Later Mr. Smyth of Princeton came and I showed him around Los Alamos. For example, 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 hand on it, it was warm. It was radioactive; it was plutonium. And we stood at the door of this room talking about it. 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 it was all isolated and radioactive and had these properties. And we had made it. And so it was very, tremendously valuable, nothing more valuable and so forth and so on. Meanwhile, you know how people do when you talk, you kind of jiggle around the jiggle and so forth. He’s kicking the doorstop, you see, and I says, yes, and I said the doorstop is more appropriate than the door. The doorstop was a hemisphere, yellowish metal, gold as a matter of fact. It was a gold hemisphere about so big. What had happened was 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 plutonium. 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 to use that great ball of gold for a doorstop for the door that contained the plutonium, which is quite appropriate.
After the thing went off and we heard about it, there was tremendous excitement at Los Alamos. Everybody had parties, we all ran around. I sat on the end of a jeep and beat drums and so on. Except for one man that I remember. [It] was Bob Wilson, who got me into it in the first place. He’s sitting there moping. I said, “What are you moping about?” He said, “It’s a terrible thing that we made.” I said, “But you started it, you got us into it.” You see, what happened to me, what happened to the rest of us is we started for a good reason but then we’re working very hard to do something, and to accomplish it, it’s a pleasure, it’s excitement. And you stop to think, you know, you just stop. After you thought at the beginning, you just stop. So he was the only one who was still thinking about it, at that particular moment. I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one and I can’t understand it anymore but I felt very strongly then. I’d sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and how far away, I would think, you know, how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth. How far down there was down to 34th Street? All those buildings, all smashed and so on. And I got a very strange feeling. I would go along and I would see people building a bridge. Or they’d be 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 so useless? But fortunately, it’s been useless for 30 years now isn’t it, almost, maybe we’ll make 30 years. So I’ve been wrong for 30 years about its being useless making 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.
Question: What about your story about some safe?
Feynman: 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? The motivation for me to open the filing cabinet, pick the lock, became my interest in the safety of the whole thing. Somebody had told me how to pick locks. Then they got filing cabinets which had safe combinations. One of my diseases, one of my things in life is that anything that is secret I try to undo. And so those locks to those filing cabinets, made by the Mosler Lock Company, in which we put our documents after that–everybody had them–they represented a challenge to me. How the hell to open them?! So I worked on them and I worked on them. There’s all kinds of stories about how you can feel the numbers and listen to things and so on. That’s true; I understand it, very well. For old-fashioned safes. They had a new design so that 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 methods would work. I read books by locksmiths. Books by locksmiths always say in the beginning how they opened the locks, the greatest thing, the woman is underwater, the safe is underwater and the woman is drowning or something, and he opened the safe. I don’t know, 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. Like guess the combination on the basis of the psychology of the person who owns it! So I always figured they’d keep it a secret. Anyway, I kept working. And so like a kind of 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 combination, how close you have to be. And then I invented a system by which you could try all the combinations that you have to try. Eight thousand as it turned out, because you could be within two of every number. Then it turns out that it’s every fifth number out of a hundred and twenty thousand . . . eight thousand combinations. And then I worked out a scheme by which I could try numbers without altering a number that I already set, by correctly moving the wheels, so that I could do it in eight hours, try all the combinations. And then I discovered still further that–this took me about two years of researching–I had nothing to do up there, you see, and I was fiddling–finally I discovered a way that it’s easy to take the numbers, the back two numbers, the last two numbers of the combination off the safe if the safe is open. If the drawer is pulled out you could turn the number and see the bolt 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 off. So I used to practice it like a cardsharp practices cards, you know, all the time, all the time. Quicker and quicker and more and more unobtrusively I would come in and I would talk to some guy and I’d sort of lean against his filing cabinet, just like I’m playing with this watch now; you wouldn’t even notice I’m doing anything. I’m not doing anything. I would just play with the dial, that’s all, just play with the dial. But I was taking the two numbers off! And I go back to my office and I write the two numbers 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 twenty possibilities and it’s open. OK?
