was right. But I did sweat a bit.
I also had a little hand microscope. It was a toy microscope, and I
pulled the magnification piece out of it, and would hold it in my hand like
a magnifying glass, even though it was a microscope of forty or fifty power.
With care you could hold the focus. So I could go around and look at things
right out in the street.
So when I was in graduate school at Princeton, I once took it out of my
pocket to look at some ants that were crawling around on some ivy. I had to
exclaim out loud, I was so excited. What I saw was an ant and an aphid,
which ants take care of -- they carry them from plant to plant if the plant
they're on is dying. In return the ants get partially digested aphid juice,
called "honeydew." I knew that; my father had told me about it, but I had
never seen it.
So here was this aphid and sure enough, an ant came along, and patted
it with its feet -- all around the aphid, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat. This was
terribly exciting! Then the juice came out of the back of the aphid. And
because it was magnified, it looked like a big, beautiful, glistening ball,
like a balloon, because of the surface tension. Because the microscope
wasn't very good, the drop was colored a little bit from chromatic
aberration in the lens -- it was a gorgeous thing!
The ant took this ball in its two front feet, lifted it off the aphid,
and held it. The world is so different at that scale that you can pick up
water and hold it! The ants probably have a fatty or greasy material on
their legs that doesn't break the surface tension of the water when they
hold it up. Then the ant broke the surface of the drop with its mouth, and
the surface tension collapsed the drop right into his gut. It was very
interesting to see this whole thing happen!
In my room at Princeton I had a bay window with a U-shaped windowsill.
One day some ants came out on the windowsill and wandered around a little
bit. I got curious as to how they found things. I wondered, how do they know
where to go? Can they tell each other where food is, like bees can? Do they
have any sense of geometry?
This is all amateurish; everybody knows the answer, but I didn't know
the answer, so the first thing I did was to stretch some string across the U
of the bay window and hang a piece of folded cardboard with sugar on it from
the string. The idea of this was to isolate the sugar from the ants, so they
wouldn't find it accidentally. I wanted to have everything under control.
Next I made a lot of little strips of paper and put a fold in them, so
I could pick up ants and ferry them from one place to another. I put the
folded strips of paper in two places: Some were by the sugar (hanging from
the string), and the others were near the ants in a particular location. I
sat there all afternoon, reading and watching, until an ant happened to walk
onto one of my little paper ferries. Then I took him over to the sugar.
After a few ants had been ferried over to the sugar, one of them
accidentally walked onto one of the ferries nearby, and I carried him back.
I wanted to see how long it would take the other ants to get the
message to go to the "ferry terminal." It started slowly, but rapidly
increased until I was going mad ferrying the ants back and forth.
But suddenly, when everything was going strong, I began to deliver the
ants from the sugar to a different spot. The question now was, does the ant
learn to go back to where it just came from, or does it go where it went the
time before?
After a while there were practically no ants going to the first place
(which would take them to the sugar), whereas there were many ants at the
second place, milling around, trying to find the sugar. So I figured out so
far that they went where they just came from.
In another experiment, I laid out a lot of glass microscope slides, and
got the ants to walk on them, back and forth, to some sugar I put on the
windowsill. Then, by replacing an old slide with a new one, or by
rearranging the slides, I could demonstrate that the ants had no sense of
geometry: they couldn't figure out where something was. If they went to the
sugar one way, and there was a shorter way back, they would never figure out
the short way.
It was also pretty clear from rearranging the glass slides that the
ants left some sort of trail. So then came a lot of easy experiments to find
out how long it takes a trail to dry up, whether it can be easily wiped off,
and so on. I also found out the trail wasn't directional. If I'd pick up an
ant on a piece of paper, turn him around and around, and then put him back
onto the trail, he wouldn't know that he was going the wrong way until he
met another ant. (Later, in Brazil, I noticed some leaf-cutting ants and
tried the same experiment on them. They could tell, within a few steps,
whether they were going toward the food or away from it -- presumably from
the trail, which might be a series of smells in a pattern: A, B, space, A,
B, space, and so on.)
