AdamSmith

Oh, lord, don't we know it! That one looks like how you described yours -- what a beauty.

Sister Ann speaks gospel truth about that! Trouble was, try anything in the front seats and we'd lose something else to that damned stick shift.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/does-pope-francis-say-too-much

Gorgeous. Amazing to remember what American styling used to be capable of. Set me to remembering my first car, a 1967 Mustang, which I bought used with a rebuilt engine in 1976. It was exactly this model and color...

Yes. Right. I don’t know about everybody, but what I think is most impressive is, like when I read about Dirac, for example. I also get a similar feeling about Maxwell. When, say, Dirac got the equation he knows something about nature that nobody else knows. And it is a miracle that it’s possible, by doing experiments over here, to predict what’s going to happen over there. It is not as much a miracle to predict something if you know the laws about it. In other words, it’s enough of a miracle that there are laws at all, but what’s really a miracle is to be able to find the law. It’s another kind of miracle. You see, knowing a law to figure out that such and such is going to do something, and then have nature do it — OK, that’s pretty good. But to look at other aspects and to guess, and to know that there’s a pattern under there, and to tell nature that in this experiment she’s going to do that — no by deduction, strictly speaking, from what’s known but by guessing from what’s known — it seems a wonderful thing to me. And I always wanted to do that. Now, my work in electrodynamics was really using other people’s formulas. My electrodynamics is not unequivalent to the electrodynamics of Pauli, Dirac, and so on, in 1929, with some technical improvements and methods of analysis and so on. It’s fundamentally the same thing. Also, even the diagrams and so on only help people make calculations, and therefore makes predictions, but with a basic theory which is essentially not my own. The work with helium I got a great deal of pleasure out of also, but it still wasn’t exactly that same category, because in the work on helium I had the Schrodinger equation which I thought was going to give the helium. The puzzle here is, how can that equation ever lead to that phenomenon? But that’s still not exactly the same. But here, for a moment, that night, a couple of nights, I have a knowledge of a law and I can make predictions analogous to, but nowhere near as important or as vital and marvelous as, the Dirac equation or Maxwell equation. It’s just a small piece, but at least I have the moment when I’ve a new law, and could predict nature for a while. You remember I said that I was uncomfortable and told my sister I was unable to do work anymore; I’m worn out. And she said, “At least write it up,” and so on and so on. So I was uncomfortable that I wasn’t doing anything. And I suddenly got this thing. And then I finally said: “Well, I’ve done physics now. I’ve finally done some physics now, and I don’t care if I never do anything more.” I don’t mean I didn’t want to do anything more, but I wasn’t going to feel any more that I’ll be uncomfortable and unfulfilled, in the sense that it was an aim that I’d never fulfilled. I felt now that I’d fulfilled my original dream of one day discovering a law which was unknown. It turned out that that law had been guessed by Marshak, and perhaps by Salam and I don’t know who all, earlier than I perhaps. But it doesn’t make any difference. That doesn’t bother me. Maybe it’s bothering Marshak because all the glory comes to Gell-Mann and myself, and that may not be fair for all I know, because I don’t know the situation. I don’t read what the others are writing and doing. And I think it’s possible, although that would have to be studied by an historian, that those other guys got the bad end in this case, and the names that are associated with this thing are not in accordance with priorities. I don’t know. I haven’t the slightest idea. I was told this after I discovered it. So I don’t know, but it’s possible. But that doesn’t have anything to do with it. It’s not the name and the priority. It could have been that they discovered it. As long as I didn’t know they discovered it, for that moment I knew something and I had found a law, and I could make predictions about nature, which is the aim that I had. And the fact that somebody else was already making the predictions, unbeknownst to me, in no way takes the pleasure away, in any way. So that was really a great moment. I would like more moments like that, but I don’t have to ask the gods for everything. http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/5020_4.html

Weiner:Have you ever had any difficulty with referees, in terms of papers? Feynman:No. Weiner:So usually you send it in and it’s accepted as such. Feynman:Ever since the first paper, which is the Review of Modern Physics paper on path integrals, in which there was a small objection which I mentioned, there’s never been anything. I mean, I send it in and it gets published, just the way it is. Weiner:Who would be the likely referee on your papers on quantum electrodynamics, for example? There wasn’t a very large group that they could turn to. Feynman:I don’t know how that works. I myself don’t referee any papers. Weiner:What was your attitude on that? Feynman:Well, I started to try to look at the papers of other people but, you see, I have a funny thing. To me there’s an infinite amount of work involved. I would have to first understand how he’s thinking about it — not just understand the problem, but what he’s thinking about it. Then I’d have to go and see, is it Ok? Hm. Or what is it? I mean, it’s too much work, darn it. It’s like almost research: checking the ideas, seeing if it really works, and so on. It’s like research, and I can’t do somebody else’s research. I’m not built that way. I can’t think his way. I can’t follow and try to go through all these steps. If I want to worry about the problem, I read the paper to get the problem, and then maybe work it out some other way. But it’s too much work. Now, to read and just check steps — I can’t do it. And then, if a paper comes out that’s bad, that’s not very good, I’d feel very uncomfortable to say that there’s something the matter with it, or that it’s not OK, because maybe I’m not understanding. Maybe it is OK; maybe somebody else will see that it’s all right. I think it’s a lot of nonsense. Finally, I think most of the papers are a lot of nonsense and not worth publishing. And so, altogether it’s a miserable business, and I just say I won’t review any papers in order to simplify it because if I start reviewing some and not others, then it sounds like a criticism. There are a number of other things — I have resisted the outside world on this and a number of other things. For example, I never give commentary on whether a man is loyal or not loyal. You know this kind of investigation. And I got everybody off my back on that by just saying I won’t do it. And I never review papers. And one thing I would like not to have to do, but I can’t avoid, is writing recommendations for students. But after all, sometimes nobody else knows them, and they’re trying to get a job. So I have to do that. But I find it very distasteful. I don’t like to judge other people, or their work, at all. I don’t. I don’t want to judge somebody else’s work. http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/5020_4.html

