Richard Feynman Lecture -- "Los Alamos From Below"

this joint may get raided by the police department anyhow we're going to get started on speaker today as you know is Richard Phillips Feynman Nobel Prize winner in physics and scientist extraordinary the difference between a dick Feynman and other people is that he is more logical and has a greater imagination this is a rare combination most people who are logical don't have much imagination as a great Russian physicist Frankel said knowledge progresses by illogical steps Feynman uses his imagination to probe the scientific frontiers beyond the bounds of logic in much the same manner as mathematicians use complex variables in order to make analytic continuation z' ah at Los Alamos and less olmos robert oppenheimer raided dick as his most valuable player besides being an extremely talented theoretical physicist he is a super-duper troubleshooter he can go into an experimental lab than by asking the right questions find the reasons why the experiment doesn't work it's a great pleasure to have dick here and I thanks very much how do you do hello down there and however everybody else that introduction is quite inappropriate for my talk which is Los Alamos from below when I mean from below because Oh Lois mr. hershfeld says in my field at the present time I'm a slightly famous man at the time I was not anybody famous at all I did not even have my degree when I started to work on stuff associated with the Manhattan Project so I want to describe it from many of the other people who tell you about Los Alamos know something they're up in some higher echelon of government of the organization or something or worried about some big decisions I worried about no big decisions I was always fluttering about underneath somewhere I wasn't the absolute bottom as you've turned out I did get sort of up a few steps but I wasn't one of the higher people so I want you to try to put yourself in a different kind of condition than the introduction said and just imagine this young graduate student that hasn't got his degree yet is working on his thesis and I'll start by saying how I got into the project and then what happened to me that's all just what happened to me during the project I was working at Princeton in my room one day when Bob Wilson came in I was working at what the hell it isn't funny yet I got lots of better Bob Wilson came in and said that he had been funded to do a job that was a secret and was not supposed to tell anybody but he was going to tell me because he knew that as soon as I knew what he was going to do I'd see that I had to go along with it so he told me about the problem of separating different isotopes of uranium he had a to make up ultimately and make a bomb he had a process for separating the isotopes of uranium which is different than the one that was ultimately used that he'd wanted to try to develop and he taught me about it and he said there's a meeting I said I didn't want to do it he says alright there's a meeting at 3 o'clock I'll see you there he said I said it's alright that you told me the secret because I'm not going to tell anybody but I'm not going to do it so I went back to work on my thesis for about three minutes and then I began to pace the floor to think about this thing the Germans had Hitler and the possibility of developing an atomic bomb was obvious and the possibility that they would develop before we did was very much of a fright so I decided to go to the meeting at 3 o'clock by 4 o'clock I already had a desk in a room I was trying to calculate whether this particular method was limited by the total amount of current that you can get in an ion beam and so on I won't go into the details but I had a desk and I have paper and I'm working as hard as I could and as fast as I can whereas the fellows were building the apparatus to do the experiments right there the other fellows who were joined and it was like those moving pictures that you see where you see a piece of equipment go bloop bloop bloop every time I'd look up the thing was getting bigger and what was happening of course is that all the boys had decided to work on this and to stop their research in science all the science stopped during the war except the little bit that was done in Los Alamos it was not much science it was a lot of engineering and they were robbing their equipment from their research and all the equipment of different research was being put together to make the new apparatus to do the experiments try to separate the isotopes of uranium and I stopped my work also for the same reason it is true that I did take a six week vacation off after a while from that job and finished writing my thesis so I did get my D just before I got the los alamos so I wasn't quite as far down as I led you to believe one of the first experiences that were very interesting to me in this project at Princeton was to meet great men I had never met very many great men before but there was a committee evaluation committee that had to decide which way we're going and to try to help us along that ultimately decide which way we're going to separate the Iranian this evaluation committee had men like Tolman and Smyth and URI and Robbie and Oppenheimer and so forth on it and there was Compton for example one of the things that was a terrible shock deride sit there because I had understood the theory of this process that we're doing and so they asked me questions and I'd be there and then we discuss it and then they start to discuss something you know one man would make a point then Conklin would explain a different point of view and he would be perfectly right and it was the right ID and he said it should be this way another guy would say well it may be there's this possibility we have to consider against it another possible you have to consider I'm jumping they should repeat Compton's we should say it again he should say it again because everybody's disagreeing when the wall the way around the table so finally at the end a Tamil news the Chairman says well having heard all these arguments I guess it's true that companies Eichmann is the best of all I know we have to go ahead and it was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas each one thinking of a new facet and remembering what the other fella said having paid attention and so at the end the decision is made as to which idea was the best summary at all together without having to say it three times you see so that was a shock and these were very great men indeed this project was ultimately decided not to be the way that they were going to separate uranium and we were told then that we were going to stop and that they would be starting in Los Alamos in New Mexico the project which would actually make the bomb and that we would all go out there to make it there would be experiments that we would have to do theoretical work that we'd have to do I was in the theoretical work all the rest of the fellows were an experimental work the question was what could do because we had this heedless of time we've just been told to turn off but without Los Alamos wasn't ready yet some Bob Wilson tried to make use of his time by saying they sent me to Chicago to find out all that we could find out about the bomb and the problems so that we could start the build in our laboratory equipment counters of various kinds of Sun that would be useful when we got the Los Alamos so no time was wasted I was sent to Chicago with the instructions to go to each group tell him I was gonna work with them have them tell me about a problem to the extent that I knew enough details that I could actually sit down and start working on the problem and as soon as I got that far go to another guy in s for a problem in that way I would understand the details of everything it was a very good idea my conscience bothered me a little bit but it turned out accidentally I was very lucky and one of the guys explaining the promise has wanted to do it that way and in a half an hour he had it solve me been working on it for three months so I did something so I came back from Chicago and I described this situation how much energy was released what the bomb was going to be like and so forth to the fellows I remember a friend of mine it was a work with me Paul olam mathematician came up to me and he said when they make a moving picture about this then have the guy coming back to Chicago telling the Princeton man all about the bomb and he'll be dressed in a suit and carry a briefcase and so on and urine dirty shirt sleeves and just telling us all about it but it's very serious thing anyway and so he appreciated the difference between the real world and that in the movies well this still seemed to be a delay and Wilson went to Los Alamos to find out what was holding things up and how they were progressing and when he got there he found that the construction company was working very hard and had finished the theater and a few buildings cuz they understood how but they hadn't gotten instructions clear on how to build a laboratories how many pipes for gas how much for water so he simply stood around and decided how much water how much gas and so on and told him to start building the laboratories then he came back to us we were all ready to go you see an Oppenheimer was having some difficulties in discussing some problems with groves and we were getting impatient so what as far as I understand it from the position I was in Wilson called Manley in Chicago and it all got together and they decided we'd go out there anyway when it wasn't ready so we all went out to Los Alamos before it was ready we were recruited by the way--by Oppenheimer and other people and he was very patient with everybody paid attention everybody's problems he worried about my wife who had TB and whether there would be a hospital out there and everything and it was the first time I met him in such a personal way and he was such a wonderful man we were told among other things to be careful not to buy a train ticket in Princeton because Princeton was a very small train station and if everybody bought a train ticket to Albuquerque New Mexico in print there'd be some suspicion that something was up and so everybody bought that ticket of somewhere else a sec me because I figured if everybody bought they'd take it somewhere else so when