"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

everything is yes, yes, Dr. Bohr. Get that guy and we'll talk with him first."
I was always dumb in that way. I never knew who I was talking to. I was always
worried about the physics. If the idea looked lousy, I said it looked lousy. If it looked
good, I said it looked good. Simple proposition.
I've always lived that way. It's nice, it's pleasant ­­ if you can do it. I'm lucky in
my life that I can do this.
After we'd made the calculations, the next thing that happened, of course, was the
test. I was actually at home on a short vacation at that time, after my wife died, and so I
got a message that said, "The baby is expected on such and such a day."
I flew back, and I arrived just when the buses were leaving, so I went straight out
to the site and we waited out there, twenty miles away. We had a radio, and they were
supposed to tell us when the thing was going to go off and so forth, but the radio wouldn't
work, so we never knew what was happening. But just a few minutes before it was sup­
posed to go off the radio started to work, and they told us there was twenty seconds or
something to go, for people who were far away like we were. Others were closer, six
miles away.
They gave out dark glasses that you could watch it with. Dark glasses! Twenty
miles away, you couldn't see a damn thing through dark glasses. So I figured the only
thing that could really hurt your eyes (bright light can never hurt your eyes) is ultraviolet
light. I got behind a truck windshield, because the ultraviolet can't go through glass, so
that would be safe, and so I could see the damn thing.
Time comes, and this tremendous flash out there is so bright that I duck, and I see
this purple splotch on the floor of the truck. I said, "That's not it. That's an after­image."
So I look back up, and I see this white light changing into yellow and then into orange.
Clouds form and disappear again ­­ from the compression and expansion of the shock
wave.
Finally, a big ball of orange, the center that was so bright, becomes a ball of
orange that starts to rise and billow a little bit and get a little black around the edges, and
then you see it's a big ball of smoke with flashes on the inside, with the heat of the fire
going outwards.
All this took about one minute. It was a series from bright to dark, and I had seen
it. I am about the only guy who actually looked at the damn thing ­­ the first Trinity test.
Everybody else had dark glasses, and the people at six miles couldn't see it because they
were all told to lie on the floor. I'm probably the only guy who saw it with the human eye.
Finally, after about a minute and a half, there's suddenly a tremendous noise ­­
BANG, and then a rumble, like thunder ­­ and that's what convinced me. Nobody had
said a word during this whole thing. We were all just watching quietly. But this sound
released everybody ­­ released me particularly because the solidity of the sound at that
distance meant that it had really worked.
The man standing next to me said, "What's that?"
I said, "That was the Bomb."
The man was William Laurence. He was there to write an article describing the
whole situation. I had been the one who was supposed to have taken him around. Then it
was found that it was too technical for him, and so later H. D. Smyth came and I showed
him around. One thing we did, we went into a room and there on the end of a narrow
pedestal was a small silver­plated ball. You could put your hand on it. It was warm. It