20 Facts About Monty Python and the Holy Grail That Might Make You Say, “Ni!” March 9, 2015 Sitting at or near the top of many “best” lists (including an Amazon UK/IMDB poll rating it Britain’s Best Comedy) is Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the bare bones little film that could. The oft quoted, silly and irreverent Pythons (John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam) share their take on King Arthur and the movie features each of the players in several roles. For my money, there are few funny movie scenes that hold as well as that of the Black Knight, it never fails to crack me up. And if any of you whippersnappers out there have yet to see this, then you must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest…WITH A HERRING. Black Knight Reliable Bridge Security T Shirt $24.99 Only $19.99 with Coupon Code: KNIGHT ________________________________________ 1. The opening credits are so plain because the sequence was done at the end of filming and there was no budget left. The “Swedish” subtitles were written by Michael Palin; he used it as an opportunity to entertain the “captive” audience. When the film opened at Cannes, the subtitles got huge laughs and right at the end of the credits, the film stopped and a bunch of firemen ran in to usher out the audience. Because of the perfect concurrence of events, filmgoers thought it was all part of the show, but they had been evacuated for a real bomb scare. After the theater was deemed clear, the audience went back in and resumed watching. According to John Cleese, “The Llama is funny, like moose and Nixon, and fish of any kind.” 2. The Monty Python group was formed (according to Gilliam) while he was working for David Frost. He met John Cleese (who was doing “The Frost Report” along with Chapman) and everyone was working in television–Mike Palin, Terry Jones and Eric Idle on “Do Not Adjust Your Set.” Gilliam was a cartoonist; John Cleese introduced him to the “Do Not Adjust Your Set” producer, who liked Gilliam’s work. Gilliam began doing caricatures of the weekly guests and did his first animation there. Cleese had a standing show invitation for the BBC, so the group did a show together. After their fourth outing, the BBC said they didn’t understand the show and were ready to pull them off air, but the public loved them and thus, Python was born. Other group names considered were: A Horse, a Spoon and a Basin, Owl Stretching Time, The Toad Elevating Moment, Bun Whacket Buzzard Stubble and Boot and Gwen Dibley’s Flying Circus (Gwen Dibley was the lady who played piano at Palin’s mother’s afternoon town guild meetings and Palin thought she’d be quite surprised to have a group named after her.) For a while they had a working title of Circus, then Cleese suggested “python” as something nasty and sneaky and Idle came up with a sneaky agent called Monty. Terry Jones remembered a “Do Not Adjust Your Set” animation called “Elephants” that inspired him to think of continuous sketches that flowed like animation and that idea became the format for their show. 3. Self-described by co-director Terry Gilliam (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Twelve Monkeys, The Fisher King, Brazil, Time Bandits) as “ambitious little shits who wanted to direct at all costs,” he and Terry Jones (Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, The Life of Brian, The Meaning of Life) decided to do a film and that anyone named Terry would get to direct it. 4. In the original script, half the film was set in the middle ages and the other half in the 20th century. The story flipped about between them; at end of the first draft, the Holy Grail was discovered at Harrods department store, at the Holy Grail counter…because Harrods has everything. At the time, Terry Jones was working on his (Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary) book and thought it would be nice to keep it in middle ages, so they figured why not do the King Arthur story? 5. The opening shot was actually completed at the end of filming, near Terry Gilliam’s house. They had a big problem with locations, which had been set up in Scotland ahead of time. A week before filming was to begin, they got word the Environmental Department had forbidden them to shoot at any castles. In a last minute panic they found the privately owned Doune Castle in Glencoe. So all location shots (of different castles) are Doune. 6. Gilliam said the only time he ever saw Michael Palin get really annoyed is when he had to spend all day crawling in the Plague Village mud. The mud was foul and “full of pig shit; people had to get tetanus shots.” Palin said he spoke to a prop man about how he’d know which mud to eat–the man said he’d put down chocolate–to Palin it all looked the same. After about 14 takes, Palin lost it and beat the ground, which according to Cleese was “hysterical.” After all that, most of Palin’s crawling and mud eating was cut. 7. When Patsy (GIlliam) and Arthur (Graham Chapman) are crossing the meadow, the castle in the background (and later, Camelot) is a plywood cutout. Shooting had to be stopped many times as the wind kept blowing it over. 8. The actual period of the film is the 1350s. Gilliam said they blackened and yellowed all the actors’ teeth “because people always think medieval means bad teeth, but it probably wasn’t that way.” Referencing the Mary Rose (a ship sunk in 1545 and salvaged in 1982), the director related that the mariners all had perfect teeth because they had no sugar in their diet. 9. The Black Knight scene was inspired by a story John Cleese heard at college: two Roman wrestlers were engaged in a long match and they became so entangled that one of them suffered a broken limb. He couldn’t take the pain any longer and submitted, so various attendants came over, untangled them and tapped the winner on the shoulder, saying “You won,” at which time they discovered he was dead. Cleese and Chapman did their own stunts, including the sword fighting, which was described as very difficult because of the tiny eye slits in the helmets. At the time of shooting, they had run out of budget and the producer was running the camera and lighting; they had about three other people and it took a week to shoot the scene. 10. Gilliam said that because the film came out during the time of the Vietnam War, all the liberals who came to the see it were very anti-violence and couldn’t handle it–people didn’t laugh until the Black Knight’s very last limb was cut off. He said they (Jones and Gilliam) enjoyed the audience coming to terms with the scene, realizing it wasn’t about violence, but rather attitude. No matter how much of the guy is removed, he’s still a belligerent, mad character who won’t give up. Part of the scene is done with Cleese holding his arms behind his back, part by a one-legged silversmith, named Richard Burton (which delighted Cleese because he could say “Richard Burton was my stunt double”) and part with a wired puppet. 11. John Cleese’s first wife and “Fawlty Towers” co-writer and star, Connie Booth played the witch. During the scene, Eric Idle came so close to laughing that he bit his blade (on film). 12. The book scene was done to save money; Gilliam’s wife turned the pages (shot in his living room) and Michael Palin’s son Tom is the little baby. 13. Animated God was a picture of one of Britain’s most famous cricketers, W.G. Grace. 14. Gilliam spoke of people trying to write papers about the left-brain/right-brain theory of Python, noting that the group is split down the middle. John, Eric and Graham were Cambridge educated, Mike and Terry Jones went to Oxford and Terry Gilliam was the token American. In addition to the different universities, were differing heights. The Cambridge group was the “Tall Group” and the “Normal Sized People” were Mike, Terry and Gilliam. According to Gilliam, Cambridge seems to produce the kind of person whose best defense is strong offense (more logical, precise, etc.) and their verbal skills are more obvious. Mike, Terry and Gilliam were more conceptual. Whenever Python had a disagreement, there was usually a split down the middle of these groups. 15. The film played steadily at a cinema in France until The Life of Brian came out (1974-1979). 16. The catapulted cow was a toy from a railway set. It was the directors’ first model shot; Gilliam said, “We dug the camera into the ground, threw the cow in Julian Doyle’s (Production Manager) back garden, put it all together and we had entered the world of Special Effects. Explaining the tactic, the director said flinging animals in battle was not unheard of. During the Battle of Corsica, there was a town under siege for years. Gilliam related a story: the woman in charge of the town was trying to convince the besiegers that they were fine and had enough food, so she took the town’s last remaining pigs, stuffed them with bits of grain and other things and fired them out. It worked and the besiegers went home. The Python group was also obsessed with animals at the time, thus the Trojan Rabbit. 17. The directors were surprised at the success of the film. When it opened at Cinema One in New York, before dawn, there was a queue around the block. They didn’t know how people had heard about it and they snuck into shows with audiences. Gilliam remembered two people coming to him from out of the crowd, it was John Belushi and Gilda Radner, both of whom were just starting out–trying to break into showbiz. 18. The movie was made at a time in England when the rich were paying “crazy” taxes, 80 to 90 percent. All the music stars had made lots of money and were looking for ways of creating tax losses to salvage their earnings, so Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Elton John and Chrysalis Records funded the film. The Python group didn’t have a lot of money to make it (most of the money went to costuming), thus the mimed horse riding with coconut banging (copied from BBC radio horse-clopping) sound effects. It is the film from which they made the most money because it cost the least to make and the group owns most of it. There is no ad-libbing; everything was scripted and rehearsed, which helped to keep down the cost. 19. Shooting inside Doune Castle led to Terry Jones writing Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary when it was learned the castle’s interior was sectioned in two (by walls). One section was for the lord and one for the soldiers, each defensible from the other because the soldiers were mercenaries and couldn’t be trusted. The lord had to defend himself against his own defenders. Jones set on path of reexamining Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale and the symbol of knights being chivalrous; “It may have been a totally ironic piece written about a mercenary.” 20. Gilliam said, “The most damage we did was to the killer rabbit.” The lady who owned the bunny didn’t want it to get dirty or messed up, so they tried to keep her distracted. The dye they used didn’t immediately come out and the lady was crazed. He wondered why they didn’t just go out and buy a bunny instead of using a “trained” rabbit. The director felt that animal wranglers are the maddest people you’ll find on film, saying “The animals not really trained, they’re just doing what animals do–most of training is in trainers’ minds.” http://se7ens.info/20-facts-about-monty-python-and-the-holy-grail/