I tried at one point to make the ants go around in a circle, but I
didn't have enough patience to set it up. I could see no reason, other than
lack of patience, why it couldn't be done.
One thing that made experimenting difficult was that breathing on the
ants made them scurry. It must be an instinctive thing against some animal
that eats them or disturbs them. I don't know if it was the warmth, the
moisture, or the smell of my breath that bothered them, but I always had to
hold my breath and kind of look to one side so as not to confuse the
experiment while I was ferrying the ants.
One question that I wondered about was why the ant trails look so
straight and nice. The ants look as if they know what they're doing, as if
they have a good sense of geometry. Yet the experiments that I did to try to
demonstrate their sense of geometry didn't work.
Many years later, when I was at Caltech and lived in a little house on
Alameda Street, some ants came out around the bathtub. I thought, "This is a
great opportunity." I put some sugar on the other end of the bathtub, and
sat there the whole afternoon until an ant finally found the sugar. It's
only a question of patience.
The moment the ant found the sugar, I picked up a colored pencil that I
had ready (I had previously done experiments indicating that the ants don't
give a damn about pencil marks -- they walk right over them -- so I knew I
wasn't disturbing anything), and behind where the ant went I drew a line so
I could tell where his trail was. The ant wandered a little bit wrong to get
back to the hole, so the line was quite wiggly, unlike a typical ant trail.
When the next ant to find the sugar began to go back, I marked his
trail with another color. (By the way, he followed the first ant's return
trail back, rather than his own incoming trail. My theory is that when an
ant has found some food, he leaves a much stronger trail than when he's just
wandering around.)
This second ant was in a great hurry and followed, pretty much, the
original trail. But because he was going so fast he would go straight out,
as if he were coasting, when the trail was wiggly. Often, as the ant was
"coasting," he would find the trail again. Already it was apparent that the
second ant's return was slightly straighter. With successive ants the same
"improvement" of the trail by hurriedly and carelessly "following" it
occurred.
I followed eight or ten ants with my pencil until their trails became a
neat line right along the bathtub. It's something like sketching: You draw a
lousy line at first; then you go over it a few times and it makes a nice
line after a while.
I remember that when I was a kid my father would tell me how wonderful
ants are, and how they cooperate. I would watch very carefully three or four
ants carrying a little piece of chocolate back to their nest. At first
glance it looks like efficient, marvelous, brilliant cooperation. But if you
look at it carefully, you'll see that it's nothing of the kind: They're all
behaving as if the chocolate is held up by something else. They pull at it
one way or the other way. An ant may crawl over it while it's being pulled
at by the others. It wobbles, it wiggles, the directions are all confused.
The chocolate doesn't move in a nice way toward the nest.
The Brazilian leaf-cutting ants, which are otherwise so marvelous, have
a very interesting stupidity associated with them that I'm surprised hasn't
evolved out. It takes considerable work for the ant to cut the circular arc
in order to get a piece of leaf. When the cutting is done, there's a
fifty-fifty chance that the ant will pull on the wrong side, letting the
piece he just cut fall to the ground. Half the time, the ant will yank and
pull and yank and pull on the wrong part of the leaf, until it gives up and
starts to cut another piece. There is no attempt to pick up a piece that it,
or any other ant, has already cut. So it's quite obvious, if you watch very
carefully, that it's not a brilliant business of cutting leaves and carrying
them away; they go to a leaf, cut an arc, and pick the wrong side half the
time while the right piece falls down.
In Princeton the ants found my larder, where I had jelly and bread and
stuff, which was quite a distance from the window. A long line of ants
marched along the floor across the living room. It was during the time I was
doing these experiments on the ants, so I thought to myself, "What can I do
to stop them from coming to my larder without killing any ants? No poison;
you gotta be humane to the ants!"
