Recent Changes
- SurelyYoureJokingMrFeynman . . . October 30, 2019, at 05:42 PM by phaedrus: [[Category: Florilegium]]
- FeynmanGetsHypnotized . . . December 06, 2017, at 05:09 AM by phaedrus: 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....
- HowTheBoardOfEducationSavedTwoMillionDollars . . . December 05, 2017, at 02:13 PM by phaedrus: There were two books that we were unable to come to a decision about after much discussion; they were extremely close. So we left it open to the Board of Education to decide. Since the board was now taking the cost into consideration, and since the two books were so evenly matched, the board decided to open the bids and take the lower one. Then the question came up, "Will the schools be getting the books at the regular time, or could they, perhaps, get them a little earlier, in time for the coming term?" One publisher's representative got up and said, "We are happy that you accepted our bid; we can get it out in time for the next term."
- FeynmanReadsABlueprint . . . December 05, 2017, at 10:32 AM by phaedrus: How do you look at a plant that isn't built yet? I don't know. Lieutenant Zumwalt, who was always coming around with me because I had to have an escort everywhere, takes me into this room where there are these two engineers and a ''loooooong'' table covered with a stack of blueprints representing the various floors of the proposed plant. I took mechanical drawing when I was in school, but I am not good at reading blueprints. So they unroll the stack of blueprints and start to explain it to me, thinking I am a genius. Now, one of the things they had to avoid in the plant was accumulation. They had problems like when there's an evaporator working, which is trying to accumulate the stuff, if the valve gets stuck or something like that and too much stuff accumulates, it'll explode. So they explained to me that this plant is
- FeynmanBecomesAMechanicalEngineer . . . December 05, 2017, at 10:27 AM by phaedrus: 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
- TheMindreaderAndTheSalesman . . . December 05, 2017, at 09:53 AM by phaedrus: 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?"
- ADifferentBoxOfTools . . . December 05, 2017, at 09:51 AM by phaedrus: 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.
- Hypnosis . . . December 05, 2017, at 08:36 AM by phaedrus: 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.
- TheMetaplastCorporation . . . December 05, 2017, at 08:31 AM by phaedrus: A few years later I was in Los Alamos, where there was a man named Frederic de Hoffman, who was a sort of scientist; but more, he was also very good at administrating. Not highly trained, he liked mathematics, and worked very hard; he compensated for his lack of training by hard work. Later he became the president or vice president of General Atomics and he was a big industrial character after that. But at the time he was just a very energetic, open-eyed, enthusiastic boy, helping along with the Project as best he could. One day we were eating at the Fuller Lodge, and he told me he had been working in England before coming to Los Alamos. "What kind of work were you doing there?" I asked. "I was working on a process for metal-plating plastics. I was one of the guys in the laboratory." "How did it go?"
- FeynmanLearnsItalian . . . December 05, 2017, at 08:28 AM by phaedrus: I thought it was a great idea. I would say 'A te! A te!" back—gesturing, of course. Then, as I gained confidence, I developed my abilities further. I would be riding my bicycle, and some lady would be driving in her car and get in the way, and I'd say, "PUzzia a la maLOche!"—and she'd shrink! Some terrible Italian boy had cursed a terrible curse at her! I call back, "RONte BALta!", returning the greeting. He didn't know I didn't know, and I didn't know what he said, and he didn't know what I said. But it was OK! It was great! It works! After all, when they hear the intonation, they recognize it immediately as Italian—maybe it's Milano instead of Romano, what the hell. But he's an iTALian! So it's just great. But you have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing will happen.
- GroupHeader . . . December 05, 2017, at 08:25 AM by phaedrus: (:stylepage Site.StyleSheetApostaxe:)