AdamSmith

Merkin Mufflee Mhttp://www.imdb.com/character/ch0036986/bio

'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia Google, Twitter and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks who worry the race for human attention has created a world of perpetual distraction that could ultimately end in disaster https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia

Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, Washington, D.C., April 14, 1876 by Frederick Douglass http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/184/a-lincoln-anthology/4823/oration-in-memory-of-abraham-lincoln-washington-dc-april-14-1876

One's own little pink white ass has been in this scene several times above 125th St in Manahatto. As a Credible Witness. One reason, among many, why one's darker friends kept one round.

Feynman: So I used to pick the locks all the time and point out that it was very easy to do. And every time we had a meeting of everybody together, I would get up and say that we have important secrets and we shouldn't keep them in such things; we need better locks. One day Teller got up at the meeting, and he said to me, “Well, I don't keep my most important secrets in my filing cabinet; I keep them in my desk drawer. Isn't that better?" I said, “I don't know. I haven't seen your desk drawer.” Well, he was sitting near the front of the meeting, and I'm sitting further back. So the meeting continues, and I sneak out and go down to see his desk drawer. OK? I don't even have to pick the lock on the desk drawer. It turns out that if you put your hand in the back, underneath, you can pull out the paper like those toilet paper dispensers. You pull out one, it pulls another, it pulls another ... I emptied the whole damn drawer, put everything away to one side, and went back upstairs. The meeting was just ending, and everybody was coming out, and I joined the crew and ran to catch up with Teller, and I said, “Oh, by the way, let me see your desk drawer." "Certainly, “ he said, and he showed me the desk. I looked at it and said, “That looks pretty good to me. Let's see what you have in there. "I'll be very glad to show it to you, “ he said, putting in the key and opening the drawer.” If , “ he said, “ you hadn't already seen it yourself." The trouble with playing a trick on a highly intelligent man like Mr. Teller is that the time it takes him to figure out from the moment that he sees there is something wrong till he understands exactly what happened is too damn small to give you any pleasure! http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos.htm

"If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it." Einstein

Do you need to be willing to risk your reputation and pursue crazy ideas? Is that what leads to great breakthroughs? First of all, it helps to be ignorant. The time when I did my best work was when I was most ignorant. Knowing too much is a great handicap. Especially if you’ve been teaching for some years, things get so fixed in your mind and it’s impossible to think outside the box. I was in the lucky position of jumping into physics without ever having taken any courses in physics. I’d only been a pure mathematician up to that point. Is the great scientist also naturally subversive? Yes, undoubtedly. You’ve got to destroy what exists in order to build something new. You need good taste, of course. If you destroy indiscriminately, it doesn’t help at all. That’s where intuition comes in—what parts of the old building should be taken down.

You never actually got your Ph.D., did you? No. I was so lucky. I slipped through the cracks. You didn’t want a Ph.D.? No, I hate the Ph.D. I think it destroys people’s lives. I had actually three tragedies which I witnessed with people who came to work with me and came to grief. One of them committed suicide and two ended up in mental institutions. I blame the Ph.D. system for that. I think it really was a disaster for many people. Why? Because the Ph.D. system grinds people down? Yes, and it’s completely inappropriate for what most people need. It was designed for German academics in the 19th century and it was fine for that. But for any other kind of life, it’s totally wrong. It takes far too long. It forces you to pretend to be a researcher when most people don’t want to be researchers. It’s become a union card and I think it’s highly disruptive, particularly bad for women. For women to waste five or 10 years of their lives is more of a disaster than it is for men. Because they might have family responsibilities as well? Yes, because there’s a biological clock. It’s ticking much more for them.

Then you met Richard Feynman and you ended up working with him on quantum electrodynamics. I never worked with Feynman, but I learned a tremendous lot from him. He was a young professor and I was just a student, so I listened to Feynman, and of course he was a genius. He was also a clown and loved to perform, so he always needed an audience. I was very happy to be the audience. What made Feynman different from other scientists? He was extremely original. He had his own way of doing science, which was different from everybody else. That’s why he had a hard time communicating. He never wrote down equations. Most people in physics write down an equation and then find the solutions, but that wasn’t the way Feynman did it. Feynman would just write down the solutions without ever writing the equations. It seemed like a sort of magic because he thought in terms of pictures instead of equations. He had these little pictures in his head and he scribbled little pictures on paper and nobody understood what they meant. My job was to translate Feynman into language other people could understand.

Freeman Dyson: Feynman would just write down the solutions without ever writing the equations. It seemed like a sort of magic. After the war, you went to Cornell as a graduate student in the late ’40s, and you ended up working with one of the towering figures in physics, Hans Bethe. Did he become your mentor? Yes, very much so, an extraordinarily good one. He was amazing with students. He had a lot of students and he always found the right problem for each student, just difficult enough but not too difficult. He was an ideal person to have as a mentor. I owe a tremendous amount to him. What was the right problem for you? It concerned quantum molecular dynamics, which was bursting open at that time. There was a group of experimenters at Columbia who had been looking at the hydrogen atom with tools they developed during the war. Microwaves were invented for military purposes—for radar—and microwaves were just what you needed to study quantum mechanics with great accuracy. Willis Lamb was the chief experimenter, and he was tickling the hydrogen atom, measuring very precisely the energy levels of hydrogen. It turned out the standard quantum theory gave the wrong answers, so something new was needed and Bethe understood what it was. If you put the reaction of the atom’s radiation field onto its mechanics, it gave the right kind of behavior. Bethe had this extraordinary ability to do simple calculations which were quite sloppy but gave roughly the right answer. Then he gave me the problem of doing the same calculation, which I did much more accurately. http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/my-life-with-the-physics-dream-team

No. He's being psychotic.