What I did was this: In preparation, I put a bit of sugar about six or
eight inches from their entry point into the room, that they didn't know
about. Then I made those ferry things again, and whenever an ant returning
with food walked onto my little ferry, I'd carry him over and put him on the
sugar. Any ant coming toward the larder that walked onto a ferry I also
carried over to the sugar. Eventually the ants found their way from the
sugar to their hole, so this new trail was being doubly reinforced, while
the old trail was being used less and less. I knew that after half an hour
or so the old trail would dry up, and in an hour they were out of my larder.
I didn't wash the floor; I didn't do anything but ferry ants.
--------
Part 3
Feynman, the Bomb, and the Military
--------
Fizzled Fuses
When the war began in Europe but had not yet been declared in the
United States, there was a lot of talk about getting ready and being
patriotic. The newspapers had big articles on businessmen volunteering to go
to Plattsburg, New York, to do military training, and so on.
I began to think I ought to make some kind of contribution, too. After
I finished up at MIT, a friend of mine from the fraternity, Maurice Meyer,
who was in the Army Signal Corps, took me to see a colonel at the Signal
Corps offices in New York.
"I'd like to aid my country, sir, and since I'm technically-minded,
maybe there's a way I could help."
"Well, you'd better just go up to Plattsburg to boot camp and go
through basic training. Then we'll be able to use you," the colonel said.
"But isn't there some way to use my talent more directly?"
"No; this is the way the army is organized. Go through the regular
way."
I went outside and sat in the park to think about it. I thought and
thought: Maybe the best way to make a contribution is to go along with their
way. But fortunately, I thought a little more, and said, "To hell with it!
I'll wait awhile. Maybe something will happen where they can use me more
effectively."
I went to Princeton to do graduate work, and in the spring I went once
again to the Bell Labs in New York to apply for a summer job. I loved to
tour the Bell Labs. Bill Shockley, the guy who invented transistors, would
show me around. I remember somebody's room where they had marked a window:
The George Washington Bridge was being built, and these guys in the lab were
watching its progress. They had plotted the original curve when the main
cable was first put up, and they could measure the small differences as the
bridge was being suspended from it, as the curve turned into a parabola. It
was just the kind of thing I would like to be able to think of doing. I
admired those guys; I was always hoping I could work with them one day.
Some guys from the lab took me out to this seafood restaurant for
lunch, and they were all pleased that they were going to have oysters. I
lived by the ocean and I couldn't look at this stuff; I couldn't eat fish,
let alone oysters.
I thought to myself, "I've gotta be brave. I've gotta eat an oyster."
I took an oyster, and it was absolutely terrible. But I said to myself,
"That doesn't really prove you're a man. You didn't know how terrible it was
gonna be. It was easy enough when it was uncertain."
The others kept talking about how good the oysters were, so I had
another oyster, and that was really harder than the first one.
This time, which must have been my fourth or fifth time touring the
Bell Labs, they accepted me. I was very happy. In those days it was hard to
find a job where you could be with other scientists.
But then there was a big excitement at Princeton. General Trichel from
the army came around and spoke to us; "We've got to have physicists!
Physicists are very important to us in the army! We need three physicists!"
You have to understand that, in those days, people hardly knew what a
physicist was. Einstein was known as a mathematician, for instance -- so it
was rare that anybody needed physicists. I thought, "This is my opportunity
to make a contribution," and I volunteered to work for the army.
I asked the Bell Labs if they would let me work for the army that
summer, and they said they had war work, too, if that was what I wanted. But
I was caught up in a patriotic fever and lost a good opportunity. It would
have been much smarter to work in the Bell Labs. But one gets a little silly
during those times.
I went to the Frankfort Arsenal, in Philadelphia, and worked on a
dinosaur: a mechanical computer for directing artillery. When airplanes flew
by, the gunners would watch them in a telescope, and this mechanical
computer, with gears and cams and so forth, would try to predict where the
plane was going to be. It was a most beautifully designed and built machine,
and one of the important ideas in it was non-circular gears -- gears that
weren't circular, but would mesh anyway. Because of the changing radii of
the gears, one shaft would turn as a function of the other. However, this
machine was at the end of the line. Very soon afterwards, electronic
computers came in.