They began to be able to produce a little bit of separated isotopes from the plant in Tennessee, sort of on an experimental basis. And they had made surveys, I mean tests, of the proportions, of the degree of separation. They had calibrated the degree of separation at Tennessee. Then they would send us the samples, and Segre and the others who received them would measure the proportions, and it didn’t agree. We were just getting tiny little samples to do experiments with that they had separated in their attempts to test their equipment before they put 200 of them together, you see. That was the stage. The plants were getting ready, but sort of pilot experiments were being done with the equipment, you see. And it didn’t check. They had many things back and forth that didn’t check. Finally Segre and company said, “We can’t straighten this out unless we go down there and find out what they’re doing to make the test. They’re doing something wrong, and we can’t do it by mail,” and so on. This was very much against the rules. See, the Army’s rules, or Mr. Groves’ or something was one department like Tennessee does not have to know what’s going on at Los Alamos or anything about the bomb. They just separate the uranium. And the other side, we’ll tell them anything they need to know, the other side, Los Alamos, doesn’t have to know how the plant works, what it looks like or anything. It was the secrecy. It sounded like a good idea. But there was this problem of communication. So finally it was broken down. Oppenheimer or somebody helped to break down this so that they would be able to go to Tennessee to talk to those guys, rather than the other way, because the secrecy was much more important. So they went, Segre and two or three other guys, went, and as they were walking through the plant, they see a little bit of what the plant is like. And the guys are practicing already. They haven’t got the thing separated yet, but they’re practicing with the chemical process and so on, where it was partly built, and they’re partly going through the motions of the operations. And they see great barrels of bluish-green water being carried on dollies and so on, boxes, and cardboard boxes with salts of various kinds stored in a room — and while they see it they say, “What’s that stuff? Is that uranium?” “Yeah.” “Well, when your plant gets operating, you’re going to separate it, you’re not going to handle it like that, are you, partly separate it…” They said, “Sure, why not.” “Won’t it explode?” they said innocently. And this caused a terrible excitement, you see. Well, to make the story shorter, they didn’t know, in Tennessee. They had been told that there was no danger whatsoever. Segre saw these bottles of water with this stuff in it — realized, of course, as we all do, that when you put it in water, because it slowed down the neutrons and made them much more effective, you’d need very much less stuff, and so on. He realized that there was a danger. And he didn’t think that they didn’t know that there was a danger, you see. The Army’s first reaction was: “It just shows you we shouldn’t let these guys in.” But their second reaction was to wake up. The point was, they had been told that it wouldn’t explode because presumably, my guess is, that they had been told how much stuff we needed for a bomb, which would be worked dry and very efficiently to get as much energy out as possible, not to get the reaction to go at all, and so on — not just to get the reaction to go. The Army, then, hearing that number, simply said, “It’s so big they’re never going to get all that in one barrel, there’s no danger.” But the fact is that with water solutions and other chemical solutions, you could accumulate stuff to explode. So there was a great moment of excitement just prior to the plant beginning to operate, when it was discovered that a new thing had to be worried about, the safety. Ok? I just set the situation up. Well, Segre was then authorized by Oppenheimer to go through the entire plant and make a list of all possible accumulation points where there might be danger. So he and his cohorts (I don’t remember who they were) made this thing and sent back to Los Alamos. See, it was an emergency problem for us, and we were set. I remember getting this thing and looking it through. Then we had a division of labor. Christy and his group calculated water solution, what the critical limits are, in the various circumstances, like in a plant — you know, what would happen if you mixed, how to do it, if you put cadmium in how much you would stop it. In some cases there was carbon tetrachloride. Well, the chlorine will absorb the neutrons and that’s OK. And all these questions of liquids. I was to calculate, in my group, the dry solids, the boxes full of salts, you see, against the brick walls — what were their limitations. You can get a lot more in a dry solid than in a liquid, and it was much harder to calculate, but anyway, that’s what we did, and we did it as fast as we could. But unlike calculating for the bomb, we took safety limits. It’s easier to calculate something that’s safe, than exactly what it is, you know. I mean, I can’t say 657 so and so’s going to explode. I can say, I know it isn’t going to explode with 302. You know? It’s much easier. You don’t have to be so accurate. So anyhow we got this all prepared. An emergency business — all work at Los Alamos, a lot of work in theoreticals, was stopped for a couple of weeks or so while we did this as fast as we could. We had to do it fast because the plant was getting ready to go, and they were not allowed to go until this thing was looked into, you see, so it was a very great and interesting emergency, very exciting. So Christy is going to go tell them about the thing, and I give my stuff to Christy, all my numbers, explain everything to him, and breathe a sigh of relief. Then he got pneumonia –- Christy — and was in the hospital, and I was going to have to go. So Christy gave me all his information about water and gave me my stuff back about solids, and said, “Good day.” Then I was sent across country to tell them about this thing. Oppenheimer said to me — before I left he called me up and said, “Now, about the safety thing, I want you to make sure that the following men are in the meeting when you first tell them the problem, because they’re the men there that know physics enough to understand. You tell them, the situation, what to do — but don’t directly tell the Army. Make sure that it’s not you telling the Army and the Army is going to be responsible, because they don’t know enough. I mean, they’re nice, but you’ve got to get somebody there who knows physics.” They gave me names, Webb and a few others, and so on, to do it. So I said: “Well, suppose they arrange a meeting and these fellows aren’t there?” “Well, you ask for them,” says Oppenheimer. “But suppose that they say no for some reason, secrecy or something?” He said, “Then you say, ‘Los Alamos cannot then accept the responsibility for the safety of the Oak Ridge Plant.’” I said, “You mean me, little Richard Feynman, is going to say that?” He said, “Yes, little Richard Feynman, you’re going to say that.” Growing up, yeah. So I got on the airplane to go across. I went by air. I’d never traveled by air before. (Just giving you the level, you know, the way it looks to the human end of it.) It was very exciting. You see, in that day we had to have priorities to fly. Then at one place, we’d fly, and we had to land — in those days you had to land in many places, like a bus trip, you know, as you went across. I think it was in Kansas City somewhere that we got off the airplane for a while, and then a lot of big important looking cats, some generals, important looking businessmen — and some guy’s standing there, swinging his gold watch round on a string, and he’s talking. I look like a kid, you know. And he says to me, “It must be extremely hard to fly without priorities in these days.” So I said, “Well, I don’t know. I have a priority.” So he’s still swinging. I mean, he was such an important what do you call it — the way he treated me, you know. He keeps swinging away, you know, he says, “Well, you know, some of us Number 4s are going to get bumped. I hear there are some generals getting on here.” Then I kind of leaned — I said, “That’s all right. I have a Number 3.” He probably wrote to his Congressman, “What are they doing? They give a priority to some kid.” Anyway, with all this information, I got to Oak Ridge. (I tell this just because it is very interesting to me.) I go to Oak Ridge, and the first thing, they asked me a lot of questions. “I’m not saying anything. I want to go through the plant. I want to see with my own eyes what I got on the report from Segre,” and so on. “Ok.” And I went through this plant. I discovered it was worse than they thought. There were a few things, like they would describe a room that had boxes of something; then they would describe another room that had barrels of something and another room that had bottles of something. Well, they had confusion going through the plant, because they were following the process. And it was the same room that they would go in several times. The boxes are on one side, the barrels on another. I am convinced that if they had simply started to separate the uranium, they would have had an accident. I don’t mean an explosion, but they would have had a nuclear reaction in some accumulation somewhere, relatively fast, and it would have made neutrons and radioactivity all over the plant, and there would have been a terrible calamity. I’m convinced of it, from the circumstances. Anyway, I went through the plant. I kept my trap shut. I didn’t go and say, “Oh, ah!” — nothing. I recorded everything in my mind, and that evening, I spent the whole night — I was practically awake the entire night — preparing for a meeting the next morning in which I would tell them the situation. I went through everything. I worked very hard on it. I have a fairly good short term memory, but not a good long term memory. When I work very hard on something I can remember it, and in all this stuff I remember the building