“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

by Richard Phillips Feynman

  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.

  After the thing went off, 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. But one man, I remember, Bob Wilson, was just 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, then you’re working very hard to accomplish something and it’s a pleasure, it’s excitement. And you stop thinking, you know; you just stop. Bob Wilson was the only one who was still thinking about it, at that moment.

  I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can’t understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth … How far from here was 34th Street? … All those buildings, all smashed—and so on. And 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 almost forty years now, hasn’t it? So I’ve
been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I’m glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.

  Safecracker Meets Safecracker

  I learned to pick locks from a guy named Leo Lavatelli. It turns out that picking ordinary tumbler locks—like Yale locks—is easy. You try to turn the lock by putting a screwdriver in the hole (you have to push from the side in order to leave the hole open). It doesn’t turn because there are some pins inside which have to be lifted to just the right height (by the key). Because it is not made perfectly, the lock is held more by one pin than the others. Now, if you push a little wire gadget—maybe a paper clip with a slight bump at the end—and jiggle it back and forth inside the lock, you’ll eventually push that one pin that’s doing the most holding, up to the right height. The lock gives, just a little bit, so the first pin stays up—it’s caught on the edge. Now most of the load is held by another pin, and you repeat the same random process for a few more minutes, until all the pins are pushed up.

  What often happens is that the screwdriver will slip and you hear tic-tic-tic, and it makes you mad. There are little springs that push the pins back down when a key is removed, and you can hear them click when you let go of the screwdriver. (Sometimes you intentionally let go of the screwdriver to see if you’re getting anywhere—you might be pushing the wrong way, for instance.) The process is something like Sisyphus: you’re always falling back downhill.

  It’s a simple process, but practice helps a lot. You learn how hard to push on things—hard enough so the pins will stay up, but not so hard that they won’t go up in the first place. What is not really appreciated by most people is that they’re perpetually locking themselves in with locks everywhere, and it’s not very hard to pick them.

  When we started to work on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, everything was in such a hurry that it wasn’t really ready. All the secrets of the project—everything about the atomic bomb—were kept in filing cabinets which, if they had locks at all, were locked with padlocks which had maybe only three pins: they were as easy as pie to open.

  To improve security the shop outfitted every filing cabinet with a long rod that went down through the handles of the drawers and that was fastened by a padlock.

  Some guy said to me, “Look at this new thing the shop put on—can you open the cabinet now?”

  I looked at the back of the cabinet and saw that the drawers didn’t have a solid bottom. There was a slot with a wire rod in each one that held a slidable piece (which holds the papers up inside the drawer). I poked in from the back, slid the piece back, and began pulling the papers out through the slot. “Look!” I said. “I don’t even have to pick the lock.”

  Los Alamos was a very cooperative place, and we felt it our responsibility to point out things that should be improved. I’d keep complaining that the stuff was unsafe, and although everybody thought it was safe because there were steel rods and padlocks, it didn’t mean a damn thing.

  To demonstrate that the locks meant nothing, whenever I wanted somebody’s report and they weren’t around, I’d just go in their office, open the filing cabinet, and take it out. When I was finished I would give it back to the guy: “Thanks for your report.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Out of your filing cabinet.”

  “But I locked it!”

  “I know you locked it. The locks are no good.”

  Finally some filing cabinets came which had combination locks on them made by the Mosler Safe Company. They had three drawers. Pulling the top drawer out would release the other drawers by a catch. The top drawer was opened by turning a combination wheel to the left, right, and left for the combination, and then right to number ten, which would draw back a bolt inside. The whole filing cabinet could be locked by closing the bottom drawers first, then the top drawer, and spinning the combination wheel away from number ten, which pushed up the bolt.

  These new filing cabinets were an immediate challenge, naturally. I love puzzles. One guy tries to make something to keep another guy out; there must be a way to beat it!

  I had first to understand how the lock worked, so I took apart the one in my office. The way it worked is this: There are three discs on a single shaft, one behind the other; each has a notch in a different place. The idea is to line up the notches so that when you turn the wheel to ten, the little friction drive will draw the bolt down into the slot generated by the notches of the three discs.

  Now, to turn the discs, there’s a pin sticking out from the back of the combination wheel, and a pin sticking up from the first disc at the same radius. Within one turn of the combination wheel, you’ve picked up the first disc.