After saying all this stuff about how physicists were so important to
the army, the first thing they had me doing was checking gear drawings to
see if the numbers were right. This went on for quite a while. Then,
gradually, the guy in charge of the department began to see I was useful for
other things, and as the summer went on, he would spend more time discussing
things with me.
One mechanical engineer at Frankfort was always trying to design things
and could never get everything right. One time he designed a box full of
gears, one of which was a big, eight-inch-diameter gear wheel that had six
spokes. The fella says excitedly, "Well, boss, how is it? How is it?"
"Just fine!" the boss replies. "All you have to do is specify a shaft
passer on each of the spokes, so the gear wheel can turn!" The guy had
designed a shaft that went right between the spokes!
The boss went on to tell us that there was such a thing as a shaft
passer (I thought he must have been joking). It was invented by the Germans
during the war to keep the British minesweepers from catching the cables
that held the German mines floating under water at a certain depth. With
these shaft passers, the German cables could allow the British cables to
pass through as if they were going through a revolving door. So it was
possible to put shaft passers on all the spokes, but the boss didn't mean
that the machinists should go to all that trouble; the guy should instead
just redesign it and put the shaft somewhere else.
Every once in a while the army sent down a lieutenant to check on how
things were going. Our boss told us that since we were a civilian section,
the lieutenant was higher in rank than any of us. "Don't tell the lieutenant
anything," he said. "Once he begins to think he knows what we're doing,
he'll be giving us all kinds of orders and screwing everything up."
By that time I was designing some things, but when the lieutenant came
by, I pretended I didn't know what I was doing, that I was only following
orders.
"What are you doing here, Mr. Feynman?"
"Well, I draw a sequence of lines at successive angles, and then I'm
supposed to measure out from the center different distances according to
this table, and lay it out..."
"Well, what is it?"
"I think it's a cam." I had actually designed the thing, but I acted as
if somebody had just told me exactly what to do.
The lieutenant couldn't get any information from anybody, and we went
happily along, working on this mechanical computer, without any
interference.
One day the lieutenant came by, and asked us a simple question:
"Suppose that the observer is not at the same location as the gunner -- how
do you handle that?"
We got a terrible shock. We had designed the whole business using polar
coordinates, using angles and the radius distance. With X and Y coordinates,
it's easy to correct for a displaced observer. It's simply a matter of
addition or subtraction. But with polar coordinates, it's a terrible mess!
So it turned out that this lieutenant whom we were trying to keep from
telling us anything ended up telling us something very important that we had
forgotten in the design of this device: the possibility that the gun and the
observing station are not at the same place! It was a big mess to fix it.
Near the end of the summer I was given my first real design job: a machine
that would make a continuous curve out of a set of points -- one point
coming in every fifteen seconds -- from a new invention developed in England
for tracking airplanes, called "radar." It was the first time I had ever
done any mechanical designing, so I was a little bit frightened.
I went over to one of the other guys and said, "You're a mechanical
engineer; I don't know how to do any mechanical engineering, and I just got
this job..."
"There's nothin' to it," he said. "Look, I'll show you. There's two
rules you need to know to design these machines. First, the friction in
every bearing is so-and-so much, and in every gear junction, so-and-so much.
From that, you can figure out how much force you need to drive the thing.
Second, when you have a gear ratio, say 2 to 1, and you are wondering
whether you should make it 10 to 5 or 24 to 12 or 48 to 24, here's how to
decide: You look in the Boston Gear Catalogue, and select those gears that
are in the middle of the list. The ones at the high end have so many teeth
they're hard to make, if they could make gears with even finer teeth, they'd
have made the list go even higher. The gears at the low end of the list have
so few teeth they break easy. So the best design uses gears from the middle
of the list."
