Who are you Dr. Feynman. “Of course you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” Chapter from the book (fragment). Quotes from the book “Of course you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” Richard Phillips Feynman
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Feynman turned out to be a great lover of women, whores and taverns. He even conducts a master class on pickup trucks. He admitted that he spent 5 days a week in bars. He loved bars with striptease and even served as a witness in court on the defense side of one such bar, trying to get this wonderful establishment out of closing. Confesses to cheating on his wife. He admits that he cracked safes with secret documentation in a super secret research center where the development of a nuclear bomb was underway and the safes of high-ranking military personnel involved in this area, and also gives a master class on safe hacking. He talks about his greater desire to use drugs, but he pissed that drugs supposedly thin the brain (naive), although he still admits to using 1/10 of the “standard dose” of amphetamine purely for “expanding consciousness”, which was given to him by one wonderful person, a psychic guru, teacher with a capital letter (and as you know, the first dose for teachers is always free...) so that Feynman could catch glitches. And he did catch them. The teacher developed a special method. It was necessary to lie in a large sealed tank, in salt water for 2-2.5 hours, and during this time the patients began to have glitches. This happened due to the fact that the teacher released his vibes to his adherents. Drugs, of course, did not play any role in this process.
At the same time, Feynman was a famous physicist, a university professor, a Nobel Prize winner, sculpted a nuclear bomb and painted paintings (his favorite theme of paintings was naked women).
You can listen to the book, in places it is very interesting, but I was sick of his constant stories about women, it seems that when he sees a woman, there is an outflow of blood from his brain to more interesting places. And by the way, Feynman was rejected by the military medical commission when they wanted to draft him into the army. He didn't see a psychotherapist and judging by his behavior, it is possible that this is not unreasonable.
In general, the book can be recommended for familiarization, but it is better for pregnant women, children, nursing mothers and people with unstable mental health (for the reasons described above) to refrain from reading it.
A few words about sound. I would like to say a special thank you to the aunt who read it all (Performer: Irina Erisanova), the reading is amazing. I can’t even believe that you “can’t buy this anywhere.” The sound quality is excellent. The only thing is that the long arms of the enemies of progress got here and cut some tracks right in the middle of the words.
BitCam56
purrr wrote:
58187643 Apparently, Irina Erisanova is a person very far from technical sciences. I won’t nitpick about the incorrect accents of terms, but when the inverse sine function turned into sine x to the first degree - apparently, Irina was confused by the minus before the one - the exponent became the “number and”, and the factorials were simply pronounced more solemnly - well, yes, 4 is four, and 4! this is FOUR! - it was quite funny.
It's a pity. Reading such books can only be trusted by specialists, but where can you get them... But we studied factorials at school. And in general, they should be part of the horizons of any philologist or artist.
Richard P. Feynman
Surely you're joking, mr. Feynman!
© Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton, 1985
© Translation. S. B. Ilyin, 2011
© Russian edition AST Publishers, 2014
Preface
The stories in this book were accumulated intermittently and informally over the seven years that I had the pleasure of playing percussion with Richard Feynman. Each of these stories is funny, I think, on its own, but when put together, they are simply amazing. It's hard to believe that so many amazing things could happen to one single person in one single life. And the fact that one single person was able to commit so many innocent pranks and pranks in one single life can certainly serve as a source of inspiration!
Ralph Leighton
Introduction
I hope these memories of Richard Feynman will not remain the only ones. They certainly give a true insight into many aspects of his character - an almost manic need to solve puzzles, cheeky mischief, an angry rejection of pretentiousness and hypocrisy, and the ability to outmaneuver anyone who tries to outmaneuver him! Reading this book is a great pleasure: in places it outrages, even shocks, but at the same time remains very warm and humane.
And yet it only casually talks about the cornerstone of his life - science. We encounter it here and there, it forms the background of this or that episode, but nowhere does it appear as the meaning of its existence, which it actually was - as more than one generation of Feynman’s students and colleagues has testified to. It probably cannot be otherwise. Probably, otherwise he would not have been able to build a series of charming stories about himself and his work: about the strain of all his strength and disappointments, about the delight that crowns insights, about the enormous pleasure delivered by scientific knowledge, which became an inexhaustible source of happiness in his life.
I remember coming to his next lecture when I was a student. He stood in the middle of the audience, smiling at those entering and beating out a complex rhythm with his fingers on the black surface of the demonstration table. While the last students to arrive were seated, he twirled a piece of chalk in his fingers like a professional gambler twirls a poker chip, and continued to smile, as if remembering some funny joke. And then, still smiling, he would start talking about physics, drawing diagrams and equations on the board that helped us share his understanding of this science. His smile, the sparkle in his eyes, was not generated by a joke unknown to us, but by physics. The joy of her perception! And this joy was contagious. We were lucky enough to get infected from him. And now You got the opportunity to understand the joy of life in the manner of Feynman.