I went to the trade station and I said I want to go to Albuquerque New Mexico he's always says so all the stuff is for you we've been shipping out crates full of counters for weeks and expecting they didn't notice that the dress was Albuquerque so at least I explained why it was that we were shipping our crates I was going out through Albuquerque well when we arrived we were ahead of time and the houses for the dormitories and things like that were not ready in fact the laboratories weren't quite ready we were pushing him we were driving him by coming down ahead of time they went crazy at the other end and they rented ranch houses all around in the neighborhood and we stayed at first at a ranch house and would drive in in the morning the first morning I drove in was tremendously impressive the beauty of the scenery for a person from the east who didn't travel much was sensational there's a great glitz you've probably seen the pictures I won't go into it much detail this thing was high on a Mason you'd come up from below and see these great cliffs and we were very surprised and the most impressive thing to me was it as I was going up I said maybe there were Indians even living here the guy who was driving the car sets just stopped he stops the car walks around the corner in era Indian caves they took her with respect so it was really very exciting in that respect when I got up to the site the first time I saw at the gate of the DC that was a technical area where it's supposed to do the work with a fencer of suppose I have a fence around that ultimately but because they were still building it was open then there was supposed to be a town and then a big fence further out around the town yeah they were still building and my friend Paul olam who was my assistant was standing with a clipboard checking the trucks coming in and out and telling him which way to go to deliver the materials in different places when I went into the laboratory I would meet men that I'd heard of by seeing their papers in the Physical Review and so on I never met him before this is John Williams they said the guy comes standing up from a desk which is covered with blueprints the sleeves are all that and he's standing it by some windows at one of the buildings or during trucks things going in different directions to build things in otherwise we took over the construction company and finished it then as the job the physicists in other words at the beginning the experimental physicists particularly had nothing to do until their buildings were already in apparatus ready so they just built the buildings or assisted in building the buildings the theoretical physicist Daniel that was decided that they wouldn't live in the ranch houses but they would live up at the site because they could start working right away so we started working immediately and that meant we would each get in some rooms there were no blackboard except for one a roll blackboard you know that on wheels that you'd roll around and we'd roll around and sir Burwood explained to us all the things that they've thought of in Berkeley about the atomic bomb and nuclear physics and all these things and I didn't know very much about it I'd been doing other kinds of things and so I had to do an awful lot of work every day I'd study and read and study in reading it was a very hectic time I had some luck all the big shots by some kind of accident everybody but Hans bethe happened to have left at the same time like vice cop had to go back to fix something at MIT and Teller was away just in a certain moment and what bethe need is somebody to talk to to push his ideas against so he came into this little squirt in an office and he starts to explain his idea and I says no no you're crazy it'll go like this and he says just a moment then he explains that he's not crazy that I'm crazy and we keep on going like that but I turned out that although you see when I hear about physics I just think about physics I don't know who I'm talking to so I say the dopiest things like no no that's wrong when you're crazy but it turned out that's exactly what he needed and he was so I got a notch up on account of that and so when I I ended up as a group leader with four guys under me and which is underneath later there was several groups but I wasn't quite as far below as the title might indicate but I wasn't anywhere up anywhere I had a lot of interesting experiences with beta the first day when he came in we had a head a machine at marsh ant that you work with your hands and so he says let's see he said the formula we've been working out he says involves a precious square the price is 48 the square of 48 I reach for the machine he says about 2,300 so I plug it out just to find out he says you want to know exactly it's 2304 and so it came out twenty three or four so how do you do that he says don't you know how to take squares and numbers near 50 if it's mere 50 if it's a three below then it's three below 25 like 47 squared is 22 and how much is left over is the square of what's residual for in see three loss so you get nine 22:09 for 47 squared very nice okay so we keep on he was very good in arithmetic so we kept that going and a few moments later we have to take the cube root of two and a half now the dual cube roots there was a little chart that you're taking you have some trial numbers that you try on the adding machine with marsh and company had given site open this takes him a little longer you see I opened the drawer I take out the chart he says one point three five so I figured out some way to take cube roots numbers near two-and-a-half but it turns out now how do you do that he says well he says you see the logarithm two and a half is so and so you divide by 3 to get the cube root so so now the log of 1.3 is this a log of 1.4 is it I interpolate in between I could have divided anything by 3 much less so he knew all his arithmetic and he was very good at it and that was a challenge to me I kept practicing we used to have little contests every time we'd have to calculate anything we rushed to the answer he and I and I would win after several years I began to be able to do it you know get in there once maybe one out of four because you'd notice something funny about a number like you've got the multiply 174 by 140 for example you notice that's like 173 by 141 which is like the square root of 3 times the square root of 2 is the square root of 6 which is 245 but you have to notice the numbers you see and each guy would notice a different way right we had lots of fun well when I was first there as I said we didn't have the dormitories and the theoretical physicists had to stay up there and the first place they put us was in the old school buildings from the boys school that had been there previously the first place I lived them was a thing called a mechanic's lodger we're all jammed in there in bunk beds and so on turned out it wasn't organized very well and the Bob Christie and his wife had to go to the bathroom in the morning through our bedroom so so that was very uncomfortable the next place we moved to is a thing called a big house which had a big patio all the way around the outside on the second floor we're all beds had been stuck next to each other or a long lock and then downstairs is a big chart that told you what your bed number was and which bathroom you changed clothes in so under my name it's that bathroom see no bed number as a result of this I was rather annoyed by this time I was getting annoyed at less the dormitory is built and go down to the dormitory place to get the rooms assigned and they say yeah these are you pick your room now I tried to pick one you know what I did I looked to see where the girls dormitory was and I picked one that you could look out across later I discovered a big tree was growing right but anyway I picked this room and they told me that temporarily there would be two people in a room but that would only be temporary that the rooms were two rooms which would share a bathroom and it would be double deck bunk in there and I didn't want two people in the room so when I first got there the first night nobody else was there now my wife was sick with TB in Santa Fe and Albuquerque so I had some boxes of stuff of hers so I opened the box and I took out a little nightgown I opened the top bed I threw the nightgown carelessly on a top bed I took out the slippers I threw some powder on the floor in the bathroom I just made it look like somebody else is there okay so the other bed is like it by nobody's gonna sleep there okay so what happened this is the men's dormitory well I came home that night and my pajamas are folded nicely and put under the pillow at the bottom and the slip is put nicely at the bottom of the bed and the ladies pajama is nicely folded the bed has been all fixed up and made and it's put under the pillow and the slippers are put down I see and the powders clean from the bathroom and nobody is sleeping up there I still haven't the room to myself so next night same thing when I wake up I smuggle up the bed at the top sloppily I throw the nightgown and powder in the bathroom and so on and I went on like this before night until it's settled down everybody was settled and there was no more danger that they would put a second person in the room and each night perpetually each morning everything was set very neatly everything was alright even though it was a men's dormitory so that's what happened there in that situation I got involved in politics a little bit because there was a thing called a town council and apparently there were certain things that the army people would decide how the time was supposed to be run with some assistance from some governing board up there that I never knew anything about from the civil unions or something but there were all kinds of excitement like there isn't any political thing and so there were factions the housewife faction the mechanics faction you know the technical people factious on well the bachelors and bachelorettes felt they had have a faction because a new rule had been promulgated no women in the men's dorms well this is absolutely we think it's all grown people of course ha ha and so what kind of nonsense it's awful so we had to have political action and we discarded and we debated it all this stuff you know how it is