numbers and the equipment numbers, you see, the tank No. 16 and building 9206 — because that’s the way they would tell it to me. “Now we’ll go into building 9206,” “This is tank so and so” — all this junk, this useless stuff, I would remember. I remembered it — for one day, is all — but when I was making my calculations and figuring and analyzing and so on, I thought in terms of this tank and that number and so forth. So I was very impressive the next day, when I could tell them that in tank no. 74 in building 9206 requires this, and can be repaired, and so on. It worked out very nicely. I made a big effect. While I did it, I prepared a kind of a speech in which I’d explain how the uranium underwent fission, how the neutrons came out, about slow neutrons and fast neutrons, what the effect of water was, why cadmium would slow the reactions, and so on — in order that they could understand how to be safe. I don’t believe — I didn’t believe it was possible to make the plant safe, under the circumstances, because it was a complete — It’s like you build something when nobody even knows there is such a thing as fire, and it evidently could have burnt up because there’s a flame standing there and there’s a piece of silk hanging over it, you see. You have to understand something about it to make it really stick. Well, the higher-ups had to understand — not just a series of arbitrary rules concocted by an expert from Los Alamos, but an understanding, for real safety. So the next day I came to go to the meeting. I had a lieutenant. They gave me a lieutenant to take me around all the time, Zumwalt or something, his name was. At the beginning of the meeting, Colonel Nichols said to me, through Zumwalt — he said to me that the Colonel said that he doesn’t want them to know anything about — it’s not necessary to tell them anything about the way nuclear reactions go, or something; just tell them what’s safe. So I reported. I said to the Colonel: “I do not feel that’s the way to do it, that it would be safe that way. It is necessary to give this information in order to make the plant safe, in my opinion.” I was ready, of course, for the next operation: “WE AT LOS ALAMOS CANNOT ACCEPT THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE SAFETY OF OAK RIDGE” — but I didn’t have to make that. Now, I was very impressed with these guys, colonels and generals. Very hard decision. The meeting is starting in five minutes. He goes to the window and looks out. They had never had this kind of exchange of information before. He asked for my opinion and I explained it. I explained why I had the opinion. He explained that it was dangerous that they should know this information. I explained that it was also dangerous if the plant didn’t work. You know? Not a long argument. I misrepresent it. It was three minutes. He goes to the window and looks out the window. He comes back. He says, “All right.” He makes the decision. I don’t know how they do it. Anyway, then the meeting started. I went through the meeting. I told them that the plant would explode. Why? I explained about neutrons, how everything worked, how it would explode, how it had to be redesigned, but it wasn’t very difficult. In the water solutions they could put a cadmium salt, if it doesn’t disturb the chemistry, and in this part of the chemistry it probably wouldn’t. That is a special problem. In that case we could surround it by a cadmium sheet. In this stuff we put boron solution, because cadmium would have an effect. “In Building 9216, in Tank 74, we can do it by doing this,” you see. “In such and such circumstances in the store room, we just have to get a bigger store room, and pack the boxes separated from one another, definitely, by building wooden platforms and so on, the way you put the boxes, so they can’t be stacked next to one another so you get too much in one place” — etc. So I told them the trouble, I told them the solutions. I told them, “some places I haven’t worked out the solutions,” and so on. It was a very exciting moment for me. This was the first time when I was telling anybody anything really, you know. It was a very important thing. So I was in a great and important position at that moment. After that I had to return to Tennessee from time to time, every month or so, to give advice, you see, to kind of confirm. Like, they had started some man to calculating himself. I had given him rules and formulas, so he could figure his own things out, and he wanted his hand held. I mean, they wanted his hand held, to make sure that he was doing it right, and this and that, so I had to go back and check. In addition, the company was building a new plant. It wasn’t ready yet. They were designing a plant for handling enriched material (a future plant) and with this stuff, the problem was even more serious. They had to separate things, and they had all these matters to take into account in design. So one time I returned — next time I returned to Tennessee, this company was ready with their new plans. They wanted me to check their plans, if they were safe. And one of the things we had to worry about was if valves jammed or something, like, say, an evaporator is evaporating the liquid from some uranium, so it keeps accumulating uranium, or if a valve gets stuck somewhere and stuff begins to pile up — you had to worry about all that. So they showed me these plans. They took me into a room, a room with a very long table — it must have been 15, 18 feet long and 5 or 6 feet wide — stacked with blueprints. The designers, the blueprint men, you know, the company men — they brought me into this room and they said, “Here’s the design. Now, we have designed this thing so that if any valve gets stuck — not one valve getting stuck alone would allow any accumulation. We always have a safety way,” and all this, it had been carefully worked out and so forth. Well, I had taken engineering drawing at MIT. I didn’t remember it too well. And here are these blueprints. Well, they got started fast, because I was so impressive the time before, and they thought I knew everything, you know: I knew all about neutrons, so I knew everything. Although lots of people knew about neutrons, for them, I was like a god. So they thought I knew everything, they started right in explaining about the plant — and here’s millions of lines on these things,” and so here, the plant goes down, and carbon tetrachloride goes up on the second floor,” and then they flipped a lot of paper up and they climbed down into the sheets of the blueprints –- “Here’s the second floor.” They go up and down. I’m trying to follow as fast as I can, and I notice — most of thing I understand, more of less — but all over the paper there’s a rectangle with a cross across it on the diagonal, and I don’t know what that is. So I’m thinking to ask, you know. Did you ever —? You must have gotten into this situation: you think to ask, and then you hesitate — maybe I can figure it out — and then the later it gets, the more they’ve told you, the more embarrassed you are to ask after they’ve told you all this stuff and it shows you weren’t understanding anything — you know? So I got in deeper and deeper. I got in more and more in trouble with this. I couldn’t ask. So finally I got an idea. I thought, “maybe it’s a valve” — I was guessing. (This is absolutely true — I’m just telling you, this is absolutely true, incredible but true.) I put my hand on one of those crosses to find out if it’s a valve, and I say, “What happens if this valve gets stuck?” — you see? To see if it’s a valve. And they would say to me, “That’s not a valve, Sir, that’s a pyaaa…” — you know? No. It’s a valve. It was a valve! I say, “What happens if this valve gets stuck?” So they say, “Well, then it backs up over here,” and they go through blueprints, up to the second floor, down to the first floor, and these two guys are going up and down, they’re talking, talking, talking, very fast to each other, I don’t know what’s going on, all mixed up — They finally turn to me. “You’re absolutely right, Sir,” they say. Absolute luck! I always have luck like that. I’ve always got crazy luck. “Absolutely right.” Zumwalt, this lieutenant who’d taken me around everywhere, as a kind of, you knew, security guard or something — he just sat there with his mouth hanging loose, you know. After we came out, he said, “Feynman, I know you. I’ve been to see you a lot. But that performance is physically impossible! How did you do that? It’s impossible!” I said, “I did it by luck.” Anyway, that was part of this thing. So I got involved in general safety problem for anywhere else. I had ultimately to go to the plant at Hanford about safety. Wheeler was there and I talked to him about the safety and checked his calculations on safety and so on, but there was no particular thing. I became a kind of a safety expert from Los Alamos on these other plants, although it wasn’t so much, especially at Hanford, that I was from the outside, but to make sure, and then leave. With a like Wheeler it was OK. And the men that I had taught in Tennessee were OK. So gradually there was less of this. Then, with regard to certain safety problems at our own Los Alamos place — because I became kind of an expert on this matter and would give advice — but I didn’t get involved, and didn’t want to get involved, with the safety of the experiments whose purpose it was to make a reaction. It was a different kind of safety. See, safety when the purpose is only to handle materials is a safe matter. Because my whole mental attitude was to be on the low side, you know. It’s a wholly different problem as to how to design experiments. So I did not have anything to do with the safety of the experiments whose purpose it was to get near critical, but only handling in the metallurgy division, handling in the chemistry department, what the trucks should look like, what the safes should look like and the shelves of boron in between the blocks and so on, so that the stuff wouldn’t explode in storing. That kind of stuff. I did do that. (I’m just telling you all the different things.) http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/5020_2.html