Albert R. Hibbs, Senior Technical Officer
Jet Propulsion Laboratories
Caltech
The most important biographical information
Some dates: I was born in 1918 in a town called Far Rockaway, on the border of the New York suburbs, near the ocean. I lived there until I was seventeen, that is, until 1935. Then I studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for four years, and around 1939 I moved to Princeton University. While still at Princeton, I was involved in the Manhattan Project and eventually moved in April 1943 to Los Alamos, where I stayed until October or November 1946, and then went to Cornell University.
In 1941 I married Arlene, who died of tuberculosis in 1946 while I was still at Los Alamos.
I worked at Cornell until about 1951. In the summer of 1949 I visited Brazil, in 1951 I returned there for another six months, after which I moved to Caltech, where I remain to this day.
I spent two weeks in Japan at the end of 1951, and then a year or two later, just after marrying my second wife, Mary Lou, I went there again.
Now I am married to Gweneth, she is English, we have two children - Karl and Michelle.
R.F.F.
I
From Far Rockaway to MIT
He fixes the radio in his mind!
When I was eleven or twelve years old, I set up a laboratory in my home. It consisted of an old wooden shipping box into which I inserted shelves. I also had an electric stove (on which I often fried julienned potatoes in oil), as well as a battery and a lamp unit.
To build it, I went to a store where each item cost five or ten cents, bought lamp sockets that could be screwed to a wooden base, and connected them with pieces of bell wire. I knew that different combinations of switches, either series or parallel, could produce different voltages. What I didn't know was that the resistance of a light bulb depends on its temperature, and my calculations ended up not matching the voltages that the circuit was actually producing. Well, it’s okay, when the light bulbs were connected in series, they burned at full intensity, smoldered, It turned out very beautiful - just great!
There was also a fuse in this system, so if I shorted something, it would simply blow. I must say that I needed fuses that were weaker than those that were in the house, and I made them myself - I took staniol and wrapped it around a fuse that had already flown. I connected a five-watt light bulb in series to it - when the fuse blew, the voltage of the buffer rectifier, which constantly recharged the battery, was supplied to the light bulb. This light bulb was located on the control panel, covered with a piece of brown paper from a candy store (when the light flashed behind the paper, it turned red) - if something burned out, I just had to look at the panel, and I saw a large red spot where the fuse had flown out . In general, I had a very interesting time!
I loved radios. I started with a detector, bought it in a store and at night, in bed, listened to programs through headphones until I fell asleep. If my father and mother returned home late, they would come into my room and take off my headphones, worrying about what was going on in my head while I was sleeping.
Around this time I invented a burglar alarm, quite simple: a large battery and an electric bell connected by a wire. When the door to my room opened, it pressed the wire against the battery terminal, completed the circuit, and the bell rang.
One day, my father and mother returned home late in the evening and, afraid to wake me up, quietly opened my door to come in and take off my headphones. And suddenly the bell made a devilish noise - DING-DING-DING!!! And I jumped out of bed, screaming: “It works! Works!"
I had a Ford induction coil, a regular car ignition coil, and I used it to build spark contacts on top of my control panel. I connected them in series with an argon-filled rheostatic lamp from those produced by the Raytheon company: when spark discharges passed through, the gas in it began to glow purple - beauty!
One day I was playing with a Ford coil, punching holes in the paper with sparks, and the paper suddenly caught fire. Soon I could no longer hold it in my hand - the fire was burning my fingers - and I dropped it into a metal trash can full of newspapers. Newspapers are known to burn quickly, and soon the room was ablaze. I closed the door so that my mother, who was playing bridge with her friends in the living room, would not notice that I was on fire, grabbed the first magazine that came to hand and covered the bucket with it to put out the fire.
The flame went out, I put the magazine away, but now the room began to fill with smoke. The bucket was too hot to handle, so I picked it up with pliers, carried it across the room and put it out the window, hoping that the breeze would blow away the smoke.
However, the breeze blowing outside revived the fire again, and now I could not reach the magazine. I had to drag the burning bucket into the room again to get the magazine, and, by the way, there were curtains hanging on the windows - it was very dangerous!
One way or another, I picked up the magazine, smothered the flame with it again, and this time kept it with me while I shook the ashes out of the bucket from a height of what seemed like three floors. Then he left the room, closed the door behind him and said to his mother: “I’ll go outside and play.” The smoke was gradually drawn out of the room through the open windows.
In addition to all this, I built all sorts of things out of electric motors and built an amplifier for a solar cell I bought - when I passed my hand in front of it, the amplifier made a bell ring. I didn’t have time to do everything I wanted because my mother always sent me to play outside. Still, I often stayed at home and tinkered in my laboratory.
I bought radios at junk sales. I had practically no money, but the receivers were inexpensive - old, broken - I bought them and tried to fix them. As a rule, the breakdowns were simple - in some receivers there were conspicuous wires hanging down, in others the coil was damaged or simply unwound - so I was able to quickly bring some of them back to life. One night I picked up the WACO station on one of these receivers - from Waco, Texas - I was terribly excited!
It was with the help of this tube receiver that I managed to catch the UGN station from Schenectady. I must say that we, the children - two of my cousins, my sister and the neighbor kids - listened to an exciting program on the radio on the first floor, which was called “INO Crime Club” - it was impossible to tear yourself away! So, I discovered that I could listen to this program in my laboratory on UGN an hour earlier than it was broadcast in New York! I found out what was going to happen in it, and then, when we all sat down in front of the receiver standing below to listen to the new episode, I said: “You know, we haven’t heard about such and such for a long time. I bet he’ll show up now and help everyone out.”