I had a lot of fun designing that machine. By simply selecting the
gears from the middle of the list and adding up the little torques with the
two numbers he gave me, I could be a mechanical engineer!
The army didn't want me to go back to Princeton to work on my degree
after that summer. They kept giving me this patriotic stuff, and offered a
whole project that I could run, if I would stay.
The problem was to design a machine like the other one -- what they
called a director -- but this time I thought the problem was easier, because
the gunner would be following behind in another airplane at the same
altitude. The gunner would set into my machine his altitude and an estimate
of his distance behind the other airplane. My machine would automatically
tilt the gun up at the correct angle and set the fuse.
As director of this project, I would be making trips down to Aberdeen
to get the firing tables. However, they already had some preliminary data. I
noticed that for most of the higher altitudes where these airplanes would be
flying, there wasn't any data. So I called up to find out why there wasn't
any data and it turned out that the fuses they were going to use were not
clock fuses, but powder-train fuses, which didn't work at those altitudes --
they fizzled out in the thin air.
I thought I only had to correct the air resistance at different
altitudes. Instead, my job was to invent a machine that would make the shell
explode at the right moment, when the fuse won't burn!
I decided that was too hard for me and went back to Princeton.
--------
Testing Bloodhounds
When I was at Los Alamos and would get a little time off, I would often
go visit my wife, who was in a hospital in Albuquerque, a few hours away.
One time I went to visit her and couldn't go in right away, so I went to the
hospital library to read.
I read an article in Science about bloodhounds, and how they could
smell so very well. The authors described the various experiments that they
did -- the bloodhounds could identify which items had been touched by
people, and so on -- and I began to think: It is very remarkable how good
bloodhounds are at smelling, being able to follow trails of people, and so
forth, but how good are we, actually?
When the time came that I could visit my wife, I went to see her, and I
said, "We're gonna do an experiment. Those Coke bottles over there (she had
a six-pack of empty Coke bottles that she was saving to send out) -- now you
haven't touched them in a couple of days, right?"
"That's right."
I took the six-pack over to her without touching the bottles, and said,
"OK. Now I'll go out, and you take out one of the bottles, handle it for
about two minutes, and then put it back. Then I'll come in, and try to tell
which bottle it was."
So I went out, and she took out one of the bottles and handled it for
quite a while -- lots of time, because I'm no bloodhound! According to the
article, they could tell if you just touched it.
Then I came back, and it was absolutely obvious! I didn't even have to
smell the damn thing, because, of course, the temperature was different. And
it was also obvious from the smell. As soon as you put it up near your face,
you could smell it was dampish and warmer. So that experiment didn't work
because it was too obvious.
Then I looked at the bookshelf and said, "Those books you haven't
looked at for a while, right? This time, when I go out, take one book off
the shelf, and just open it -- that's all -- and close it again; then put it
back."
So I went out again, she took a book, opened it and closed it, and put
it back. I came in -- and nothing to it! It was easy. You just smell the
books. It's hard to explain, because we're not used to saying things about
it. You put each book up to your nose and sniff a few times, and you can
tell. It's very different. A book that's been standing there a while has a
dry, uninteresting kind of smell. But when a hand has touched it, there's a
dampness and a smell that's very distinct.
We did a few more experiments, and I discovered that while bloodhounds
are indeed quite capable, humans are not as incapable as they think they
are: it's just that they carry their nose so high off the ground!
(I've noticed that my dog can correctly tell which way I've gone in the
house, especially if I'm barefoot, by smelling my footprints. So I tried to
do that: I crawled around the rug on my hands and knees, sniffing, to see if
I could tell the difference between where I walked and where I didn't, and I
found it impossible. So the dog is much better than I am.)
Many years later, when I was first at Caltech, there was a party at
Professor Bacher's house, and there were a lot of people from Caltech. I
don't know how it came up, but I was telling them this story about smelling
the bottles and the books. They didn't believe a word, naturally, because
they always thought I was a faker. I had to demonstrate it.