I was very good at doing integrals, and, for a reason that I don’t know, especially good at doing numerical calculations. I knew how to organize arithmetic so that you did a minimum amount of work to get the answer, and apparently that talent is not very widespread. I didn’t know that until I got there. Because, on the way home from lunch often, I would walk through the computing division, the computing department. See, the theorists in different groups would give problems to the computing department. I would walk through the computing department and look over the shoulder of a girl and say, “That’s wrong, that number.” Things like that, you see. Or I’d go through and say, “What are you doing?” and they’d explain. I’d say, “That’s not the way to do that problem,” and I’d go to the guy who gave it and explain to him a way of doing it five times faster. You’d think a guy like this would be annoying, but no, everybody liked it. Anyway you could improve was all right, it didn’t make any difference. There were no personal difficulties, you see. If I’d say “It’s wrong” it was to help, and everybody knew it. It was no problem. So I used to be able to do this, go around the computing department. One of the (for me) most amusing things was, a man was trying to work out an integral differential equation, complicated thing — the third root of something is a complicated integral, with a kernel and everything, an integral equation with derivatives, and he was integrating this three times, because the third derivative by Simpson’s rule — but he had to first calculate this integral kernel, many integrals — a long and elaborate thing. I looked at the kernel and I noticed that that operation was the one-half derivative. You remember I told you that I’d worked out that from before? I’m just telling you the connection. I looked — one-half derivative — so I figured, his equation is a non-linear 3 1/2 order differential equation; it said, “the 3 1/2 derivative of U is U squared,” that’s all there was to it. So I figured: Now, look, there’s numerical ways of doing one integration, Simpson’s rule — of doing a double integral, doing triple integral, see. Is there a way? Or at least there was of single integral and maybe double, you could invent them. What about inventing a numerical method of doing half an integral? So I cooked up a numerical scheme for doing half an integral in one step. Then to do three integrals, the three integrals which he did by Simpson’s rule in succession, I made up a new numerical rule to do three integrals in succession and extrapolate to the next point, and it turns out by some freakish accident that the numerical method is one order higher or two orders higher than it ought to be. You see, in any numerical method you are doing some polynomial to approximate the curve. Then the error is the first degree of polynomial that’s higher than the number of points that you’ve taken. You can’t fit. Well, there’s an error that comes when there’s one higher order derivative. It has a coefficient, such as Simpson’s rule, the 4th derivative times 1 over 180 times the integral to the 4th or something. Well, the thing that would correspond to 1 over 180 for this problem was zero. It was accident that with this particular method, the coefficient of the error was zero, and it was much more accurate. So that was cute, that three times integration extrapolated can be done so accurately, and that was not known before. And the numerical way of doing the half integral was very amusing. I got a terrific kick out of that, and ended up inventing a numerical method to do the problem, a special problem, but this is the kind of thing that’s not generalizable. But it was so much more efficient that in spite of the work I did to find the method, develop it, explain it and do it, I got way ahead of the guys that were doing it slowly. And they just stopped, because they had this other scheme. Weiner:Do you consider this as play, really? Feynman:Yes, a great deal of it is play, you see. I mean, I look for problems and I do things. I know, but play that was contributing, you see, and not fiddling around. I never fiddled around there. I played a lot, but I always played in a way that was directed. I could always explain the play as not useless, you see. There was a tremendous amount of play. That’s really what it was — so many problems — I’d look for them, because I liked all these crazy things. Yes, very much like play. But always with a purpose in the end. http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/5020_2.html