And a couple of seconds later - bang! – he appeared. Everyone was completely delighted, and after that I predicted a couple more events. In the end, they realized that there was some kind of trick here - that I would find out everything from somewhere in advance. I had to admit that I was listening to the program at home an hour earlier.
The result, of course, is clear to you even without my explanation. Now no one wanted to wait for the usual start time of the program. Everyone wanted to go upstairs to my laboratory and sit for half an hour in front of the small crackling radio, listening to the program “INO Crime Club” from Schenectady.
At that time we lived in a big house - my grandfather left it to his children, and they did not have any special wealth except this house. The house was huge, made of wood, I ran wires along the outside of it and plugged sockets into all the rooms so that I could listen to the receivers that were working upstairs in my laboratory, no matter where I was. I also got a loudspeaker - not a whole one, but a part of it, without a large upper horn.
One day, I put on headphones, connected them to the speaker and made a small discovery: when I ran my finger over the speaker, I heard the sound of this movement. That is, it turned out that the speaker can work as a microphone and does not even require any power. At the time, we were at Alexander Graham Bell School, and I demonstrated the connection between the speaker and the headphones. I think, although I didn’t know it at the time, that this was the type of phone he originally used.
Therefore, I had a microphone, and I could, using the speakers of receivers bought at sales, broadcast broadcasts from one floor of our house to another. At that time, my sister Joan, born nine years later than me, was two or three years old, and she loved to listen to a certain “Uncle Don” on the radio. He sang songs about “good children” and the like, and read letters from parents: “The birthday celebration of Mary So-and-so of 25 Flatbush Avenue will be held this Saturday.”
One fine day, my cousin Francis and I sat Joan downstairs, telling her that there was a special program that she should listen to, and we ran upstairs and started broadcasting: “Uncle Don speaking. We know of a very good little girl named Joan, who lives on New Broadway; It’s her birthday soon – not today, but on such and such a date. Very sweet girl." Then we sang a song, and then imitated music: “Diddley-diddley, trump-pump-pum...” And when we were done with that, we went down to Joan.
- Well, how? Did you like the program?
“Good,” she answered, “but why did you play music with your mouth?”
* * *
One day I got a phone call:
- Mister, is that you Richard Feynman?
- They're bothering you from the hotel. Our radio doesn't work here, we'd like to fix it. As far as we know, you can do it.
“But I’m just a boy,” I replied. - Do not know how…
“Yes, we know that, but still, do me a favor and come.”
The hotel was managed by my aunt, but I didn't know about it. And he came - this story is still told there - with a huge screwdriver sticking out of his back pocket. However, I was not tall, so no matter what screwdriver I put in my back pocket, any would seem healthy.
I walked over to the receiver, intending to fix it. I had absolutely no idea how this was done, but the hotel had its own jack of all trades, and either he or I, in general, one of us noticed that the rheostat handle - the volume control - had become loose and scroll on the axis. The master took it off, filed something in it, returned it to its place - and everything worked.
The next receiver I set out to repair did not work at all. But everything with him turned out to be simple: he was connected to the power incorrectly. My further repairs became more and more complex, I coped with them more and more intelligently, and gained skill. I bought a milliammeter in New York and converted it into a voltmeter with several scales, using pieces of very thin copper wire of different lengths (calculated by me). My voltmeter was not particularly accurate, but it allowed me to find out whether the voltages in different receiver units were of the correct order of magnitude.
The main reason people came to me was Depression. They didn’t have the money to actually repair radios, but then they heard rumors about a boy who repairs radios, charging almost nothing for the work. So I had to climb onto roofs, fix antennas, and do much more. I learned a number of lessons, each more difficult than the next. In the end, I was asked to change the power supply of one receiver - from constant to alternating - as a result, the whole system began to hum, and I could not cope with it. The task was simply beyond my capabilities, and I had no idea about it.
One of my repairs created a sensation. I was working in a printing house at the time, and a friend of the owner, having learned that I was undertaking to repair radios, came straight to work to pick me up. He was clearly not a rich man - the car in which we drove to his home in a cheap part of the city did not just fall apart while driving. Dear I ask:
- So what about the receiver?
He answers:
- When you turn it on, it hisses. Then the hissing subsides and everything works fine. The hissing just annoys me.
I think: “Wow! If he doesn’t have money, he might as well endure a little noise.”
And all the way to the house he repeats something like:
– Do you actually understand receivers? Although where are you, you’re still just a kid.
In general, he laughs at me, and I keep thinking: “What’s wrong with this receiver? Where does the hiss come from?
When I get there, I turn on the receiver. Noise? Lord God! No wonder the poor fellow found it difficult to bear. The receiver roars and hoots: WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO – the noise is simply wild. Then everything calms down, some kind of transmission begins, and I think: “Why can this happen?”
The owner of the receiver asks:
- What are you doing? I came to fix the radio, but all I can do is pace back and forth.
