Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (17 page)

And so the rule was: All other problems _out_. Only one problem and just concentrate on this one. So they started to work.

My wife, Arlene, was ill with tuberculosis–very ill indeed. It looked as if something might happen at any minute, so I arranged ahead of time with a friend of mine in the dormitory to borrow his car in an emergency so I could get to Albuquerque quickly. His name was Klaus Fuchs. He was the spy, and he used his automobile to take the atomic secrets away from Los Alamos down to Santa Fe. But nobody knew that.

The emergency arrived. I borrowed Fuchs’s car and picked up a couple of hitchhikers, in case something happened with the car on the way to Albuquerque. Sure enough, just as we were driving into Santa Fe, we got a flat tire. The two guys helped me change the tire, and just as we were leaving Santa Fe, another tire went flat. We pushed the car into a nearby gas station.

The gas station guy was repairing somebody else’s car, and it was going to take a while before he could help us. I didn’t even think to say anything, but the two hitchhikers went over to the gas station man and told him the situation. Soon we had a new tire (but no spare–tires were hard to get during the war).

About thirty miles outside Albuquerque a third tire went flat, so I left the car on the road and we hitchhiked the rest of the way. I phoned a garage to go out and get the car while I went to the hospital to see my wife.

Arlene died a few hours after I got there. A nurse came in to fill out the death certificate, and went out again. I spent a little more time with my wife. Then I looked at the clock I had given her seven years before, when she had first become sick with tuberculosis. It was something which in those days was very nice: a digital clock whose numbers would change by turning around mechanically. The clock was very delicate and often stopped for one reason or another–I had to repair it from time to time–but I kept it going for all those years. Now, it had stopped once more–at 9:22, the time on the death certificate!

I remembered the time I was in my fraternity house at MIT when the idea came into my head completely out of the blue that my grandmother was dead. Right after that there was a telephone call, just like that. It was for Pete Bernays– my grandmother wasn’t dead. So I remembered that, in case somebody told me a story that ended the other way. I figured that such things can sometimes happen by luck–after all, my grandmother was very old–although people might think they happened by some sort of supernatural phenomenon.

Arlene had kept this clock by her bedside all the time she was sick, and now it stopped the moment she died. I can understand how a person who half believes in the possibility of such things, and who hasn’t got a doubting mind–especially in a circumstance like that–doesn’t immediately try to figure out what happened, but instead explains that no one touched the clock, and there was no possibility of explanation by normal phenomena. The clock simply stopped. It would become a dramatic example of these fantastic phenomena.

I saw that the light in the room was low, and then I remembered that the nurse had picked up the clock and turned it toward the light to see the face better. That could easily have stopped it.

I went for a walk outside. Maybe I was fooling myself, but I was surprised how I didn’t feel what I thought people would expect to feel under the circumstances. I wasn’t delighted, but I didn’t feel terribly upset, perhaps because I had known for seven years that something like this was going to happen.

I didn’t know how I was going to face all my friends up at Los Alamos. I didn’t want people with long faces talking to me about it. When I got back (yet another tire went flat on the way), they asked me what happened.

“She’s dead. And how’s the program going?”

They caught on right away that I didn’t want to moon over it.

(I had obviously done something to myself psychologically: Reality was so important–I had to understand what _really_ happened to Arlene, physiologically–that I didn’t cry until a number of months later, when I was in Oak Ridge. I was walking past a department store with dresses in the window, and I thought Arlene would like one of them. That was too much for me.)

When I went back to work on the calculation program, I found it in a _mess_: There were white cards, there were blue cards, there were yellow cards, and I started to say, “You’re not supposed to do more than one problem–only one problem!” They said, “Get out, get out, get out. Wait–and we’ll explain everything.”

So I waited, and what happened was this. As the cards went through, sometimes the machine made a mistake, or they put a wrong number in. What we used to have to do when that happened was to go back and do it over again. But they noticed that a mistake made at some point in one cycle only affects the nearby numbers, the next cycle affects the nearby numbers, and so on. It works its way through the pack of cards. If you have fifty cards and you make a mistake at card number thirty-nine, it affects thirty-seven, thirty-eight, and thirty-nine. The next, card thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and forty. The next time it spreads like a disease.

So they found an error back a way, and they got an idea. They would only compute a small deck of ten cards around the error. And because ten cards could he put through the machine faster than the deck of fifty cards, they would go rapidly through with this other deck while they continued with the fifty cards with the disease spreading. But the other thing was computing faster, and they would seal it all up and correct it. Very clever.

That was the way those guys worked to get speed. There was no other way. If they had to stop to try to fix it, we’d have lost time. We couldn’t have got it. That was 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 a little fewer cards; it was going around faster than the blue deck. Just when they are going crazy–because after they get this straightened out, they have to fix the white deck–the _boss_ comes walking in.

“Leave us alone,” they say. I left them alone and everything came out. We solved the problem in time and that’s the way it was.

I was an underling at the beginning. Later I became a group leader. And I met some very great men. It is one of the great experiences of my life to have met all these wonderful physicists.

There was, of course, Enrico Fermi. He came down once from Chicago, to consult a little bit, to help us if we had some problems. We had a meeting with him, and I had been doing some calculations and gotten some results. The calculations were so elaborate it was very difficult. Now, usually I was the expert at this; I could always tell you what the answer was going to look like, or 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 told Fermi I was doing this problem, and I started to describe the results. He said, “Wait, before you tell me the result, let me think. It’s going to come out like this (he was right), and it’s going to come out like this because of so and so. And there’s a perfectly obvious explanation for this–“

He was doing what I was supposed to he good at, ten times better. That was quite a lesson to me.