[At Los Alamos] Anyhow, we did start to work and things improved a little. We got chairs and desks and filing cabinets and this and that, rather rapidly, and blackboards and so on. But in the first few weeks — there were many men I had heard of, you know, like Teller, Weisskopf — I don’t know how many I had ever met, exactly, but if I met them all I met them only from a distance or quickly, like Bethe was there. I’d only met him a little bit before, you know — not really met him, seen him — and there were all these great minds and great names that I knew of. They were great people. When I got up there, in the second or third week (I can’t remember exactly) there was a kind of accident, that all of the important men had to leave. Weisskopf had to go back to check something, he was selling his house or something. Teller was out because of something. Everybody was away except Bethe, who was the head of the theoretical division, and Bethe apparently needed somebody to talk to when he had an idea to make it was Ok. He wandered around. He went into my office. We’d never met before, but he couldn’t find anybody, and be started to explain his idea. I’m kind of dopey — just like it happens in the lecture that I gave where I was nervous but the moment I started to talk physics, I’m only thinking physics — Weiner:You mean that lecture in the first colloquium at Princeton? Feynman:Right. The same thing always happens to me when I’m thinking physics. I’m 100 percent involved. So he started to talk a little bit, and when he would tell me something, I’d start thinking, and I’d say, “No, that’s crazy, you see —” Without thinking, who am I talking to? or anything. “Crazy” and he’d say “Why?” and I would explain — he’d say, “No, you see, you’re wrong,” and he’d explain back, and of course I was wrong. This went on again and again, and I kept saying these things and he’d point out I was wrong and so on. Finally he went out of the office. Then I kind of woke up, you know. I said, “My God, what am I doing? I’ve told him he was wrong a million times and I was wrong every time?” But apparently that’s just what he wanted. He wanted someone who, he felt, was checking, really checking the thing. And none of these guys are really worried if you tell them they’re crazy. They argue only on the physics, not on the human. So apparently he was very happy with this, and he kept coming into my office. Then when the other guys come back, we had a good relationship, Bethe and I. He would still discuss things with me a lot. So I kind of was lucky in that respect, you know. We discussed many things of this kind. At the beginning I was always wrong. After a while, once in a while I would catch him out, but usually not. People used to say that to hear the two of us talking was to watch a battleship and a mosquito boat, because he would plow through the subject slowing, uniformly, correctly and so on, not deflected in the one direction or the other, working something out, while I would jump to conclusion –- “No, no, wait a minute, that’s wrong, let it go like this,” and so on. Once in a while I’d bump into something that he heading for, but usually he was going all right, you know. It was amusing. Anyway, I wanted to mention that relationship, which was quite close, and we always discussed many things together. http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/5020_2.html