I answer:
- I think!
And then I say to myself: “Okay, take out the lamps and put them in in the reverse order.” (Back then, the same tubes were used in many different parts of many receivers - 212, in my opinion, or 212-A.) I rearranged the tubes, turned on the receiver, and it was as quiet as a lamb - it warmed up and started working, and no noise.
When someone treats you unfriendly, and you suddenly do something similar in front of their eyes, their attitude usually changes to the exact opposite - this is something like compensation. So this man began to get work for me and tell everyone what a great genius I am, repeating: “He fixes the radio.” in my mind! It never occurred to him that in order to fix the receiver he had to think - that a little boy could stand, think and figure out what was wrong.
At that time, understanding radio circuits was easier than it is now, because they were all open. Having disassembled the receiver (the difficulty was only in understanding which screws needed to be unscrewed), you saw: here is a resistor, here is a capacitor, here is this, here is this, and everything is marked. If the capacitor leaked or overheated, it was clear that it had burned out. If one of the resistors showed a black coating, it was again clear what the problem was. And if you couldn’t determine the cause by eye, you took a voltmeter and found the place where the voltage leakage occurred. The receivers were simple, their circuits were not very complex. The voltage on the grids was always one and a half to two volts, on the anodes - one or two hundred volts, everything was constant. So all that was required to repair was to understand what was happening inside the receiver, find the problem and fix it.
Although sometimes it took time. I remember once spending half a day trying to find a burnt-out resistor that outwardly seemed fine. That receiver belonged to my mother’s friend, so I had time - no one was breathing down my neck, asking: “What are you doing?” On the contrary, they said to me: “Would you like some milk or a cupcake?” In the end, I fixed the receiver because I was - and still am - stubborn. If I come across a task, I simply cannot brush it aside. When my mother’s friend said, “Okay, that’s enough, there’s too much work,” I would lose my temper, because after spending so much time, I simply had to beat the damn thing. And I looked for the problem, and looked, and finally found it.
Challenges and puzzles were what drove me. Hence my desire to decipher Mayan hieroglyphs and my passion for cracking safes. I remember that in the first days of my studies in high school, a guy who studied in a special mathematics class approached me with a problem - in geometry, or something. I didn’t calm down until I solved it, which took about fifteen to twenty minutes. And during the day, several more guys came to me with the same problem, and I solved it without leaving the spot. As a result, for every one student in front of whom I struggled with it for twenty minutes, there were five who decided that I was a super-genius.
So I began to acquire a rather strange reputation. While studying in high school, I was approached with every problem and riddle that humanity has ever come up with. I learned every crazy, tricky puzzle there is. And when I went to MIT, one senior brought a friend to a dance who knew a lot of riddles and told her that I was great at solving them. While dancing, she came up to me and said:
- They say you have a good head, so try to solve this: a man has eight bundles of firewood that need to be cut...
And I already knew this riddle and answered:
“He starts by chopping everything into three parts.
She walked away, but soon returned with a new riddle, then another and another - and I knew them all.
This went on for quite a long time, and at the end of the dance she came up to me with a confident look: that’s it, they say, you’re caught.
– Mother and daughter travel around Europe...
– My daughter fell ill with bubonic plague.
She almost fell! She hasn’t yet told me the problem - and the story is long: mother and daughter stay in a hotel in different rooms, the next morning the mother comes to her daughter, and there is no one or someone unfamiliar in the room, the mother turns to the hotel director: “Where is my daughter?" - and he asks: “What kind of daughter is this?” - and in the registration book there is only the mother’s name, and so on and so on, and it is impossible to understand what happened. The answer is that the daughter fell ill with the bubonic plague, and the director, fearing that the hotel might be closed, took the girl away, cleaned out her room and destroyed all traces of her stay there. In general, the story is long, but I heard it, and when the girl began: “A mother and daughter are traveling around Europe,” I remembered that I had already encountered such a beginning, blurted out the answer at random and hit the nail on the head.
In high school, we had an “algebra team,” consisting of five students, and we traveled to other schools to participate in competitions. They sat down on chairs in a row, the opposing team sat opposite. The teacher conducting the competition took out an envelope on which was written “forty-five seconds.” She opened the envelope, wrote out the problem on the school board and said: “Let’s start!” - that is, it was still not forty-five seconds, because while she was writing on the board, it was already possible to think. So, the game looked like this: you received a piece of paper and you could write something on it, or you could not write - it doesn’t matter. All that mattered was the answer. If it looked like “six books,” you wrote “6” and circled the number with a large circle. If what was in the circle was correct, you won, if not, you lost.
One thing was for sure: the usual, straightforward solution to the problem - all sorts of “Let's denote the number of red books with the letter A, the number of blue books with the letter B” and then creaking, creaking, creaking until you get to “six books” - was practically impossible. This would have taken about fifty seconds, since those who determined how much time should be allocated for the decision always reduced it a little. So you wondered: “Isn’t it possible? see answer?" Sometimes you saw it right away, sometimes you had to come up with a new way to solve it and perform algebraic calculations as quickly as possible. The practice was great, I solved problems better and better and eventually led our team. So I learned to count quickly, and this skill came in handy at university. When we were given a calculation task, I very quickly understood in which direction we should move, and performed the calculations - also quickly.
