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

discussion about dreams, he told me that dreams have significance: there are
symbols in dreams that can be interpreted psychoanalytically. I didn't
believe most of this stuff, but that night I had an interesting dream: We're
playing a game on a billiard table with three balls - a white ball, a green
ball, and a gray ball - and the name of the game is "titsies." There was
something about trying to get the balls into the pocket: the white ball and
the green ball are easy to sink into the pocket, but the gray one, I can't
get to it.
I wake up, and the dream is very easy to interpret: the name of the
game gives it away, of course - them's girls! The white ball was easy to
figure out, because I was going out, sneakily, with a married woman who
worked at the time as a cashier in a cafeteria and wore a white uniform. The
green one was also easy, because I had gone out about two nights before to a
drive-in movie with a girl in a green dress. But the gray one - what the
hell was the gray one? I knew it had to be somebody; I felt it. It's like
when you're trying to remember a name, and it's on the tip of your tongue,
but you can't get it.
It took me half a day before I remembered that I had said goodbye to a
girl I liked very much, who had gone to Italy about two or three months
before. She was a very nice girl, and I had decided that when she came back
I was going to see her again. I don't know if she wore a gray suit, but it
was perfectly clear, as soon as I thought of her, that she was the gray one.
I went back to my friend Deutsch, and I told him he must be right -
there is something to analyzing dreams. But when he heard about my
interesting dream, he said, "No, that one was too perfect - too cut and
dried. Usually you have to do a bit more analysis."


----
The Chief Research Chemist of the Metaplast Corporation


After I finished at MIT I wanted to get a summer job. I had applied two
or three times to the Bell Labs, and had gone out a few times to visit. Bill
Shockley, who knew me from the lab at MIT, would show me around each time,
and I enjoyed those visits terrifically, but I never got a job there.
I had letters from some of my professors to two specific companies. One
was to the Bausch and Lomb Company for tracing rays through lenses; the
other was to Electrical Testing Labs in New York. At that time nobody knew
what a physicist even was, and there weren't any positions in industry for
physicists. Engineers, OK; but physicists - nobody knew how to use them.
It's interesting that very soon, after the war, it was the exact opposite:
people wanted physicists everywhere. So I wasn't getting anywhere as a
physicist looking for a job late in the Depression.
About that time I met an old friend of mine on the beach at our home
town of Far Rockaway, where we grew up together. We had gone to school
together when we were about eleven or twelve, and were very good friends. We
were both scientifically minded. He had a "laboratory," and I had a
"laboratory." We often played together, and discussed things together.
We used to put on magic shows - chemistry magic - for the kids on the