Feynman:I don’t know maybe an afternoon. And Bohr came up and apologized. His son had told him that he didn’t understand it, that I really was consonant with the principles of quantum mechanics. But I said, “It’s not necessary to apologize,” — you know, something like that. After that, I don’t know what I did. I didn’t do any more, but just decided to publish it. There is one little thing, though, that’s interesting, that also added to the complications. When I got up to talk, I started out by saying, “I can do everything but I can’t do the closed loops, the self-energy of the electron, I mean the vacuum polarization.” Schwinger got up and said, “I can do everything, including the vacuum polarization.” And he worked something out, and he got a term which looked like vacuum polarization. He had to subtract, and it left the vacuum polarization. It later came out that he had not done the vacuum polarization, but he had left it out — he didn’t even notice the term — and he had another term that he’d been doing, and was doing it wrong. And it looked like a vacuum polarization correction, the error, which you could get rid of by saying he had vacuum polarization. He got rid of it. Well, I was doing it more right, and didn’t have any vacuum polarization term at all, and knew it was missing, and said it was missing — whereas, he thought he had it and included it and got it right. But neither of us knew how to do it. But we didn’t know it. He said he did. And I said I didn’t do it. So one of the criticisms they gave was, “Why should we bother with this, you haven’t done the vacuum polarization yet. And the other thing is all done.” So you see, that was another, a small thing. I’m just saying it wasn’t something that bothered me. It didn’t bother me. I’m just telling the difficulties that people have in paying attention to me. They thought I hadn’t as much as he had — actually, I happened to have more but I didn’t know it — and so on. I could describe the specific terms, but one time a few weeks later, when I was visiting MIT, Schwinger called me up and said, “According to what I understood from what we were discussing, the terms which you have included give no vacuum polarization term, and that you have this extra thing. Well, now I found this extra thing. But now what bothers me is that the terms which I thought I had, which were the same as yours — I have a correction, it looks like a charge correction from those terms, and you said you had none. How did you handle them?” So I had to discuss terms on the telephone. We could do it. And I explained to him which terms would cancel what, and he hadn’t noticed those. “Oh,” he said, “I forgot to put those in.” So he put them in, corrected the thing, and got the same result. So, you see, we understood each other. We corrected each other. You know, we each fixed the other up, by pointing things out to each other at the time. So we were cooperating very well. But it was hard for us to know exactly what we were doing, and we would sometimes misrepresent the situation a little bit. Weiner:You could even talk about this on the phone? Feynman:Even on the phone we could identify the terms, I remember, because we understood what we were doing. We could visualize. I would say, “The term I’m talking about is canceled by a term which comes from a photon which is first emitted before interaction with the nuclear potential, is first emitted and then absorbed before the interaction with the nuclear potential.” And he’d say, “But that’s just a mass correction.” I’d say, “No, because of the fact, the mass correction is when there’s a free particle, and because of the fact that a potential is going to act soon, there’s a slight correction near the end point of the integral.” “Oh, yeah!” You know? So it would go something like that. We could talk on the telephone to each other. We understood each other very well. http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/5020_3.html