We carefully took eight or nine books off the shelf without touching
them directly with our hands, and then I went out. Three different people
touched three different books: they picked one up, opened it, closed it, and
put it back.
Then I came back, and smelled everybody's hands, and smelled all the
books -- I don't remember which I did first -- and found all three books
correctly; I got one person wrong.
They still didn't believe me; they thought it was some sort of magic
trick. They kept trying to figure out how I did it. There's a famous trick
of this kind, where you have a confederate in the group who gives you
signals as to what it is, and they were trying to figure out who the
confederate was. Since then I've often thought that it would be a good card
trick to take a deck of cards and tell someone to pick a card and put it
back, while you're in the other room. You say, "Now I'm going to tell you
which card it is, because I'm a bloodhound: I'm going to smell all these
cards and tell you which card you picked." Of course, with that kind of
patter, people wouldn't believe for a minute that that's what you were
actually doing!
People's hands smell very different -- that's why dogs can identify
people; you have to try it! All hands have a sort of moist smell, and a
person who smokes has a very different smell on his hands from a person who
doesn't; ladies often have different kinds of perfumes, and so on. If
somebody happened to have some coins in his pocket and happened to be
handling them, you can smell that.
--------
Los Alamos from Below*
* Adapted from a talk given in the First Annual Santa Barbara Lectures
on Science and Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara in
1975. "Los Alamos from Below" was one of nine lectures in a series published
as Reminiscences of Los Alamos, 1943-1945, edited by L. Badash et al., pp.
105-132. Copyright (c) 1980 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht,
Holland.
When I say "Los Alamos from below," I mean that. Although in my field
at the present time I'm a slightly famous man, at that time I was not
anybody famous at all. I didn't even have a degree when I started to work
with the Manhattan Project. Many of the other people who tell you about Los
Alamos -- people in higher echelons -- worried about some big decisions. I
worried about no big decisions. I was always flittering about underneath.
I was working in my room at Princeton one day when Bob Wilson came in
and said that he had been funded to do a job that was a secret, and he
wasn't supposed to tell anybody, but he was going to tell me because he knew
that as soon as I knew what he was going to do, I'd see that I had to go
along with it. So he told me about the problem of separating different
isotopes of uranium to ultimately make a bomb. He had a process for
separating the isotopes of uranium (different from the one which was
ultimately used) that he wanted to try to develop. He told me about it, and
he said, "There's a meeting..."
I said I didn't want to do it.
He said, "All right, there's a meeting at three o'clock. I'll see you
there."
I said, "It's all right that you told me the secret because I'm not
going to tell anybody, but I'm not going to do it."
So I went back to work on my thesis -- for about three minutes. Then I
began to pace the floor and think about this thing. The Germans had Hitler
and the possibility of developing an atomic bomb was obvious, and the
possibility that they would develop it before we did was very much of a
fright. So I decided to go to the meeting at three o'clock.
By four o'clock I already had a desk in a room and was trying to
calculate whether this particular method was limited by the total amount of
current that you get in an ion beam, and so on. I won't go into the details.
But I had a desk, and I had paper, and I was working as hard as I could and
as fast as I could, so the fellas who were building the apparatus could do
the experiment right there.
It was like those moving pictures where you see a piece of equipment go
bruuuuup, bruuuuup, bruuuuup. Every time I'd look up, the thing was getting
bigger. What was happening, of course, was that all the boys had decided to
work on this and to stop their research in science. All science stopped
during the war except the little bit that was done at Los Alamos. And that
was not much science; it was mostly engineering.
All the equipment from different research projects was being put
together to make the new apparatus to do the experiment -- to try to
separate the isotopes of uranium. I stopped my own work for the same reason,
though I did take a six-week vacation after a while and finished writing my
thesis. And I did get my degree just before I got to Los Alamos -- so I
wasn't quite as far down the scale as I led you to believe.
One of the first interesting experiences I had in this project at
Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before.
But there was an evaluation committee that had to try to help us along, and
help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium.