and so I was elected to represent the dormitory people you see in a town town so I was in the town council for a while after I was in a town castle about a year or so year and a half I was talking once to hunts beta about something and he was up in a governing council doing all this time and I told him this story I forgot about that I did this trick one time with my wife stuff on the upper bed and he start the lair he says that that's how you got on the Town Council because it turned out that what happened was this there was a report a very serious report the poor woman was shaking the woman who cleans the rooms in the dormitory I just opened and all of a sudden there's trouble somebody's sleeping with one of the guys shake each doesn't know what to do search our woman reports to the chief charwoman the chief Chawan reports the lieutenant - lieutenant reports in a major goes all the way up it goes all way up through to the general to the governing board what are they gonna do what are they gonna do are you still going to think about it so in the mean time what in the mean time instructions go down bound through the captain's down through the mayor through the lieutenant through the chief through the charwoman - just put things back the way they are clean them up and see what happens okay next day report same thing meet time for four days they worried up there what they're gonna do so they finally promulgated a rule no women in the men's dormitories and that caused such a stink down there you see that they had to have all the politics and they elected somebody to represent the sorry now I'd like to tell you about the censorship that we had they decided to do something utterly illegal which is the sensor mail of people inside the United States in the continental United States which I have no right to do so it had to be set up very delicately as a voluntary thing we would all volunteer not to seal our envelopes that we would send the letters out with we would accept it'd be alright if they would open letters coming in to us that was voluntarily accepted by us and we would leave the letters open they would seal and if they were okay if they weren't okay in their opinion in other words they said something that we shouldn't send out they would send the letter back to us with a note that said it was a violation of such-and-such a paragraph of our understanding and so on so very delicately amongst all these liberal minded scientific guys agreeing to such a proposition we finally got the censorship set up with many rules about that we were allowed to comment on the character the administration if we wanted to so we could write our senator and tell them we don't like the way things are run and things like that so it was all set up and they said that we'd notify us of any difficulty so the day starts the first day for censorship telephone buoy me what please come down I come down what's this so letter for my father what is it there's lined paper and there's these line going on with dots for dots on the one that above two dots on the one that about to play I've got ah what's that I said it's a code they said yeah what's the call but what does it say I said I know it says you said well what's the key to the code how do you decipher it I said I don't know then they said and what's this it was a letter for my wife it says TJ x YW z TW 1 X 3 what's this I said another code what's the key to it I don't know they said you mean you're receiving codes you know no the key I said precisely I said I have a game I challenge them to send me a code that I can't decipher so they're making up codes at the other end and they're not gonna tell me what the key is and they're sending them in now one of the rules of the censorship was that they aren't gonna disturb anything that you would ordinarily do in the mail so they said well you're gonna have to ask them please to send the key in with the code I said I don't want to see the key this is all right we'll take the key out so we had that arrangement okay all right next day I get a letter for my wife which says it's very difficult writing because I feel that book is looking over my shoulder and in the spot there's nicely eradicated as splotch with a reek eradicated so I went down to the bureau says you're not supposed to touch the incoming mail if you don't like it you can tell me but you're not supposed to do anything to it that you should look at it but you're not supposed to think anything are they said don't be ridiculous that's not the way censors worked with ink eradicated they cut things out with a scissor well okay so I wrote a letter back to my wife did you use ink Eradicator in your letter she writes back no I didn't use ink Eradicator my letter it must have been thought and there's a hole cut out with so I went back I went back to the guy in charge the major was supposed to be in charge of all this and complained this went on for several days I felt I was sort of a representative to get the thing straightened out he tried to explain to me that these people who were the sensors had been taught how to do it and they didn't understand this new way that we had to be so delicate about it I was trying to be the front try to the one with the most experience I was writing to my wife back and forth every day anyway so he said what's the matter don't you think I have good will I said yes you have perfectly good whip I don't think you have power because he had done three or four days he said I will see about that he grabs a telephone everything was straightened out so no more was the letter cut however there was a number of difficulties that arose for example one day I got a letter from my wife and a note from the census said there was a code in blows without the key and so we removed it so when I went to see my wife in Albuquerque that day she says well where's all the stuff I said what stuff she says Lesage glycerin hot dogs laundry I said wait a minute that was a list she says yes that was a code I said they thought it was a code Luther's glycerin mr. Lord then one day I'm jiggling around we in the first few weeks all this went on it was a few weeks before we ever got a straightened up but I'm pedaling around with the adding machine a computing machine I noticed something so I've been riding every day I had a lot of things I write it's very peculiar notice what happens if you take one divided by 273 you get point zero zero four one one five two two six three three sevens quite cute and then it goes a little cocci when the carrying your car is only for about three numbers and then you can see how the 10 10 13 is really equivalent that one one four again one one five again and keeps on going and I explained that how nicely it repeated itself after a couple of cycles I thought was kind of amusing well I put that in the mail and it comes back to me it doesn't go through and there's a little note look at paragraph 17 be I look at paragraph 17 be hey let us ought to be written only in English Russian Spanish Portuguese Latin I God shows what I can't German and so forth permission to use any other language must be obtained in writing and then it said no clothes so I wrote back to the sensor it'll note included in my letter which said of course this cannot be a cold because there's no more if you actually do divide one is you do in fact get and I wrote off there and therefore there's no more information in the number one one zero zero one point then there isn't a number 273 which is hardly any information and so forth I therefore ask for permission to write my letters in Arabic numerals I like your Arabic numerals in my load so I got that through alright there was always some kind of difficulty with the letters going back and forth for example at one time my wife kept insisting on mentioning the fact that she feels uncomfortable writing feeling that the sensor is looking on the soda and there was a rule we weren't supposed to mention censorship we are but how can they tell her so they keep sending me a note your wife mentioned censorship sir my wife mentioned sexting so finally they send me a note and say please inform your wife not to mention censorship and all that so I take my letter and I start I have been instructed to inform your not to mention censorship in your honor he comes like so I right I have been instructed to inform on that the legend says how in the heck am I gonna do it furthermore why do I have to instructor not the mentorship sir you keeping something from me is very interested the sets of himself has to tell me to tell my wife not to tell me that she's there but they had an answer they said yes but they're worried about the male being intercepted on the way from Albuquerque and that they would find out that there was censorship if they looked in the mail in which he please act much more normal and so I went down the next time to have a cookie and I talked to her and I said Malick's let's not mention censorship but we had so much trouble that we had at last worked out a code something illegal we had a code if I would put a dot at the end of my signature it meant i reaiiy had trouble again and she would move on to the next of the moves that she had concoction sit there all day long as he was ill and she'd think of things to do the last thing that she did was to send me because she found perfectly legitimately an advertisement that said send you a boyfriend a letter on a jigsaw puzzle here are the blank we sell you the blank you write the letter on take it all apart put a little sack in man so I received that one with the note say we do not have time to play games please instructor please instruct your wife to confine ourselves to ordinary letters well we're ready with the one more dot but they got ready just in time but the thing that we had ready for the next one was the letter would start I hope you remember to open this letter carefully because I have included the pepto-bismol for your stomach as we arranged would be a letter full of powder in their office we expect that open it quickly the powder would go all over the floor they get all upset because not supposed to disturb anything you see at the gather this kept rip busy but we didn't have to use that one okay as a result of all these experiences with the sensor I knew exactly what could get through and what could not get through