What I also enjoyed in high school was coming up with problems and theorems. That is, while doing mathematics, I tried to find some practical example for which what I was doing might be useful. So I came up with a whole series of problems about right triangles. Instead of specifying the lengths of two sides to find the third, I specified the difference in their lengths. Here is a typical example: there is a flagpole, a rope is tied to its top; if it is allowed to simply hang down, its length is three feet longer than the height of the flagpole; if pulled tight, the end of the rope would be five feet from the base of the flagpole. What is its height?
I developed some equations for solving similar problems and as a result I noticed some connection - perhaps it was sin 2 x + cos 2 x = 1,– which reminded me of trigonometry. A few years earlier, probably when I was eleven or twelve years old, I read a book on trigonometry I borrowed from the library - and forgot to think about it. I only remembered that trigonometry has something to do with the relationship between sines and cosines. And I began to figure out these relationships by drawing triangles, and I proved each one on my own. In addition, I calculated sines, cosines, and tangents in five-degree increments—starting with the sine of a five-degree angle I knew and using addition and the half-angle formulas I had derived.
A few years later, when I was studying trigonometry in high school, I looked through those notes and discovered that my examples often differed from those given in the textbook. Sometimes I couldn't find a simple way to solve a problem, and I went around in circles looking for it. Sometimes my method turned out to be smarter - the solution given in the textbook was more complex! In general, sometimes I had the upper hand, and sometimes the textbook took over.
While studying. trigonometry, I disliked the symbols that represent sine, cosine, tangent, and so on. In my opinion sin f looked like " s multiply by i, multiply by P and multiply by f"! And I invented another one, similar to the square root icon - “sigma” with a long tail, under which I placed f. For tangent, “tau” was used, and for cosine, something similar to “gamma” was used, although it also looked like a square root.
Further, the inverse arcsine was denoted by the same “sigma”, but mirrored from left to right, so that first there was a horizontal line with an argument under it, and then the “sigma” itself. This and it was arcsine, and NOT stupid sin 1 f! They wrote God knows what in books! For me sin 1 meant 1/sine - inverse sine. Of course my symbols are better.
AND f(x) I didn’t like it either, because it was like “ f multiply by X". AND dx/dy didn't like these d I wanted to reduce in the numerator and denominator, so I used another icon similar to amp;. For logarithms I used large L with an elongated lower leg on which the argument was placed - and so on.
I thought that my symbols were no worse, or even better than ordinary ones - what difference does it make? what exactly to use? Subsequently it turned out that the difference still exists. Once, while explaining something to a fellow student, I began, without thinking properly, to write out these symbols, and he asked: “What the hell is this?” It was then that I realized that to talk with another person I would have to use standard notations, and over time I abandoned my own.
I also invented a set of symbols for a typewriter that made it possible to type equations on it - something like Fortran icons. I also repaired typewriters, using paper clips and rubber bands (the ones back then didn’t break like the ones they sell here in Los Angeles now), but not professionally. I just wanted them to work. However, here too the main problem was to understand what was wrong with the machine and how to fix it, and this interested me, like any puzzle.
The Incredible Adventures of Richard F. Feynman, told to Ralph Leighton and edited by Edward Hutchings
From the editor
Here is the first complete translation into Russian of a wonderful book about the life and adventures of the famous physicist, one of the creators of the atomic bomb, Nobel Prize winner, Richard Phillips Feynman.
Certain parts of this book have already been translated by M. Shifman and O.L. Tikhodeeva and published in the journals “Science and Life”, No. 10-12, 1986, No. 2-8, 1987 and “Advances in Physical Sciences”, v. 148, no. 3, March 1986. The editors express gratitude to prof. M. Shifman and O.L. Tikhodeeva for providing the translation.
Preface
The stories in this book were collected gradually, informally, over seven years of very enjoyable drumming with Richard Feynman. I found each story individually quite funny and the collection of them simply amazing. Sometimes it’s even hard to believe that so many amazingly crazy things could happen to one person in one life. And, of course, one cannot help but be inspired by the fact that one person could invent so many innocent pranks in one life!
Ralph LeightonIntroduction
I hope that the book before you will not be Richard Feynman's only memoir. The facts given here certainly present a true picture of much of his character: his almost manic need to solve puzzles, his cheeky mischief, his fierce impatience with pretentiousness and hypocrisy, and his ability to take a jab at anyone who tries to jab him! This book is a great read: scandalous, shocking and at the same time warm and very human.
For all this is nothing more than the rim of the cornerstone of his life: science. We see her here and there, as the background of one sketch and then another; but she never appears as the focus of his existence. Yet, as generations of his students and colleagues know, that is exactly what she is. There is probably simply no other option. There is probably no way to create a similar cycle of stories about him and his work: about difficult problems and frustrations, about excitement that surpasses understanding, about the deep pleasure of scientific understanding that was the source of happiness in his life.