This committee had men like Compton and Tolman and Smyth and Urey and Rabi
and Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how
our process of separating isotopes worked, and so they'd ask me questions
and talk about it. In these discussions one man would make a point. Then
Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say
it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say,
well, maybe, but there's this other possibility we have to consider against
it.
So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and
disturbed that Compton doesn't repeat and emphasize his point. Finally, at
the end, Tolman, who's the chairman, would say, "Well, having heard all
these arguments, I guess it's true that Compton's argument is the best of
all, and now we have to go ahead."
It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present
a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering
what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to
which idea was the best -- summing it all up -- without having to say it
three times. These were very great men indeed.
It was ultimately decided that this project was not to be the one they
were going to use to separate uranium. We were told then that we were going
to stop, because in Los Alamos, New Mexico, they would be starting the
project that would actually make the bomb. We would all go out there to make
it. There would be experiments that we would have to do, and theoretical
work to do. I was in the theoretical work. All the rest of the fellas were
in experimental work.
The question was -- What to do now? Los Alamos wasn't ready yet. Bob
Wilson tried to make use of this time by, among other things, sending me to
Chicago to find out all that we could find out about the bomb and the
problems. Then, in our laboratories, we could start to build equipment,
counters of various kinds, and so on, that would be useful when we got to
Los Alamos. So no time was wasted.
I was sent to Chicago with the instructions to go to each group, tell
them I was going to work with them, and have them tell me about a problem in
enough detail that I could actually sit down and start to work on it. As
soon as I got that far, I was to go to another guy and ask for another
problem. That way I would understand the details of everything.
It was a very good idea, but my conscience bothered me a little bit
because they would all work so hard to explain things to me, and I'd go away
without helping them. But I was very lucky. When one of the guys was
explaining a problem, I said, "Why don't you do it by differentiating under
the integral sign?" In half an hour he had it solved, and they'd been
working on it for three months. So, I did something, using my "different box
of tools." Then I came back from Chicago, and I described the situation --
how much energy was released, what the bomb was going to be like, and so
forth.
I remember a friend of mine who worked with me, Paul Olum, a
mathematician, came up to me afterwards and said, "When they make a moving
picture about this, they'll have the guy coming back from Chicago to make
his report to the Princeton men about the bomb. He'll be wearing a suit and
carrying a briefcase and so on -- and here you're in dirty shirtsleeves and
just telling us all about it, in spite of its being such a serious and
dramatic thing."
There still seemed to be a delay, and Wilson went to Los Alamos to find
out what was holding things up. When he got there, he found that the
construction company was working very hard and had finished the theater, and
a few other buildings that they understood, but they hadn't gotten
instructions clear on how to build a laboratory -- how many pipes for gas,
how much for water. So Wilson simply stood around and decided, then and
there, how much water, how much gas, and so on, and told them to start
building the laboratories.
When he came back to us, we were all ready to go and we were getting
impatient. So they all got together and decided we'd go out there anyway,
even though it wasn't ready.
We were recruited, by the way, by Oppenheimer and other people, and he
was very patient. He paid attention to everybody's problems. He worried
about my wife, who had TB, and whether there would be a hospital out there,
and everything. It was the first time I met him in such a personal way; he
was a wonderful man.
We were told to be very careful -- not to buy our train ticket in
Princeton, for example, because Princeton was a very small station, and if
everybody bought train tickets to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in Princeton,
there would be some suspicions that something was up. And so everybody
bought their tickets somewhere else, except me, because I figured if
everybody bought their tickets somewhere else...
So when I went to the train station and said, "I want to go to
Albuquerque, New Mexico," the man says, "Oh, so all this stuff is for you!"
We had been shipping out crates full of counters for weeks and expecting
that they didn't notice the address was Albuquerque. So at least I explained
why it was that we were shipping all those crates; I was going out to
Albuquerque.
Well, when we arrived, the houses and dormitories and things like that
were not ready. In fact, even the laboratories weren't quite ready. We were
pushing them by