  On the back of the first disc there’s a pin at the same radius as a pin on the front of the second disc, so by the time you’ve spun the combination wheel around twice, you’ve picked up the second disc as well.

  Keep turning the wheel, and a pin on the back of the second disc will catch a pin on the front of the third disc, which you now set into the proper position with the first number of the combination.

  Now you have to turn the combination wheel the other way one full turn to catch the second disc from the other side, and then continue to the second number of the combination to set the second disc.

  Again you reverse direction and set the first disc to its proper place. Now the notches are lined up, and by turning the wheel to ten, you open the cabinet.

  Well, I struggled, and I couldn’t get anywhere. I bought a couple of safecracker books, but they were all the same. In the beginning of the book there are some stories of the fantastic achievements of the safecracker, such as the woman caught in a meat refrigerator who is freezing to death, but the safecracker, hanging upside down, opens it in two minutes. Or there are some precious furs or gold bullion under water, down in the sea, and the safecracker dives down and opens the chest.

  In the second part of the book, they tell you how to crack a safe. There are all kinds of ninny-pinny, dopey things, like “It might be a good idea to try a date for the combination, because lots of people like to use dates.” Or “Think of the psychology of the owner of the safe, and what he might use for the combination.” And “The secretary is often worried that she might forget the combination of the safe, so she might write it down in one of the following places—along the edge of her desk drawer, on a list of names and addresses … and so on.

  They did tell me something sensible about how to open ordinary safes, and it’s easy to understand. Ordinary safes have an extra handle, so if you push down on the handle while you’re turning the combination wheel, things being unequal (as with locks), the force of the handle trying to push the bolt down into the notches (which are not lined up) is held up more by one disc than another. When the notch on that disc comes under the bolt, there’s a tiny click that you can hear with a stethoscope, or a slight decrease in friction that you can feel (you don’t have to sandpaper your fingertips), and you know, “There’s a number!”

  You don’t know whether it’s the first, second, or third number, but you can get a pretty good idea of that by finding out how many times you have to turn the wheel the other way to hear the same click again. If it’s a little less than once, it’s the first disc; if it’s a little less than twice, it’s the second disc (you have to make a correction for the thickness of the pins).

  This useful trick only works on ordinary safes, which have the extra handle, so I was stymied.

  I tried all kinds of subsidiary tricks with the cabinets, such as finding out how to release the latches on the lower drawers, without opening the top drawer, by taking off a screw in front and poking around with a piece of hanger wire.

  I tried spinning the combination wheel very rapidly and then going to ten, thus putting a little friction on, which I hoped would stop a disc at the right point in some manner. I tried all kinds of things. I was desperate.

  I also did a certain amount of systematic study. For instance, a typical combination was 69-32-21. How far
off could a number be when you’re opening the safe? If the number was 69, would 68 work? Would 67 work? On the particular locks we had, the answer was yes for both, but 66 wouldn’t work. You could be off by two in either direction. That meant you only had to try one out of five numbers, so you could try zero, five, ten, fifteen, and so on. With twenty such numbers on a wheel of 100, that was 8000 possibilities instead of the 1,000,000 you would get if you had to try every single number.

  Now the question was, how long would it take me to try the 8000 combinations? Suppose I’ve got the first two numbers right of a combination I’m trying to get. Say the numbers are 69-32, but I don’t know it—I’ve got them as 70-30. Now I can try the twenty possible third numbers without having to set up the first two numbers each time. Now let’s suppose I have only the first number of the combination right. After trying the twenty numbers on the third disc, I move the second wheel only a little bit, and then do another twenty numbers on the third wheel.

  I practiced all the time on my own safe so I could do this process as fast as I could and not get lost in my mind as to which number I was pushing and mess up the first number. Like a guy who practices sleight of hand, I got it down to an absolute rhythm so I could try the 400 possible back numbers in less than half an hour. That meant I could open a safe in a maximum of eight hours—with an average time of four hours.

  There was another guy there at Los Alamos named Staley who was also interested in locks. We talked about it from time to time, but we weren’t getting anywhere much. After I got this idea how to open a safe in an average time of four hours, I wanted to show Staley how to do it, so I went into a guy’s office over in the computing department and asked, “Do you mind if I use your safe? I’d like to show Staley something.”