I remember how we came to his lectures as students. He stood in front of the audience and smiled at everyone who entered, and his fingers tapped some complex rhythm on the black surface of the demonstration table. When the last students took their seats, he took the chalk and began to spin it quickly, quickly, like a professional player with a poker chip, and continued to smile happily, as if at some joke known to him alone. And then, still smiling, he would start talking about physics, and his diagrams and equations would help us get closer to his understanding. But it was not a secret joke that made his eyes laugh and sparkle, but physics. The joy of physics! The joy was contagious! We are lucky that we caught this disease. Now you there is an opportunity to experience the joy of life with Feynman.
Albert R. Hibbs Chief Member of the Technical Staff of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of TechnologyAutobiography
Some facts of my life. I was born in the small town of Far Rockaway near New York, on the seashore, in 1918. I lived there until 1935. Then I studied for 4 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and in 1939 I moved to Princeton . While at Princeton, I took part in the Manhattan Project and in April 1943 moved to Los Alamos. From October or November 1946 until 1951 I worked at Cornell.
In 1941 I married Arlene, and in 1946, while I was at Los Alamos, she died of tuberculosis.
In the summer of 1949 I visited Brazil, and in 1951 I spent another six months there. Then I moved to the California Institute of Technology, where I still work.
At the end of 1951 I spent a couple of weeks in Japan. I went there again a year or two later, just after I remarried. My second wife was Mary Lou.
I am now married to Gwyneth, she is English, and we have two children: Carl and Michelle.
R.F.F.
From Far Rockaway to MIT
He fixes radios while thinking!
When I was eleven or twelve years old, I set up a laboratory in my home. It consisted of an old wooden box into which I attached shelves. I had a heater, so I would take the fat and French fry the potatoes all the time. In addition, I had a battery and a lamp unit.
To build the lamp unit, I went to a cheap hardware store and bought some sockets that screw onto a wooden base. Then I connected them with a ringing wire. I knew that if I combined the switches in different ways - in series or in parallel - I could get different voltages. However, I did not know that the resistance of a light bulb depends on its temperature, so the results of my calculations were different from what I received at the output of my circuit. However, the result was quite acceptable. When connected in series, the light bulbs lit up at half power and smoldering, very cool, just great!
The system I created also had a fuse, so if I had shorted something, it would have blown. The whole point is that I needed a weaker fuse than the one that was in the house, so I made the fuses myself: I took tin foil and wrapped it around the old blown fuse. There was a five-watt light bulb in parallel with my fuse, so that when my fuse blew, the load from the buffer charger supplying charge to the battery would light the light bulb. The light was located on the control panel under a brown candy wrapper (it turns red when the light comes on underneath it), so if something was going bad, I could tell by looking at the control panel and seeing a big red spot where the fuse was. It was easy super!
I was crazy about radios. It all started with a detector receiver that I bought at the store. I listened to it at night in bed before going to bed, putting on headphones. When Mom and Dad got home late, they used to come into my room to take off my headphones - and worry about what was going on in my head when I was sleeping.
Sep 26, 2017Of course you're joking, Mr. Feynman! Richard Phillips Feynman
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Title: Of course you're joking, Mr. Feynman!
Author: Richard Phillips Feynman
Year: 1985
Genre: Biographies and Memoirs, Foreign educational literature, Foreign journalism, Other educational literature
About the book “Of course you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” Richard Phillips Feynman
Richard Feynman is one of the most famous American physicists of the twentieth century. Nobel Prize winner, one of the creators of quantum electrodynamics, participant in the development of the atomic bomb, reformer of physics teaching in higher education - in a word, a very serious person. Is it possible to believe that this outstanding scientist loved jokes and pranks, casually opened the safes of his colleagues to leave humorous notes there, played exotic musical instruments, and during a business meeting could tell his superiors that they were doing complete nonsense?
“You're Surely Joking, Mr. Feynman” is a collection of autobiographical stories about a unique person who, with his existence, destroyed the stereotype that a real talented scientist is a buttoned-up cracker with no sense of humor, completely devoid of simple human weaknesses, and everything of his own. devoting time exclusively to scientific research in the laboratory.
Among other things, Richard Feynman was known as an excellent speaker. Not only students and colleagues, but also simply people passionate about physics sought to attend his lectures, as captivating as a detective novel. With the same artistry, the physicist spoke to his friends about his own life. Feynman's friend Ralph Layton recorded these stories on a tape recorder for seven years, later transcribed them into text form, and in 1985 they formed the basis of the book You're Surely Joking, Mr. Feynman, which we strongly recommend you read.
In fact, this collection is the same stories that bosom friends share with each other. They cover all the main periods of Feynman’s life - his student years, work in the so-called “Manhattan Project”, in which leading scientists in the USA, Great Britain, Germany and Canada developed nuclear weapons, participation in psychological experiments, cooperation with the commission that investigated the disaster of the space shuttle Challenger "
Who just needs to read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman? First of all, for those who are used to taking life too seriously. Richard Feynman is an illustration of the fact that real success can only be achieved by a person who is seriously interested in his work, but is not fixated on it. Moreover, only a comprehensively developed personality, open to everything new and ready to constantly comprehend the unknown, is able to appreciate all the beauty of life.