Then there was John von Neumann, the great mathematician. We used to go for walks on Sunday. We’d walk in the canyons, often with Bethe and Bob Bacher. It was a great pleasure. And von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since. But it was von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my _active_ irresponsibility!

I also met Niels Bohr. His name was Nicholas Baker in those days, and he came to Los Alamos with Jim Baker, his son, whose name is really Aage Bohr. They came from Denmark, and they were _very_ famous physicists, as you know. Even to the big shot guys, Bohr was a great god.

We were at a meeting once, the first time he came, and everybody wanted to see the great Bohr. So there were a lot of people there, and we were discussing the problems of the bomb. I was back in a corner somewhere. He came and went, and all I could see of him was from between people’s heads.

In the morning of the day he’s due to come next time, I get a telephone call.

“Hello–Feynman?”

“Yes.”

“This is Jim Baker.” It’s his son. “My father and I would like to speak to you.”

“Me? I’m Feynman, I’m just a–“

“That’s right. Is eight o’clock OK?”

So, at eight o’clock in the morning, before anybody’s awake, I go down to the place. We go into an office in the technical area and he says, “We have been thinking how we could make the bomb more efficient and we think of the following idea.”

I say, “No, it’s not going to work. It’s not efficient. . . Blab, blab, blah.”

So he says, “How about so and so?”

I said, “That sounds a little bit better, but it’s got this damn fool idea in it.”

This went on for about two hours, going back and forth over lots of ideas, back and forth, arguing. The great Niels kept lighting his pipe; it always went out. And he talked in a way that was un-understandable–mumble, mumble, hard to understand. His son I could understand better.

“Well,” he said finally, lighting his pipe, “I guess we can call in the big shots _now_.” So then they called all the other guys and had a discussion with them.

Then the son told me what happened. The last time he was there, Bohr said to his son, “Remember the name of that little fellow in the back over there? He’s the only guy who’s not afraid of me, and will say when I’ve got a crazy idea. So _next_ time when we want to discuss ideas, we’re not going to be able to do it with these guys who say everything is yes, yes, Dr. Bohr. Get that guy and we’ll talk with him first.”

I was always _dumb_ in that way. I never knew who I was talking to. I was always worried about the physics. If the idea looked lousy, I said it looked lousy. If it looked good, I said it looked good. Simple proposition.

I’ve always lived that way. It’s nice, it’s pleasant–if you can do it. I’m lucky in my life that I can do this.

After we’d made the calculations, the next thing that happened, of course, was the test. I was actually at home on a short vacation at that time, after my wife died, and so I got a message that said, “The baby is expected on such and such a day.”

I flew back, and I arrived _just_ when the buses were leaving, so I went straight out to the site and we waited out there, twenty miles away. We had a radio, and they were supposed to tell us when the thing was going to go off and so forth, but the radio wouldn’t work, so we never knew what was happening. But just a few minutes before it was supposed to go off the radio started to work, and they told us there was twenty seconds or something to go, for people who were far away like we were. Others were closer, six miles away.

They gave out dark glasses that you could watch it with. Dark glasses! Twenty miles away, you couldn’t see a damn thing through dark glasses. So I figured the only thing that could really hurt your eyes (bright light can never hurt your eyes) is ultraviolet light. I got behind a truck windshield, because the ultraviolet can’t go through glass, so that would be safe, and so I could see the damn thing.

Time comes, and this _tremendous_ flash out there is so bright that I duck, and I see this purple splotch on the floor of the truck. I said, “That’s not it. That’s an after-image.” So I look back up, and I see this white light changing into yellow and then into orange. Clouds form and disappear again–from the compression and expansion of the shock wave.

Finally, a big ball of orange, the center that was so bright, becomes a ball of orange that starts to rise and billow a little bit and get a little black around the edges, and then you see it’s a big ball of smoke with flashes on the inside, with the heat of the fire going outwards.

All this took about one minute. It was a series from bright to dark, and I had _seen_ it. I am about the only guy who actually looked at the damn thing–the first Trinity test. Everybody else had dark glasses, and the people at six miles couldn’t see it because they were all told to lie on the floor. I’m probably the only guy who saw it with the human eye.

Finally, after about a minute and a half, there’s suddenly a tremendous noise–BANG, and then a rumble, like thunder– and that’s what convinced me. Nobody had said a word during this whole thing. We were all just watching quietly. But this sound released everybody–released me particularly because the solidity of the sound at that distance meant that it had really worked.

The man standing next to me said, “What’s that?”

I said, “That was the Bomb.”

The man was William Laurence. He was there to write an article describing the whole situation. I had been the one who was supposed to have taken him around. Then it was found that it was too technical for him, and so later H. D. Smyth came and I showed him around. One thing we did, we went into a room and there on the end of a narrow pedestal was a small silver-plated ball. You could put your hand on it. It was warm. It was radioactive. It was plutonium. And we stood at the door of this room, talking about it. This 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 it was all isolated and radioactive and had these properties. And we had made it. And so it was _tremendously_ valuable.

Meanwhile, you know how people do when they talk–you kind of jiggle around and so forth. He was kicking the doorstop, you see, and I said, “Yes, the doorstop certainly is appropriate for this door.” The doorstop was a ten-inch hemisphere of yellowish metal–gold, as a matter of fact.

What had happened was that we needed to do an experiment to see how many neutrons were reflected by different materials, in order to save the neutrons so we didn’t use so much material. We had tested many different materials. We had tested platinum, we had tested zinc, we had tested brass, we had tested gold. So, in making the tests with the gold, we had these pieces of gold and somebody had the clever idea of using that great ball of gold for a doorstop for the door of the room that contained the plutonium.