"Ричард Фейнман. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!/Вы, конечно, шутите, мистер Фейнман! (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

on the table.
The next night I came and I had the same new waitress.
"What's the idea of leaving the cup upside down last time?"
"Well, I thought that even though you were in a hurry, you'd have to go
back into the kitchen and get a soup plate; then you'd have to sloooowly and
carefully slide the cup over to the edge of the table..."
"I did that," she complained, "but there was no water in it!"
My masterpiece of mischief happened at the fraternity. One morning I
woke up very early, about five o'clock, and couldn't go back to sleep, so I
went downstairs from the sleeping rooms and discovered some signs hanging on
strings which said things like "DOOR! DOOR! WHO STOLE THE DOOR?" I saw that
someone had taken a door off its hinges, and in its place they hung a sign
that said, "PLEASE CLOSE THE DOOR!" - the sign that used to be on the door
that was missing.
I immediately figured out what the idea was. In that room a guy named
Pete Bernays and a couple of other guys liked to work very hard, and always
wanted it quiet. If you wandered into their room looking for something, or
to ask them how they did problem such and such, when you would leave you
would always hear these guys scream, "Please close the door!"
Somebody had gotten tired of this, no doubt, and had taken the door
off. Now this room, it so happened, had two doors, the way it was built, so
I got an idea: I took the other door off its hinges, carried it downstairs,
and hid it in the basement behind the oil tank. Then I quietly went back
upstairs and went to bed.
Later in the morning I made believe I woke up and came downstairs a
little late. The other guys were milling around, and Pete and his friends
were all upset: The doors to their room were missing, and they had to study,
blah, blah, blah, blah. I was coming down the stairs and they said,
"Feynman! Did you take the doors?"
"Oh, yeah!" I said. "I took the door. You can see the scratches on my
knuckles here, that I got when my hands scraped against the wall as I was
carrying it down into the basement."
They weren't satisfied with my answer; in fact, they didn't believe me.
The guys who took the first door had left so many clues - the
handwriting on the signs, for instance - that they were soon found out. My
idea was that when it was found out who stole the first door, everybody
would think they also stole the other door. It worked perfectly: The guys
who took the first door were pummeled and tortured and worked on by
everybody, until finally, with much pain and difficulty, they convinced
their tormentors that they had only taken one door, unbelievable as it might
be.
I listened to all this, and I was happy.
The other door stayed missing for a whole week, and it became more and
more important to the guys who were trying to study in that room that the
other door be found.
Finally, in order to solve the problem, the president of the fraternity
says at the dinner table, "We have to solve this problem of the other door.
I haven't been able to solve the problem myself, so I would like suggestions
from the rest of you as to how to straighten this out, because Pete and the
others are trying to study."