nobody else knew as well as I and so I made a little money finally out of all this by making bets one day on the outside fence the outside fence I had discovered that workman who lives still further out we wanted to come in were too lazy to go around through the gate and so they had cut themselves a hole some distance along and so I went out the gate went over to the hole and came in I went out again gonna fit me and so on until the guy the sergeant at the gate begins to wonder what's happening this guy's always going out and never coming in and of course his natural reaction was to call a lieutenant then try to put me in jail for doing this I explained that was a hole so I was always trying to straighten people out point out there was a hole and so I made a bet with somebody that liked to tell where the hole in the fence was in a male-male allowed and so enough I did and the way I did it as I said you should see the way they administered this place see that's what we were allowed to say there's a hole in the fence 71 feet away from such-and-such a place that's this size and that size you can walk through now what can they do they can't say to me that there's no such hole I mean what are they gonna do it's their own hard look that there's such a hall I should fix the hole so they got that one through I also got through a letter which told about how one of the boys who worked in one of my groups had been wakened up in the middle of the night and grilled with lights in front of them by some idiots in the army there because they found out something about his father or something I don't want exposed here comes his name was Khomeini's the famous man well there were also some other things I was always trying to straighten out like point out the holes in the fence and so forth but I always these things where I was always doing these point things out direct manner and one of the things I wanted to point out was this at the very beginning we had pair of important secrets we've worked out lots of stuff about uranium how it worked and all the stuff was and documents that were in filing cabinets that were made out of wood that had on little ordinary common padlocks and various things made by the shop like a rod that would go down and then a padlock to hold it but so it lost the padlock furthermore you could get the stuff out even without opening the padlock out of these wooden counties it tilted over backwards in the bottom drawer you know it has a little rod that's supposed to hole in as a hole in the wood underneath you can pull the papers out from below so I used to pick the locks all of time and point out that it was very easy to do and every time we had a meeting of everybody together I get up and I'd say that we have important secrets and we need better locks and so uh one day teller got up at the meeting I got up at and he says to me yeah well I don't keep my most important secrets in my filing cabinet my desk drawer isn't that better I said I don't know I haven't seen your desk drawer well he's sitting near the front of the meeting and I'm sitting further back so the meeting continues and I sneak out of the meeting and I go down to see his desk drawer okay I don't even have to pick the lock on the desk drawer it turns out if you put your hand in the back underneath you can pull out a paper like those toilet paper dispensers you pull out one it pulls another pull something I empty the whole damn draw took everything out and put it away to one side and then went up on the higher floor and came back and the meeting is just ending and everybody's coming out and I joined the coup like this you see walking along with it and run up to catch up with teller and says oh by the way let me see your desk drawer you see him no so he says certainly said so we walk into his office on the shows me to desk and I look at like that looks pretty good to me that's pretty safe it looks to me like it's pretty safe I said let's see what you have in there so he says I'd be very glad to show it to you he says putting the key opens it looks and he says if you hadn't already seen it yourself the trouble with playing a trick on a highly intelligent man like mr. tella is the time that it takes him to figure out from the moment that he sees that there's something wrong till he understands exactly what happened he's too damn small to give you any pleasure well I had a lot of other fun with the safes but it has nothing to do with Los Alamos so I won't discuss it further there where I want to talk about some of the social problems that I had there a rather interesting one of them had to do with the safety of the plant at Oak Ridge Los Alamos is going to make the bomb but it all grids they're trying to separate the isotopes of uranium uranium 238 and uranium 236 the latter which is the acute 35 which is the explosive one all right so they were just beginning to get infinitesimal amounts from an experimental thing dubbed the 235 and at the same time they were practicing there's a big plant that was gonna be we're gonna have that to this stuff and they go to chemicals when we take the purify stuff and then re purify and get it ready for the next stage at the purified in several stages so they were practicing the chemistry on the one hand and they were just getting a little bit but one of the pieces of apparatus experimentally on the other hand and they were trying to learn how to ask say it at the time and how much uranium-235 there is in it and we would send instructions and they never got it right so finally so gray said that the only possible way to get it rise to go down yeah to see what they're doing to understand why the I say is wrong the army people said no a lot policy to keep all the information Los Alamos in one place and that that people know could you would not know anything about what it was used for they just do what they were trying to do I mean the higher people knew they were separating uranium but they didn't know how powerful of vawa's are exactly how it worked or anything and the people underneath to know at all what they were doing and the army wanted to keep it that way that there was no information going back and forth but so gray finally insisted on it that it was important you never get the assays right the whole thing would go up in smoke so the gray went on to see what they were doing and as he was walking through he saw them wheeling a tank carboy of water green water the green water is uranium nitrate he says you're gonna handle it like that when it's purified too they said sure why not well won't it explode he says huh explode harder and so the army said you see we shouldn't let any information go well it turned out that the army had realized how much stuff we needed to make a bomb 20 kilograms or whatever it was and they realized that that much material purified would never be in the plant so there was no danger but they did not know that the neutrons are enormous we more effective when they're slowed down in water and so in water it takes less than 1/10 I know 2100 very much less material you can make a reaction which makes radioactivity does make a big explosion makes radioactivity kills people around and so on so it was very dangerous and they had not paid any attention to safety at all so a telegram goes from up and I Minister gray go through the entire plant notice where all the concentrations are supposed to be with the process as they've designed it we will calculate in the meantime how much material can come together before there's an explosion and so two groups started working on a Christie's group worked on water solutions and I worked on dry powder in boxes my group and we calculated about how much material and Christy was going to go down and tell them all at Oakridge what the situation was the whole thing was broken down we have to go down and tell him now and so I happily give all my numbers to Christy and say you have all the stuff you go Christy got pneumonia I had a go I never traveled on an airplane before I travel them there a plane they strapped the secrets for the little thing with belt on my back the airplane in those days with like a bus you stop off every once a while except the stations were afraid of a part you stop off and wait there's a guy standing next to me with a chain swinging like this saying something like it must be terribly difficult to fly without a priority on airplanes these days I couldn't resist I said well I don't know I said I have a priority a little bit later it looks like some generals are coming they're gonna put out some of us number three's it's alright I'm a number two he probably wrote to his Congressman if he wasn't the congressman himself saying what are they doing sending these little kids around with number two priorities in the middle of the wall and anyway I arrived there and the first thing I did was had them take me through the plant and I said nothing I just looked at everything I found out that situation was even worse than sue gray reported because he was confused the first time he noticed certain boxes in Big Lots and he didn't notice another boxes in another room in a big lot but it was the same room on the other side and things like that so if you have too much stuff together it goes up you see so it was it I went through the entire plant and I have a very bad memory but when I work intensive ly have a good short-term memory and so I could remember all kinds of crazy things like building 92007 vat number so and so and so forth you see shy at all that's different went home that night and I went through the whole thing explaining where all the dangers were what you would have to do to fix is rather easy you put cadmium in the solutions to absorb the neutrons in the water you separate the boxes so they're not too dense too much uranium together and so on according to certain rules and so I worked out all the examples and how it worked I found that you couldn't make the plant safe than this you know how it worked and so forth so the next day is gonna be a big meeting oh I forgot to say before I left Oppenheimer said to me yeah now he said when you go there following people are technically able down there in Oakridge mister Julian where is so-and-so and so I want you to make sure that these people are at the meeting that you tell them the safety problem that