Your ass place or mine?

... we got this space-time view, this view of action integrals and action in distance, and pads in space and time instead of fields, and so on, that we were thinking about. Then Wheeler called me up one day and he said I answered the phone in my dormitory - Feynman, I know why all the electrons have the same charge and mass, all different electrons. I said, Why? He said, Theyre all the same electron. So I asked him what he meant by that brilliant idea. He said, You know, we always make the world lines go one way, but suppose the world line of an electron is one enormous knot, going back and forth in space-time, just one line, going back and forth. Then when we cut it in the place of present time, wed have a large number of intersections, which would represent electrons. I said, Oh. Yeah. Very nice. He said, It turns out that the back section, where its going the other way, the proper times running the wrong way, corresponds to a negative charge. You see why? Then he explained why. I could see it from our action principle: you change the sign of BS and change the sign of the charge. So that was I said, Yeah, but where are all the positrons? Well, maybe theyre hidden in the protons somewhere or something, the back sections. I said, Ok. Its a nice idea. But what I liked about the idea was that the positrons were electrons going backwards in time, and that world lines could be inverted. This idea I kept in my mind, although I didnt go so much for the fact that all electrons are the same electron. He always liked to prove it to the most dramatic point. I just took the backwards-moving electrons as very likely candidates for the positrons. Because here we had a theory that we could represent both electrons and positrons in classical physics in a very simple way, by reversing, by letting the world lines go backwards and forwards in time. So it was pretty good. He had a lot of good ideas, Wheeler. Weiner: Yeah. He seemed to be able to deal with the ones that you brought in too. Feynman: Yes. Well, what he did, you see, things like Id like to remark that the moment he mentioned advanced waves that is, against causality and all this other stuff is against cause, the causes would precede the effect no, the causes would follow the effects instead of preceding them, and so on I didnt ever say, But thats impossible! or anything like that. I was not ever upset by any of the obvious troubles, as against some principle of causality or something. This was from the training we had in physics from Einstein and Bohr and so on. See, the history of physics was that a crazy idea like relativity, which is so evidently nutty like when one man thinks two things are simultaneous, some other guy riding by doesnt say so or, that you cant measure simultaneously position and momentum, or something It had been discovering that you must always think carefully about the real experimental situation before you cavalierly say such a thing is impossible, you dont like it. So I never objected to any of these crazy ideas, on those grounds. I never said, for instance, How can it go backwards? How would it know when its going to meet an electron? I knew that that was something we would have to study that that wasnt obviously cockeyed. The fact that there were protons and not positrons were an obvious trouble, but I let him get away with it, so someday well discover how the protons go, wind up in this knot, too. But never mind. His brilliance, the wildness of his ideas, apparently impossible ideas, did fall on fertile soil, because I never objected to what other people would immediately have objected to, you know. All the books would say we cant use advanced waves because this would mean effects would precede causes. But things like that never bothered me. I dont give a darn. I never thought in terms of cause and effect necessarily, anything. http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/5020_3.html

There seem to be plenty of each for the other. It gives some pleasure to imagine Jesus and/or Paul coming down and telling Pastor Osteen just what they think of his Prosperity Gospel.

One born every minute.

You have to stop outing me.

So those oral-history transcripts from Feynman are a lot more fun than I had expected. At random: ...I’m still at Cornell, definitely, right. Good. That’s all right. Well, I went to Princeton, to the Institute of Advanced Study, and there were these smart people there, and they came to the lecture, and I explained it, explained the ideas. And I always had the impression at the Institute — Well, I gave the lectures, and it was very successful. All the questions were very practical. And very sensible. And I was rather terrified of the Institute before that, because it was well known that all these guys at the Institute would talk a good game, you see. Like somebody would say, “Well, isn’t that just the same as Smorglepop’s theory?” I’ll give you another example of it in a minute. At any rate, I gave the lectures, and there were nothing but practical questions like, “If you were trying to do this problem, how would you set it up? Did you mean by this a minus sign there?” “Yes” You know. All perfectly OK, and I gave nice lectures. I gave all the lectures I wanted to and explained everything and went back home to Cornell. I said: “Hey, Hans, the Institute has changed! Something has happened. These guys are very different. They didn’t ask anything but sensible questions. They didn’t say, ‘Isn’t that the same as Porkyschnorp in 1621?’ or something like that.” “Oh,” he said, “I know the reason. I went just a few weeks before you did and gave some lectures on nuclear physics. I started to give the lectures and I hadn’t opened my mouth and said two, three, four words, when this stuff started. Somebody jumps up and asks a question. He says, ‘Isn’t that the same as what Wegischnorp said in 1960, and so on, in a paper in the Weische Physica Acta?’ Somebody else, before I can answer, gets up (typical Princeton Institute) and says, ‘No, you see, what Bethe is going to say is ‘this, that and the other thing,’ and what the fellow says in the Weische Physica Acta is ‘this, slightly different.’ And somebody else says, ‘No, it isn’t exactly so different, because Bethe —’” He says to me, “So when the third fellow gets up to argue, I slam the table” — you know, when Bethe gets mad he can look formidable -– “I slam the table and I said, ‘Gentlemen, if you knew what I was going to say, why did you invite me to speak? Now, I want to make an uninterrupted speech, unless you have a specific, detailed, and sensible question.’” Then he gave his lecture. When I followed, they were still smarting under the spanking that they had gotten from Hans, you see. So they were asking only sensible questions. I was afraid that they would just try to tear me limb from limb — you know, saying “This is just Schwinger stuff. You can do it this way. Why don’t you do it that way? Why don’t you do it this way?” And then quoting some other guys, and making it very esoteric and difficult and fancy. They have a kind of one-upmanship which practical people can see through, but which a poor fellow is fooled by. I wouldn’t have been fooled by it, but I would have been terribly annoyed by it, because they wouldn’t have been learning from me. They wouldn’t have been paying attention if they’d started that game. They close their minds to find out if it isn’t the same as something they already know. Therefore, they don’t have to learn it. So at any rate, that was my opinion of the Institute, but I had, I must admit, no trouble whatever, and they were a very, very good audience. They listened and asked only sensible questions. http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/5020_3.html

I have to confess a great sin: I posted on the Other Site just yesterday this morning. And the day before. There goes a girl's reputation.

...When she took the podium, she said she was there to give Justin some tips for when he "inevitably ends up in prison." After offering to teach him how to make a shank, Stewart advised Justin to settle down and find a powerful, rich girl who's "a player in the boardroom and a freak in the bedroom." And with that, she quipped, "So Justin, my final piece of advice is: Call me." BOOM. http://www.mtv.com/news/2105841/inside-justin-bieber-comedy-central-roast/