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

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"Oh! I guess the property section was able to open it after all." I went down to the man in the property section. "I went up to the safe and it was already open." "Oh, yeah," he said; "I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I sent our regular locksmith up there to drill it, but before he drilled it he tried to open it, and he opened it." So! First information: Los Alamos now has a regular locksmith. Second information: This man knows how to drill safes, something I know nothing about. Third information: He can open a safe cold in a few minutes. This is a real professional, a real source of information. This guy I have to meet. I found out he was a locksmith they had hired after the war (when they weren't as concerned about security) to take care of such things. It turned out that he didn't have enough work to do opening safes, so he also repaired the Marchant calculators we had used. During the war I repaired those things all the time so I had a way to meet him. Now I have never been surreptitious or tricky about meeting somebody; I just go right up and introduce myself. But in this case it was so important to meet this man, and I knew that before he would tell me any of his secrets on how to open safes, I would have to prove myself. I found out where his room was in the basement of the theoretical physics section, where I worked and I knew he worked in the evening, when the machines weren't being used. So, at first I would walk past his door on my way to my office in the evening. That's all; I'd just walk past. A few nights later, just a "Hi." After a while, when he saw it was the same guy walking past, he'd say "Hi," or "Good evening." A few weeks of this slow process and I see he's working on the Marchant calculators. I say nothing about them; it isn't time yet. We gradually say a little more: "Hi! I see you're working pretty hard!" "Yeah, pretty hard" that kind of stuff. Finally, a breakthrough: he invites me for soup. It's going very good now. Every evening we have soup together. Now I begin to talk a little bit about the adding machines, and he tells me he has a problem. He's been trying to put a succession of springloaded wheels back onto a shaft, and he doesn't have the right tool, or something; he's been working on it for a week. I tell him that I used to work on those machines during the war, and "I'll tell you what: you just leave the machine out tonight, and I'll have a look at it tomorrow." "OK," he says, because he's desperate. The next day I looked at the damn thing and tried to load it by holding all the wheels in my hand. It kept snapping back. I thought to myself, "If he's been trying the same thing for a week, and I'm trying it and can't do it, it ain't the way to do it!" I stopped and looked at it very carefully, and I noticed that each wheel had a little hole just a little hole. Then it dawned on me: I sprung the first one; then I put a piece of wire through the little hole. Then I sprung the second one and put the wire through it. Then the next one, the next one like putting beads on a string and I strung the whole thing the first time I tried it, got it all in line, pulled the wire out, and everything was OK. That night I showed him the little hole and how I did it, and from then on we talked a lot about machines; we got to be good friends. Now, in his office there were a lot
of little cubbyholes that contained locks half taken apart, and pieces from safes, too. Oh, they were beautiful! But I still didn't say a word about locks and safes. Finally, I figured the day was coming, so I decided to put out a little bit of bait about safes: I'd tell him the only thing worth a damn that I knew about them that you can take the last two numbers off while it's open. "Hey!" I said, looking over at the cubbyholes. "I see you're working on Mosler safes." "Yeah." "You know, these locks are weak. If they're open, you can take the last two numbers off. . ." "You can?" he said, finally showing some interest. "Yeah." "Show me how," he said. I showed him how to do it, and he turned to me. "What's your name?" All this time we had never exchanged names. "Dick Feynman," I said. "God! You're Feynman!" he said in awe. "The great safecracker! I've heard about you; I've wanted to meet you for so long! I want to learn how to crack a safe from you." "What do you mean? You know how to open safes cold." "I don't." "Listen, I heard about the Captain's safe, and I've been working pretty hard all this time because I wanted to meet you. And you tell me you don't know how to open a safe cold." "That's right." "Well you must know how to drill a safe." "I don't know how to do that either." "WHAT?" I exclaimed. "The guy in the property section said you picked up your tools and went up to drill the Captain's safe." "Suppose you had a job as a locksmith," he said, "and a guy comes down and asks you to drill a safe. What would you do?" "Well," I replied, "I'd make a fancy thing of putting my tools together, pick them up and take them to the safe. Then I'd put my drill up against the safe somewhere at random and I'd go vvvvvvvvvvv, so I'd save my job." "That's exactly what I was going to do." "But you opened it! You must know how to crack safes." "Oh, yeah. I knew that the locks come from the factory set at 25025 or 5025 50, so I thought, 'Who knows; maybe the guy didn't bother to change the combination,' and the second one worked." So I did learn something from him that he cracked safes by the same miraculous methods that I did. But even funnier was that this big shot Captain had to have a super, super safe, and had people go to all that trouble to hoist the thing up into his office, and he didn't even bother to set the combination. I went from office to office in my building, trying those two factory combinations, and I opened about one safe in five. Uncle Sam Doesn't Need You!