they really understand they're in charge and I suppose they're not at the meeting what am I supposed to do so then you should say Los Alamos cannot accept the responsibility for the safety of the Oakridge plant unless these guys I said you mean me little Richards gonna go in there and say this is yes Little Richard you go and do that said I really grew up fast so when I arrived sure enough I arrived there and the meeting was the next day and all these people from the company the big shots and the company and the technical people that I wanted were there and the generals and so forth that were interested in the follows and organizing everything it was a big meeting about this very serious problem of the safety because the plant would never work it would have blown up I swear it would have if nobody had paid attention to it so there was a lieutenant to carry me he told me that some Colonel says that I shouldn't tell how the neutrons work and all the details because we want to keep the things separate I just tell them what the duty keep it's say I said in my opinion it's impossible for them to understand or to obey a bunch of rules that they don't understand unless they understand how it works and so it's my opinion that it's only gonna work if I tell him and while Solomon's cannot accept the responsibility for the sacred rock words plant unless they are fully informed as to how it works he was great so he goes to the colonel and he says it the colonel it was just five minutes he says so he goes to the window and he starts and thinks and that's what they're very good at that good at making decision I thought it was very remarkable how a problem of whether or not information of saw the bomb works should be in a low courage plant or not had to be decided and could be decided in five minutes so I have a great deal of respect for these military guy because I never can decide anything very important in any lengthy fight at all so it looks fine me she says all right mr. fireman go ahead Joyce I thought I told him all about neutrons how they work they don't a pilot too many neutrons together you got to keep the material apart cadnams orbs and slow neutrons are more effective as a faster project at all stuff which was elementary premise stuff at Los Alamos but they had never heard of any of it so I turned out to be a tremendous genius to him I was a god coming down from the sky all these phenomena that were not understood never heard of before I knew all about and I could give him back some numbers and everything else so by being rather primitive back there in Los Alamos I was a super genius at the other end well the result was that they made little groups to make their own calculations to learn how to do it they started the redesign plant the designers of their plants were there the construction designers engineers the chemical engineers for the new plant that was going to handle the separated material were there and other people were there and I went away again they told me to come back in a few months they were going to redesign that plant for the separation so I came back in a month or so and Stoney Webster company engineers I'd finished designed the plant and now it was for me to look at the plant okay how do you look at a plant that ain't built yet I don't know so I go into this room with these fellas take me into the room there was always a lieutenant Zumwalt that was always coming around with me taking care of me you know I had to have an escort everywhere so he goes with me takes me into this room and there are these two engineers and atra long table great big long table tremendously covered with a blueprint that's his big as if they were not one blueprint but a stack of blueprints like this I took mechanical drawing when I was in school but I wasn't too good at reading blueprints so they start to explain it to me because they thought I was a genius and they start out mr. pirate would like you to understand that plan too so design you see one of the things we had to avoid was accumulation problems like there's an evaporator working which is trying to accumulate the stuff if the valve gets stuck or something like that and accumulate too much stuff it'll explode so they explained to me that this plan is designed so that no one valve if any one valve gets stuck nothing will happen it needs at least two valves everywhere okay so that is explained I'll watch the tetrachloride comes in here the uranium nitrate from here comes in here goes up and down it goes through the floor comes up through the pipes coming up in the second floor below through the blueprints down up down up very fast talking explaining it very complicated chemical plant I'm completely dazed worse I don't know what the symbols on the blueprint me there's some kind of a thing that at first I think it's a window it's a square with a little cross in the middle like this all over the damn place lined with this damn Square lies with this damn square I think it's a window now it can't be in window cuz it ain't always at the edge I want to ask him what it is oh you must have been in this situation like this you didn't ask him right away right away it would have been okay but they've been talking a little bit too Lord you hesitated to Lord if you ask him now they'll say what are you wasting my time all this time for I don't know what to do I think to myself I swear I am often in my life I've been lucky you are not gonna believe this story but I swear it's absolutely true it's such sensational moccasin okay what am I gonna do what am I going mean I got an idea maybe it's about so we wanted to find out whether it's a valve or not I take my finger and I put it down in the middle of one of the blueprints on page number three down in the unit what happens if this valve gets stuck figuring they're gonna say that's not about so that's a window so one looks at the other said well if that valve gets stuck and they go up and down in the booth from something down approval are they going up and down a boogaloos back and forth back and forth back but they both look at each other in a chick-chick-chick may turn around to me and they open them out like this you're absolutely right sir so uh they roll up the blueprints of the way they went and we walked out and mr. Zumwalt who'd been following me all the way through he says you're a genius he said I got the idea you a genius when you went through the plant once and you could tell them about evaporator c21 and building 92007 the next one he says and when you know all about the neutron Yugi but when you have just done he say we're so fantastic I want to know how how do you do something like that I told him you try to find out whether it's a Volvo well another kind of problem that I worked on was this we had to do lots of calculations and we did them on March 10th calculating machines by the way just to give you an idea what Los Alamos was like we had these Marsh ant computers I don't know if you know what they look I hand calculator with numbers and you push him in a multiplied divided and so on not like they do easy now but hard they were mechanical gadgets and they had to be sent back to the factory to be repaired we didn't have a special man to do it that was a standard way to do it and so they've always been sent to the factory and pretty soon you were running out of machines so I and a few other fellas started to take the covers off we weren't supposed there's a rule you take the covers off it cannot be responsible so we took the covers off we had my series of lessons like the first one we took the cover off for there was a shaft with a hole in it and a spring which was hanging this way and obviously the spring went in the hall so it was easy so we got like a series of lessons by God and how to fix him and we got better and better we did more and more elaborate repairs when we got something too complicated we send it out back to the factory but we do the easy ones and kept the things going I also did some typewriters I ended up doing all her computers the other fellas quit on me I did a few typewriters with as a guy in the machine shop er was better than I was and he took care of typewriter I took care any machines however we decided that the big problem which was to figure out exactly what happened during the bombs explosion when you push the stuff in by an explosion and then it goes out again exactly what happened so we can figure out how much energy was released and so on we've quiet much more calculating than we were capable of and a rather clever fellow by the name is Stanley Frankel realized that it possibly could be done on IBM machines the IBM company had machines for business purposes which adding machines that called tabulated for listing sums and multiplier just the Machine big machine you put cards in and it would take two numbers from a car to multiply and print it on the car and then they were co-leaders and sawyers and so on so he figured out a nice program if we got enough of these machines in the room we could take the cause and put them through a cycle everybody who does numerical calculation now knows exactly what I'm talking about but this is kind of a new thing mass production with machines we had done things like this on any machines usually you'd go one step across yourself doing everything but this was different where you go first to the air and then we go to the multiply and we go to the it's on so he designed this thing and ordered the machines from the IBM company we realize it was a good way of solving our problems and we found that there was somebody in the army that had IBM training we needed a man to repair them they keep them going and everything and they were going to send this fellow but it was delayed or we delay now we always were in a hurry I have to explain that way everything we did we tried to do as quickly as possible so in this particular case we worked out all the numerical steps that the machines were supposed to do multiply this and then do this and subtract that no we worked out the program but we didn't have any machines to test on so what we did is where I arranged was a room with girls in it each one had a Martian but she was the multiplier and she was the air this one cute so he had cards index cards well she did was cube this number and send it to the next one she was imitating