In addition, the book “You're Surely Joking, Mr. Feynman” is an excellent motivator for those who have lost interest in the activities they are forced to engage in. It restores faith in one’s own strength, awakens curiosity and the desire, following the example of its main character, to also try one’s strength in the most unexpected areas.
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Quotes from the book “Of course you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” Richard Phillips Feynman
What matters is not the property we have, but the ability to create this property.
Of course, you only live once, you make all the mistakes you have to make, you learn what not to do, and that's the best thing you can learn.
The main principle is not to fool yourself. And it’s just easier to fool yourself. Here you need to be very careful.
I have a hard time understanding what happens to people: they do not learn through understanding. They learn in some other way - by rote memorization or otherwise. Their knowledge is so fragile!
You keep telling yourself, “I can do it, but I won’t,” but that’s just another way of saying you can’t.
To add one second to your life, you would have to fly around the earth 400 million times, but all those airplane breakfasts will shorten your life much more significantly.
How much do you value life?
- Sixty four.
- Why did you say sixty-four?
- How do you think the value of life can be measured?
- No! I mean, why did you say "sixty-four" and not "seventy-three", for example?
- If I said “seventy-three.” You should have asked me the same question!
When I was eleven or twelve years old, I set up a laboratory in my home. It consisted of an old wooden shipping box into which I inserted shelves. I also had an electric stove (on which I often fried julienned potatoes in oil), as well as a battery and a lamp unit.
To build it, I went to a store where each item cost five or ten cents, bought lamp sockets that could be screwed to a wooden base, and connected them with pieces of bell wire. I knew that different combinations of switches - series or parallel - could produce different voltage values. What I didn't know was that the resistance of a light bulb depends on its temperature, and my calculations ended up not matching the voltages that the circuit was actually producing. Well, it’s okay, when the light bulbs were connected in parallel, they burned at full intensity, smoldered, it turned out very beautifully - just great!
There was also a fuse in this system, so if I shorted something, it would simply blow. I must say that I needed fuses that were weaker than those that were in the house, and I made them myself - I took staniol and wrapped it around a fuse that had already flown. I connected a five-watt light bulb in series to it - when the fuse blew, the voltage of the buffer rectifier, which constantly recharged the battery, was supplied to the light bulb. This light bulb was located on the control panel, covered with a piece of brown paper from a candy store (when the light flashed behind the paper, it turned red) - if something burned out, I just had to look at the panel, and I saw a large red spot where the fuse had flown out . In general, I had a very interesting time!
I loved radios. I started with a detector, bought it in a store and at night, in bed, listened to programs through headphones until I fell asleep. If my father and mother returned home late, they would come into my room and take off my headphones, worrying about what was going on in my head while I was sleeping.
Around this time I invented a burglar alarm, quite simple: a large battery and an electric bell connected by a wire. When the door to my room opened, it pressed the wire against the battery terminal, completed the circuit, and the bell rang.
One day, my father and mother returned home late in the evening and, afraid to wake me up, quietly opened my door to come in and take off my headphones. And suddenly the bell made a devilish noise - DING-DING-DING!!! And I jumped out of bed, screaming: “It works! Works!"
I had a Ford induction coil - a regular car ignition coil - and used it to build spark contacts on top of my control panel. I connected them in series with an argon-filled rheostatic lamp from those produced by the Raytheon company: when spark discharges passed through, the gas in it began to glow purple - beauty!
One day I was playing with a Ford coil, punching holes in the paper with sparks, and the paper suddenly caught fire. Soon I could no longer hold it in my hand - the fire was burning my fingers - and I dropped it into a metal trash can full of newspapers. Newspapers are known to burn quickly, and soon the room was ablaze. I closed the door so that my mother, who was playing bridge with her friends in the living room, would not notice that I was on fire, grabbed the first magazine that came to hand and covered the bucket with it to put out the fire.
The flame went out, I put the magazine away, but now the room began to fill with smoke. The bucket was too hot to handle, so I picked it up with pliers, carried it across the room and put it out the window, hoping that the breeze would blow away the smoke.
However, the breeze blowing outside revived the fire again, and now I could not reach the magazine. I had to drag the burning bucket into the room again to get the magazine, and, by the way, there were curtains hanging on the windows - it was very dangerous!
One way or another, I picked up the magazine, smothered the flame with it again, and this time kept it with me while I shook the ashes out of the bucket from a height of what seemed like three floors. Then he left the room, closed the door behind him and said to his mother: “I’ll go outside and play.” The smoke was gradually drawn out of the room through the open windows.
In addition to all this, I built all sorts of things out of electric motors and built an amplifier for a photocell I bought - when I passed my hand in front of it, the amplifier made a bell ring. I didn’t have time to do everything I wanted, because my mother always sent me to play outside. Still, I often stayed at home and tinkered in my laboratory.
I bought radios at junk sales. I had practically no money, but the receivers were inexpensive - old, broken - I bought them and tried to fix them. As a rule, the breakdowns were simple - in some receivers there were immediately noticeable wires hanging down, in others the coil was damaged or simply unwound - so I was able to quickly bring some of them back to life. One night I caught the WACO station on one of these receivers - from Waco, Texas - I was terribly excited!