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
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Preface The stories in this book we
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He Fixes Radios by Thinking! Part 1
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could act like a microphone, and yo
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whole afternoon to find a burnedo
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For logarithms it was a big L exten
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very sharp knife into the table at
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and be more relaxed, and vice versa
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One time I danced with a certain gi
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same waitress all the time. I notic
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"Cut it out, Feynman; this is seri
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could find. Before I tell you what
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observations were made while I was
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I decided there must be an "interpr
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company. His father was the one who
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we could do. Our process was pretty
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out of me, because I didn't like fo
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In the Princeton cyclotron lab they
Page 37 and 38: When it was time to get up and go o
Page 39 and 40: and animal, are made of little bric
Page 41 and 42: some other experiment. I said, "Hel
Page 43 and 44: We figured if we could get rid of t
Page 45 and 46: do?" I said I didn't know, and he s
Page 47 and 48: always something I could find in th
Page 49 and 50: Atlantic City, where they had vario
Page 51 and 52: though it was a microscope of forty
Page 53 and 54: lowing" it occurred. I followed eig
Page 55 and 56: I asked the Bell Labs if they would
Page 57 and 58: the fuse won't burn! I decided that
Page 59 and 60: that he wanted to try to develop. H
Page 61 and 62: Mexico," the man says, "Oh, so all
Page 63 and 64: meantime, what instructions go down
Page 65 and 66: said, "No codes." So I wrote back t
Page 67 and 68: I looked at it and said, "That look
Page 69 and 70: people that I wanted were there, an
Page 71 and 72: different where you go first t
Page 73 and 74: concentrate on this one. So they st
Page 75 and 76: it was very difficult. Now, us
Page 77 and 78: was radioactive. It was plutonium.
Page 79 and 80: One guy tries to make something to
Page 81 and 82: Everybody was amazed. It was comple
Page 83 and 84: it appeared, depends on the same li
Page 85 and 86: Hoffman is just the kind of guy to
Page 87: mathematical constant?" "Oh, no!" d
Page 91 and 92: himself! So I turn around, and sure
Page 93 and 94: "No. Do you?" "Well, I'm keeping an
Page 95 and 96: partly in the strength of our futur
Page 97 and 98: have any room either. I say to the
Page 99 and 100: answered the questions. Everything
Page 101 and 102: around faster than the wobbling. I
Page 103 and 104: ar, with all its "temptations," and
Page 105 and 106: level. . . "Excuse me, sir," I say,
Page 107 and 108: I liked to imitate being drunk, so
Page 109 and 110: you been?" At this moment the guy t
Page 111 and 112: "What?" "That's right," he said con
Page 113 and 114: After that, I tried to do those thi
Page 115 and 116: He was completely washed out, and l
Page 117 and 118: Monday, at the latest. I got all up
Page 119 and 120: The people from the airlines were s
Page 121 and 122: The boss said, "Where're you from?"
Page 123 and 124: eaches, where most people felt thei
Page 125 and 126: super: He answered everything nifty
Page 127 and 128: y first learning to pronounce the l
Page 129 and 130: Certainly, Mr. Big! I used to cross
Page 131 and 132: We were eating breakfast in the din
Page 133 and 134: "That must have been it," I said. I
Page 135 and 136: some kind of big pain, and it start
Page 137 and 138: the two piles of hay, with the extr
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I must refuse. The reason I have to
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hotel. I pushed open the doors and
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"Well, yes. . ." "Hoompf." And that
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something like, "May I observe your
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in fact, a prediction on top of wha
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"The one from SoandSo's book."
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government, or else I can't talk in
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et Jerry that he wouldn't be able t
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at the paper. Don't take your eyes
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She told me this story: She and her
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were these fluorescent colors on bl
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they came back and bought it. So th
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with the artists from time to time
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understand," and everybody else wou
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way to understand ethical problems
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families all the time, so that if a
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that they called "new math," and si
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awful! All it was was a game to get
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then there was something else. And
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one. Then the question came up, "Wi
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I got that shock about three or fou
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had been brought up by my father ag
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She turned to me and said, "Oh! You
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astronomy. *When I was a young prof
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After the colloquium at UCLA Profes
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So the fella who'd been talking to
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andleader said, "Geez! Who was that
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who had come out at the beginning o
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"This is the place," the receptioni
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my way down again. At first it took
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external to the internal psychologi
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people with commonsense ideas are i
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think to laymen. For example, I was
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to have such a policy in teaching
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

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