the multiply the next was imitating the air and we went through our second we got all the bugs out when we did it that way and it turned out that the speed at which we were able to do it we've never done mass production calculate everybody who ever calculator for your single person did all the steps but his Lord had a good idea the damn thing works a hell of a lot faster the other way and we got a speed with this system that was the predictive speed for the IBM machines the same the only difference is that the IBM machines didn't get tired he could work three shifts but the girls got tired after a while so anyway we got the bugs out during that process and finally the machines arrived but not the repairman so we went down to put them together and one of the most complicated machines the technology of those days these computing machines your big thing they came partially disassembled with lots of wires and blueprints of what to do we went down we put them together Stan Franklin I and another fella and we had odd trouble most of the trouble was the big shots coming all the time and say you're gonna break something you're gonna break something we put him together and sometimes they would work and sometimes they were put together from home and they didn't work so he fiddled around and they got it to work we didn't get them all to work and I was like last working on some multiply I saw a bed part inside but I was afraid to straighten it because it might snap off and they were always telling us we're gonna bust it irreversibly and finally the man from the IBM company came in time as a matter of fact according to schedule but he came and he fixed the rest that we hadn't got ready and everything was going we got the program going but he had trouble with the one that I had trouble with I couldn't fix after three days he was still working at that one last one I went down as all I noticed that was bent oh he says of course he's that's all I was too it was all right so how is it well mr. Frankel started this program and began to suffer from a disease the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about it's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work it was a serious problem we were trying to do the disease with computers is you play with them there's so wonderfully have these X switches that determine if it's a even number you do this and if it's not number you do that and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you're clever enough on one machine and so after a while it turned out the whole system broke that he wasn't paying any attention he wasn't supervising anybody the system was going very very slowly the real problem well he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc tangent X and then it would start and print columns and then calculate the arctangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make the whole table in one operation absolutely useless we had cables of our pen but if you've ever worked with computers you understand the disease and the light to be able to see how much it could do but he got the disease for the first time the poor fellow who invented the thing got the disease and so I was asked to stop working on the stuff I was doing in my group and to go down and to take over the IBM group and so I noticed the disease and I tried to avoid the disease and although they did three problems in nine months I had a very good group the first problem was that they had never told the fellows they had selected all over the country thing called special engineered attachment clever boys from high school to go into the army right engineering ability and they collected them together special engineered attachment they sent them up the los alamos they put him in barracks and they would tell him nothing then they came to work and what they had to do is work on IBM machine punching holes numbers that they didn't understand nobody told him what it worked the thing was growing very slowly I said that the first thing has to be is that the technical guys know what we're doing so Oppenheim I went and talked to the security and got special permission so I had a nice lecture which I told him what we're doing they were all excited we're fighting a war we see what it is they knew what the numbers meant if the pressure came out higher that meant was more energy released it was it saw ansan they knew what they were doing complete transformation they began to invent ways of doing it better they had proved the scheme they worked at night they didn't need supervisors in and I didn't need anything they understood everything they invented several of the programs that we use and so forth so my boys really came through and all I had to be done was to tell him what it was that's all that just not coming there punching holes please as a result although it took him nine months to do three problems before we did nine problems in three months nearly ten times fast but one of the secret ways that we did our problems was this the problem consisted of a bunch of Cod to try to go through a cycle first ad then multiply and so it went through the cycle of machines in this room slowly about as it went around and around so we figured away by taking different colored set of cards to put them through a cycle through but out of fate we'd do two or three problems at a time see this was another problem while this one was adding it was multiplying on the other farm and such managerial schemes we gotten any more problems finally near the end of the war just before we had to make a test in Albuquerque the question was how much would we release we had been calculating and released from various designs but the specific design which was ultimately used we hadn't computed so Bob Christie came down and said we would like the result for how this thing is going to work in one month or some very short time less than at 3 weeks I said it's impossible but he says look you're putting out so on so many problems that one it takes only 2 3 weeks per bomb I said I know it takes much longer to do the problem but we're doing them in parallel they go through it takes a long time and there's no way to make it go around faster so you went out and I began to think is there a way to make a call round fist well if we did nothing else on the machine so there was nothing interfering and the salon so I began to thing I put on the black board a challenge can we do it to the boys they all stopped there yes we'll work double shift we'll work overtime we'll try it we'll try it and so the rule was all other problems out the only one problem and just concentrate on this thing and so forth so they started to work and my wife died in Albuquerque I had to go down I borrowed Fuchs car he was a friend of mine in the dormitory he had an automobile he was using the automobile to take the secrets away you know that SantaFe he was the spy I didn't know that I borrowed his car to go to Albuquerque danping got three flat tires on the way I came back from man and I went into the room but I was supposed to be supervising everything but I couldn't do it for three days and was in this mess this big rush to get the answer for the pest that was going to be done in the desert and go into the room and there are three different color cards there's white cards and blue cars yellow card and I start to say but you're not supposed to do more than one problem only one fun we should get out get out get out wait we'll explain everything so I waited and what happened was this as they went through sometimes the machine made a mistake or they put a wrong number in what we used to have to do we refined something's go back and do that over again but they noticed this that there's a deck of cards represented positions in depth in space of something the mistake made here in one cycle only affects the nearby numbers and makes cycle effects the nearby number the science he only works its way through the Packer card you had 50 cards you make a mistake in card number 39 it affects 37 38 and 39 the next time 36 37 38 39 and 40 next time spreads like a disease the air so they found an era back aways and they got an idea they would only compute a small deck of 10 cards around the error and because 10 cards could be put through the machines faster than the deck of 50 cards they would go with this other deck rapidly through while they continued with the 50 cards with the disease spreading but the other thing was computing faster and they would seal it all up and correct it okay very clever there was a way those guys worked really hard very clever to get speed there's no other way if they had stopped to try to fix it we don't lost our part we couldn't have got a result that's what they were doing of course you know what happened while they were doing that they found an error in the blue deck and so they had a yellow deck with fewer cars it was going around faster that cannot I just when they gone crazy you know because after they get it straight now they gotta fix the white when they got to take the other cards out and replace it by the right ones and continue correctly and it's rather confusing you how those things always I I want to make a mistake and just at the time when they got these three decks going they're trying to seal everything else the boss comes walking in leave us alone and they said so I left them alone and everything came out we solved apartment time and that's the way it would I would like to tell you just a few words about some of the people that I met I was an underling at the beginning I became a group leader but I met some very great men beside the men on the evaluation committee the men that I met in Los Alamos and there's so many other merits it's one of my great experiences in life was to have met all these wonderful physicists men that I had heard of smaller and larger but the greatest ones were there also there was of course Fermi he came down once the first time that he came he came from Chicago to consult a little bit to help us if we had some problems and we had a meeting with him and I've been doing some calculations and gotten some results the calculation was so alive was very difficult now usually I was the expert this I could always tell you what the answer is gonna look like one when I got it I could explain why but this thing was so complicated I