So, I got an excellent reputation for safecracking. They would say to me, “Mr. Schmultz is out of town, we need a document from his safe. Can you open it?” I’d say, “Yes, I can open it; I have to go get my tools” (I don’t need any tools). I go to my office and I’d look at the number of his safe. I had the last two numbers. I had everybody’s safe numbers in my office. I put a screwdriver in my back pocket, to account for the tool I claimed I needed. I go back to the room and I would close the door. The attitude is that this business about how you open safes is not something that everybody should know because it makes everything very unsafe, it’s very dangerous to have everybody know how to do this. So I close the door and then I sit down and I read a magazine, or do something. I’d average about 20 minutes of doing nothing, and then I’d open it, you see, well, I opened it right away to see that everything was all right and then 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’d come out, you know, sweating a bit, and say “It’s open. There you are,” and so forth. OK?
Also, at one particular moment, I did open a safe purely by accident, and that helped to reinforce 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’ve got to tell you these stories now because 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 safecracker book better than any safecracker book. In the beginning it would explain how I opened the safe absolutely cold without knowing the combination, which contained more secret t
hings than any safe that’s ever been opened. I opened the safe that contained behind it the secret of the atomic bomb, all the secrets, the formulas, the rates at which neutrons are liberated from uranium, how much uranium you need to make a bomb, all the theories, all the calculations, the WHOLE DAMN THING!
This is the way it was done. All right? I was trying to write a 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 went down to get it from the library. The library at Los Alamos had all these documents. There was a great vault with a great knob of a different kind I didn’t know anything about. Filing cabinets I understood, but I was only an expert on filing cabinets. Not only that but there were guards walking back and forth in front with guns. You can’t get that one open, OK? But I think, wait! Old Freddy DeHoffman in the declassification section, he’s in charge of declassifying documents. Which documents now can be declassified? And so he had to run down to the library and back so often, he got tired of it. And he got a brilliant idea. He would get a copy made of every document in the Los Alamos library. And he’d stick it in his file, he had nine filing cabinets, one right next to the other in two rooms, full of all the documents of Los Alamos and I knew he had that. So I’ll go up to DeHoffman and I’ll ask him to borrow the documents, from him, he’s got a copy. So I went up to his office. The office door is open. It looks like he’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 diddled the knobs. I tried 10-20-30, didn’t work. I tried 20-40-60, didn’t work. Tried 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 to open them cleverly. Maybe they don’t either, maybe all the stuff they’re telling me about psychology is right. I’m going to open this one by psychology. First thing, the book says, “The secretary is very nervous that she will forget the combination.” She’s been told the combination. She might forget and the boss might forget—she has to know. So she nervously writes it somewhere. Where? List of places were a secretary might write combinations. OK? Starts out with, most clever thing, starts right out with–you open the drawer and on the wood along the side of the drawer, the outside, is written carelessly a number, like as if it is an invoice number. That’s the combination number. So. It’s on the side of the desk. OK? I remembered that, it’s in the book. Desk drawer is locked, I picked the lock easy, I opened the lock right away, pull out the drawer, look along the wood–nothing. It’s all right, it’s all right. There’s a lot of papers in the drawer. I fish around among the papers and finally I find it, a nice little piece of paper which has 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 the thing. But–carelessly scrawled across the top is π is equal to 3.14159. Well, why does she need the numerical value of π, she’s not computing anything? So I go up to the safe. Honest, it’s honest, right? It’s just like in the book. I’m just telling you how it was done. I walk up to the safe. 31-41-59. Doesn’t open. 13-14-95–doesn’t open. 95-14-13, doesn’t open. 14-31, twenty minutes I’m turning π upside down. Nothing happens. 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. DeHoffman 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 walk back to the safe, 27-18-28, click, clock, it opens. I checked by the way, that all the combinations were the same. Well, there’s another lot of stories about it but it’s getting late and that’s a good one, so we’ll let it go at that.
______
*The name given to the gargantuan project to build the first atomic bomb, which began in 1942 and culminated with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, respectively, 1945. The project was spread over the United States, with units at, for example, the University of Chicago; Hanford, Washington; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the bombs were built, and which was essentially the headquarters of the whole project. Ed.
*at Princeton University.
†Robert R. Wilson (1914-2000), first director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, 1967-1978. Ed.
*Emilio Segrè, winner (with Owen Chamberlain) of the 1959 Physics Nobel Prize for discovering the antiproton. Ed.
