Hans Bethe: How I met Feynman at Los Alamos

there was a very young man in my division richard feynman and i very soon noticed that he his ability was far beyond the great ability of all the rest of my division and so we collaborated from the beginning we we extended service formula for the yield of a nuclear weapon and there is the beta final formula which i think is still secret and has worked very well and it has generalized servers work to the case when a large fraction of the fish fissionable material is actually efficient so very soon i made feinman another group leader and we became good friends and remained so uh after the war i had the impression at los alamos that i was really constantly urged to work harder we worked eight hours a day six days a week and still there was far more to do than we ever could do feynman by the way turned out to be a wizard not only in in theoretical physics but at one time we got ibm machines that is uh mechanical electrical calculating machines and he and another member of my division managed to to build the whole machine that is really not one but half a dozen machines from the toolkit and the instructions that were given together with these tools after about 10 days we got an expert an ibm machinist who was inducted into the army and was assigned to us and he just admired it and said he had never seen it before that people without previous instruction could put together these machines they worked feinman became the leader of that group and they calculated all the things that we needed to calculate

Channel: Christopher Sykes

Views: 84,346

Keywords: Bethe, Feynman, genius, science, physics, Los, Alamos, atomic, bomb, IBM, war, wizard, web, of, stories

Id: e4e1jdt-n8U

Length: 3min 26sec (206 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2010