couldn't explain why it was like that so I said the famiiy that I was doing this problem and I start the CAG a night to get there's a dip before you tell me the result let me think it's going to come out like this he's right and it's going to come out like this because it's so and so and it's a perfectly obvious explanation of the thing that I so he was doing what I was supposed to be good at ten times better so that was quite a lesson for me then there was one new man who was the great mathematician he suggested I will go into the things here some very clever technical observations we had some very interesting phenomena in the computing the numbers that problem looked as if it was unstable and he explained why and so forth he was very good technical advice we used to go for walks off and to get rest like on Sunday or something we walk in the canyons in the neighborhood would often walk with Bayard by Noah and marker it was great pleasure and the one thing that von Neumann gave me was an idea that he had which is interesting that you don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in and so I have developed a very powerful sense of socially responsibility as a result of going on advice and I made me a very happy man since I but it was by no man who put the seed in which grew now into my active irresponsibility I also met niels bohr that was interesting he came down his name was Nicholas Baker in those days and he came with Jim Baker his son whose name is really horrible they came from Denmark and they came to visit and there were very famous physicists as you all know and all the bigshot guys to him they was even the great God just on him listening to another song he was talking about things and we were in a meeting and everybody wanted to see the great boy there were a lot of people and I was back in the corner somewhere and they discuss the problems of the bomb that was the first time he came in he went away now all I could see him from between somebody's heads from the corner next time he's due to come in the morning of the day he's doing come I got a telephone call hello Fineman yes this is Jim Baker it's his son my father and I would like to speak to you me I'm fine man I'm just look that's right okay so eight o'clock in the morning before anybody right I go down to the place we go into an office in a technical area we started this stuff he says we have been thinking how we could make the bomb more efficient that we think of the following idea so now I won't go to work it's now good it's on a silent listen that is how about so and so I said that sounds a little bit better now but I got this damn full idea so forth back and forth I was always dumb about one thing I never knew who I was talking to I would only worried about the physic the idea looked lousy I said it looked lovely even with good eyes that looked good simple proposition I've always lived that way it's nice its pleasant if you can do it I'm lucky this is lucky as I am with that blueprint I'm lucky in my life that I can do that so after this went on for about two hours of going back and forth over lots of ideas at that time back and forth arguing the great meals always lighting his pipe perpetually it always went out and he talked in a way that was understandable requested a lot on this day I couldn't understand him but his son I can understand but finally he said well he says lighting his pipe I guess we could call him the big shots now so then they called all the other guys had a discussion with that and his son Tomi there what happened one the last time he was there he said to his son remember the name of that little fella in the back over here he's the only guy that's not afraid of me and will say when I got a crazy idea so next time when we want to discuss ideas you're not going to be able to do it with these guys who all say everything is yes yes not come or get that guy first we'll talk with him first so that was well it's almost finished the next thing that happened was course the test after we'd made the calculations we had to make the test I was actually at home on a short vacation at that time because I guess because my wife died and so I got a message that said the baby was expected on such a such a day so I flew back and I just arrived on the site while the buses believed I couldn't even get to my room and I got out to the site and we waited out there at the distance we were 20 miles away and we had a radio and they were supposed to tell us when the thing was going to go off and so forth the radio wouldn't work and we never knew what was happening but just a few minutes before it was supposed to go off the radio started to work and I told us there was a twenty seconds or something to go the people who were far away like we were the others were close us six miles away and up they gave out dark glasses that you can watch a star class with twenty miles away the damn thing with its dark glasses they're gonna see a damn thing too dark glasses and so when I figured altered the only thing I really hurt your bright light never can hurt you is ultraviolet light that does so I got behind a truck windshield so the ultraviolet can't go through glass and that would be safe and so I could see the damn thing other people are never gonna see the damn thing okay time comes and this tremendous flash out there so bright I quickly my head goes like this because it was so bright and I see this purple splotch on the floor of the truck I says that ain't it that's an afterimage so I turned back up and I see this this white light changing into yellow and environs the clouds form and then they disappear again the compression and the expansion forms and makes clouds disappear and I saw it and then finally a big ball of orange it become a center that was so bright became a ball of arms and started to rise and billow a little bit and get a little bit black around the edges and then you see it's a big ball of smoke with flashes on the inside of the fire going out of the heat and I saw a lot and all this that I've just described in just a moment took about one minute it was a series from Bright to dark and I had seen it I'm Bob the only guy in the world actually looked at the damn thing the first Trinity test everybody else had dark glasses the people of six miles couldn't see it because they were old Paul the lie on the floor with the eyes like this so nobody saw it and the guys up there where I was or had dark glasses I'm the only guy saw with the human eye finally after about a minute and a half suddenly as a tremendous noise bang and then rumbles like thunder and that's what convinced me nobody had said a word during this whole minute we're all just watching quiet but this sound released everybody reached me particularly cuz the solidity of the sound at that distance meant that it really worked the man who was standing next to me said when the summer of what's that that was the bomb the man was William Lawrence who had come he was going to write an article that we're going to describe the whole situation I had been the one who was supposed to have taken him around there was found that it was too technical for him and so later mr. smight came around and I showed mr. Smythe around when I was showing mr. smight around we went into a room and there on the end of a pedestal a little narrower than that was a small ball about so big silver plated you could put your head on it was warm it was radioactive it was plutonium and we stood at the door of this room talking about there was a new element that was made by man that had never existed on the earth before except for a very short period possibly at the very beginning and here was all isolated radioactive and had these properties and we had made it and so it was tremendously valuable it nothing more valuable and so forth and so on meanwhile he sort of you know how people do when you talk you kind of Dibble around and jiggle and so forth he's kicking the door stop hissing I said yes and I said no stop is appropriate than the door it's the door stop was a hemisphere yellowish metal gold as a matter of fact it was a gold hemisphere about so being what had happened was we needed to do experiments to see how many neutrons were reflected by different materials in order to save the neutrons so we use so much material and so we had tested many different materials we had tested platinum we had tested zinc we'd pet the brass we tested gold so in making the test with the gold we had these pieces of gold and somebody had the clever idea to use that great ball of gold for a doorstop for the door campaign the plutonium which is quite appropriate after the thing went off there was tremendous excitement that Los Alamos everybody had parties we all ran around ice sat on the end of a jeep and beat drums and so on except for one man that I remember his name was Bob Wilson who got me into it in the first place he's sitting there moping is why you're moping about he says a terrible thing we're a I said we just started you got us into it you see what happened to me what happened to the rest of us if we started for a good reason but then we're working very hard to do something and to accomplish it as a pleasure is excitement and you not stop to think any you know you just stop after your thought at the beginning you stop thinking so he was the only one that was still thinking about it at that particular moment I returned to civilization shortly after that I went to Cornell the teach and my first impression was a very strange one and I can't understand any more but I felt very strongly then I'd sat in a restaurant in New York free sampan I looked out at the buildings and how far away I would think you know how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage wasn't son how far down there was down a 34th Street all those buildings all smashed up and so on and I got a very strange thing I would go along and I'd see people building a bridge or they making a new road and I thought they're crazy they just don't understand they don't understand why are they making new things it's useless but fortunately it's been useless for thirty years now or isn't it almost maybe we'll make thirty years so I've been wrong for thirty years about the being useless to make bridges and I'm glad that those other people were able to go ahead but my first