*(1901-1954) Winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the existence of new radioactive substances produced by neutron irradiation and related work. Fermi was also responsible for the first controlled nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago in December 1942. Ed.
*(1885-1962) Winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them. Ed.
†Aage Bohr (1922– ) winner (with Ben Mottelson and James Rainwater) of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics for their theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus. Ed.
4
WHAT IS AND WHAT SHOULD BE THE ROLE OF SCIENTIFIC CULTURE IN MODERN SOCIETY
Here is a talk Feynman gave to an audience of scientists at the Galileo Symposium in Italy, in 1964. With frequent acknowledgments and references to the great work and intense anguish of Galileo, Feynman speaks on the effect of science on religion, on society, and on philosophy, and warns that it is our capacity to doubt that will determine the future of civilization.
I am Professor Feynman, in spite of this suit-coat. I usually give lectures in shirtsleeves, but when I started out of the hotel this morning my wife said, “You must wear a suit.” I said, “But I usually give lectures in shirtsleeves.” She said, “Yes, but this time you don’t know what you’re talking about so you had better make a good impression. . . .” So, I got a coat.
I am going to talk about the topic that was given me by Professor Bernardini.* I would like to say, at the very beginning, that, in my opinion, to find the proper place of scientific culture in modern society is not to solve the problems of modern society. There are a large number of problems that have nothing much to do with the position of science in society, and it is a dream to think that to simply decide on one aspect of how ideally science and society should be matched is somehow or other to solve all the problems. So, please understand that, although I will suggest some modifications of the relationship, I do not expect these modifications to be the solution to society’s problems.
This modern society seems to be threatened by a number of serious threats, and the one that I would like to concentrate on and which will be in fact the central theme, although there will be a lot of subsidiary little items, the central theme of my discussion is that I believe that one of the greatest dangers to modern society is the possible resurgence and expansion of the ideas of thought control; such ideas as Hitler had, or Stalin in his time, or the Catholic religion in the Middle Ages, or the Chinese today. I think that one of the greatest dangers is that this shall increase until it encompasses all of the world.
Now, in discussing the relation of science to the scientific culture of society, the first thing that comes to mind immediately is, of course, the most obvious thing, which is the applications of science. The applications are culture, too. However, I am not going to talk about the applications, but not for any good reasons. I appreciate that all the popular discussions on the subject of the relation of science to society revolve around the applications almost completely, and furthermore that the moral questions that scientists have about the kind of work that they do also usually involve the applications. Nevertheless, I will not speak about them because there are a number of other items which are not spoken about by so many other people, and so for the fun of it I would like to talk in a slightly different direction.
I will, however, say about the applications that, as you all appreciate, science creates a power through its knowledge, a power to do thing
s: You are able to do things after you know something scientifically. But the science does not give instructions with this power as to how to do good against how to do evil. Let us put it a very simple way: There are no instructions along with the power, and the question of applying the science or not is essentially the problem of organizing the applications in a way that doesn’t do too much harm and does as much good as possible. But, of course, sometimes people in science try to say it is not their responsibility, because the application is just the power to do; it is independent of what you do with it. But it certainly is in some sense true that to create for mankind the power to control this is good, probably, in spite of the difficulties that he has in trying to figure out how to control the power to do himself good rather than evil.
May I say, too, that although many of us here are physicists, and most of us think of the serious problems of society in terms of physics, I believe most assuredly that the next science to find itself in moral difficulties with its applications is biology, and if the problems of physics relative to science seem difficult, the problems of the development of biological knowledge will be fantastic. These possibilities were hinted at, for example, in the book by Huxley, Brave New World, but you can think of a number of things. For example, if energy in the far future can be supplied freely and easily by physics, then it is a matter of mere chemistry to put together the atoms in such a way as to produce food, from energy that the atoms have conserved, so that you can produce as much food as there are waste products from human beings; and there is therefore a conservation of material and no food problem. There will be serious social problems when we find out how to control heredity, as to what kind of control, good or bad, to use. Suppose that we were to discover the physiological basis of happiness or other feelings, such as the feeling of ambition, and suppose that we could then control whether somebody feels ambitious or does not feel ambitious. And, finally, there is death.
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out Page 10