It was with the help of this tube receiver that I managed to catch the UGN station from Schenectady. I must say that we children - two of my cousins, my sister and the neighbor kids - listened to an exciting program on the radio on the first floor, which was called “INO Crime Club” - it was impossible to tear yourself away! So, I discovered that I could listen to this program in my laboratory on UGN an hour earlier than it was broadcast in New York! I found out what was going to happen in it, and then, when we all sat down in front of the receiver standing below to listen to the new episode, I said: “You know, we haven’t heard about such and such for a long time. I bet he’ll show up now and help everyone out.”
And a couple of seconds later - bang! - he appeared. Everyone was completely delighted, and after that I predicted a couple more events. In the end, they realized that there was some kind of trick here - that I would find out everything from somewhere in advance. I had to admit that I was listening to the program at home an hour earlier.
The result, of course, is clear to you even without my explanation. Now no one wanted to wait for the usual start time of the program. Everyone wanted to go upstairs to my laboratory and sit for half an hour in front of the small crackling radio, listening to the INO Crime Club broadcast from Schenectady.
At that time we lived in a big house - my grandfather left it to his children, and they did not have any special wealth except this house. The house was huge, made of wood, I ran wires along the outside of it and plugged sockets into all the rooms so that I could listen to the receivers that were working upstairs in my laboratory, no matter where I was. I also got a loudspeaker - not a whole one, but a part of it, without a large upper horn.
One day, I put on headphones, connected them to the speaker and made a small discovery: when I ran my finger over the speaker, I heard the sound of this movement. That is, it turned out that the speaker can work as a microphone and does not even require any power. At the time, we were at Alexander Graham Bell School, and I demonstrated the connection between the speaker and the headphones. I think, although I didn’t know it at the time, that this was the type of phone he originally used.
Therefore, I had a microphone, and I could, using the speakers of receivers bought at sales, broadcast broadcasts from one floor of our house to another. At that time, my sister Joan, born nine years later than me, was two or three years old, and she loved to listen to a certain “Uncle Don” on the radio. He sang songs about “good children” and the like, and read letters from parents: “The birthday celebration of Mary So-and-so of 25 Flatbush Avenue will be held this Saturday.”
One fine day, my cousin Francis and I sat Joan downstairs, telling her that there was a special program that she should listen to, and we ran upstairs and started broadcasting: “Uncle Don speaking. We know of a very good little girl named Joan, who lives on New Broadway; It's her birthday soon - not today, but on such and such a date. Very sweet girl." Then we sang a song, and then imitated music: “Diddley-diddley, trump-pump-pum...” And when we were done with that, we went down to Joan.
So how? Did you like the program?
“Good,” she answered, “but why did you play music with your mouth?”
One day I got a phone call:
Mister, is that you Richard Feynman?
You are being disturbed from the hotel. Our radio doesn't work here, we'd like to fix it. As far as we know, you can do it.
“But I’m just a boy,” I replied. - Do not know how...
Yes, we know this, but still, do me a favor and come.
The hotel was managed by my aunt, but I didn't know about it. And he came - they still tell this story there - with a huge screwdriver sticking out of his back pocket. However, I was not tall, so no matter what kind of screwdriver I put in my back pocket, any one would seem hefty.
I walked over to the receiver, intending to fix it. I had absolutely no idea how this was done, but the hotel had its own handyman, and either he or I, in general, one of us, noticed that the rheostat knob - the volume control - was loose and began to scroll on the axis. The master took it off, filed something in it, returned it to its place - and everything worked.
The next receiver I set out to repair did not work at all. But everything with him turned out to be simple: he was connected to the power incorrectly. My further repairs became more and more complex, I coped with them more and more intelligently, and gained skill. I bought a milliammeter in New York and converted it into a voltmeter with several scales, using pieces of very thin copper wire of different lengths (calculated by me). My voltmeter was not particularly accurate, but it allowed me to find out whether the voltages in different receiver units were of the correct order of magnitude.
The main reason people came to me was Depression. They didn’t have the money to actually repair radios, but then they heard rumors about a boy who repairs radios, charging almost nothing for the work. So I had to climb onto roofs, fix antennas, and do much more. I learned a number of lessons, each more difficult than the next. In the end, I was asked to change the power supply of one receiver - from constant to alternating - as a result, the whole system began to lose noise, and I could not cope with it. The task was simply beyond my capabilities, and I had no idea about it.
One of my repairs created a sensation. I was working in a printing house at the time, and a friend of the owner, having learned that I was undertaking to repair radios, came straight to work to pick me up. He was clearly not a rich man - the car in which we drove to his home in a cheap part of the city did not fall apart while driving. Dear I ask:
So what about the receiver?
He answers:
When you turn it on, it hisses. Then the hissing subsides and everything works fine. The hissing just annoys me.
Due to copyright restrictions, we are forced to end this citation of the chapter “He Fixes the Radio in His Mind.” The continuation of this chapter (though in a different translation), as well as the full text of Richard Feynman's book "You're Surely Joking, Mr. Feynman!" can be read.