reaction after I was finished with this thing was it's useless to make anything thank you very much yes I want to advance a story about some states yes well so what's the question yes sorry well there's a lot of stories about safes if you give me ten minutes I'll tell you three stories about safes all right alright now I'll tell you more stories about safe the fact that I was able to pick the locks interested me in the safety of the whole thing somebody had taught me how to pick locks then they got filing cabinets which had safe combinations one of the my diseases one of my things in life is anything that's secret I tried on do and so those filing cabinets were made by the Mohs law lock company which we put our documents after that everybody had them they represented a challenge to me how the hell to open so I worked on him and I worked on him there's all kinds of stories about how you can feel the numbers and listen to things and so on that's true and I understand it very well for old-fashioned sites they had a new design so nothing would be pushing against the wheels while you were trying them I won't go into the technical details but none of the old method would work I read books by locksmiths books by locksmiths always say at the beginning how the safes on the water and a woman who's drowning or something I mean you open to say I don't know a crazy story and then in the back they tell you how they do it and they don't tell you anything sensible it doesn't sound like they could really open safes that way I guess the combination on the basis of the psychology of the person who owns it so I always figured it keep it a secret anyway I kept working and so like a kind of a disease I kept working on these things until I found out a few things first I found out how big a range you need to open the combi days how close you have to be and then I invented a system by which you could try all the combinations that you'd have to try eight thousand it turned out because you could be within two of every number then it turns out that's every fifth number and 125 strains for 8,000 combinations and then that worked out a scheme by which I could try numbers without altering a number that I already set by correctly moving the wheel so that I could do it in eight hours that try all the combination and then I discovered still further this took me about two years of researching got nothing to do up there you see and I was fiddling finally I discovered a way that it's easy to take the last two numbers of the combination off the safe if the safe is open if the drawer is pulled out and you can turn the number and see the both go up and play around and find out what makes it what number it comes back at and stuff like that with a little trickery you can get the combination all so I used to practice it like a card shop practices cards you know all the time all the time all the time quicker and quicker more and more unobtrusively I would come in and I'd talk to some guy and I kind of leaned against the smiling cabbage it's like I'm playing with this watch now you wouldn't even notice I'm doing anything I'm not doing eight I just play with the while at so I'll just play with the dial but I was taking a do numbers on can I go back to my office and I write that up is down the last two numbers of the three now if you have the last two numbers it takes a minute to try the first number there's only 20 possibilities and it's open okay three minutes to open the sake of you know the last two numbers so I got an excellent reputation for safecracking they were telling me mr. schmaltz is out of town we need a document from his safe can you open it I'd say yes I could open it I have to get my tools I don't need any tool I go to my office and I look at the lumber his safe I got the last three numbers I had everybody safe in my up I put a screwdriver in my back pocket suicide with a count for the tool I claimed I needed I'd go back to the room and I would close the door the attitude is that this business about how you open say there's not something that everybody should know because it's very you know it makes everything unsafe is very dangerous to have everybody know how to do this so I close the door then I sit down read a magazine or do something I'd average about 20 minutes of doing nothing then I'd open it to see what I opened right away make sure everything was all right and I'd sit there for 20 minutes to give myself a good reputation that it wasn't too easy there was no trick to it no trick to it and then I come out you know sweating a bit it's open they are and so forth okay I also at one particular moment I did open a safe purely by accident and that helped to endorse my reputation it was a sensation it was pure luck the same kind of luck I had with the blueprints but after the war was over I went back to Los Alamos to finish some papers and there I did some safe opening which I could write a safe cracker book better than any safe packet book it would start in the beginning and it would explain how I opened the safe absolutely cold without knowing the combination which contained more secret thing than any safe to sever can open I opened the safe that contained behind it the secret of the atomic bomb all the secrets but formulas the rates at which neutrons are liberated from urania how much uranium you need to make a bomb all the theories all the calculators the whole damn fee this is the way it was done all right I was trying to write his report I needed this report it was a Saturday I thought everybody worked I thought it was like Los Alamos used to be so I've got down to the library the library at La Scala had all his document and there was a great vault with a great knob of a different kind of knob I didn't know anything about a filing cabinet I understood but I wasn't only an expert on filing cam not only that but there were gods walking back and forth in front with Gundy's so you can't get that one open okay so I didn't get it and I think wait old Freddie de Hoffman in the declassification section he's in charge of declassifying document which documents now can be declassified and so he had to run down to the librarian back so often he got tired of him he got a weird idea did he get a copy made of every document in the pasamos library I and he'd stick it in his file in Canada he had nine file in candidates one right next to the other in two rooms full of all the documents of Los Alamos and I know he had that so I go up to the hospital ask him to borrow the document from him he's got a copy so I went up to his office and the office doors open and it looks like it's coming back the light is lit looks like he's coming back any minute so I wait and as always when I'm waiting I did 'old the Dobbs I tried 10-20-30 didn't work 20 40 60 didn't work no try everything I'm waiting nothing to do then I begin to think you know those locksmith people I had never been able to figure out how open and cleverly maybe they don't need maybe all the stuff they're telling me about psychology is right I'm going to open this one by psychology first thing first thing in the book it says the secretary is very often nervous that you will forget the combination and she's retold the combination she might forget and the boss might forget she has to know so she nervously writes it somewhere list of places where secretaries right combinations okay starts out with you know the most clever thing spots right out with you open the drawer and the wood along the side of the drawer on the outside is written carelessly a number like as if it was a ring voice number that's the combination number so it's on the side of the desk okay I remember that in the book this drawers locker I could pick the lock easy I open the lock right away pull out the drawer look alone would nothing all right there's a lot of papers in the drawer I fish around among the papers and finally I find is a nice little piece of paper which is the Greek alphabet Alpha Beta Gamma Delta and so forth carefully printed the secretaries have to know how to make those letters and how to call them when they're talking about them right so they all had each one had a copy of this thing but carelessly scrawled across the top is pi is equal to 3.14159 well why does she need the numerical value of Pi she's not computing anything so I go up to the safes honest it's like any other book Tony I'm just telling you how it was done I woke up to say 31 41 and 59 doesn't open now 13 14 95 doesn't open 95 14 13 doesn't open 4131 at 20 minutes I'm turning pi upside down nothing happened so I start walking out of the office and I remember the book about the psychology and I said you know but it's true psychologically I'm right pretty the Hoffman is just the kind of a guy to use a mathematical constant for his safe combination so the other important mathematical constant is e so I walked back to the safes 27 18 28 click it opens I checked by the way that all the combinations were the same well there's a lot of stories about it but it's getting late and that's a good one so we'll let it go at that you

Channel: The Quagmire

Views: 309,456

Rating: 4.8705912 out of 5

Keywords: Richard Feynman, Los Alamos, LANL, Trinity, Manhattan Project, Physics

Id: uY-u1qyRM5w

Length: 78min 0sec (4680 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 12 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/MonkeysOnMyBottom]

Before computers were computers, computer was a person who did maths.
The devices from IBM were the ones "simulating a computer"

[u/kayb1987]

He was also quite the jokester.

[u/DanTheTerrible]

I always find it a bit odd we have this cultural perception that "women aren't good at math" when it is a simple fact that before electronic computers became widespread a "computer", that is a person who did mathematical calculations for a living, was far more likely to be female than male.

[u/FezPaladin]

Universal emulation at work.

[u/bibbidybobbidyboobs]

Why was it a one-gender assembly line?

[u/BillyBobTheBuilder]

Turns out Feynman had a time traveler friend who came back to give him Cixin Liu's 3 Body Problem.

[u/DeepMotor]

There's a sci fi story on this theme except the nav computer broke on a space ship that happen to be carrying a load on abacuses.

found it:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Comet