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

"Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Would you like to have coffee, or tea, Mr.
Feynman?"
"Tea," I said, "thank you."
A few moments later Mrs. Eisenhart's daughter and a schoolmate came
over, and we were introduced to each other. The whole idea of this
"heh-heh-heh" was: Mrs. Eisenhart didn't want to talk to me, she wanted me
over there getting tea when her daughter and friend came over, so they would
have someone to talk to. That's the way it worked. By that time I knew what
to do when I heard "Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh." I didn't say, "What do you mean,
'Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh'?"; I knew the "heh-heh-heh" meant "error," and I'd
better get it straightened out.
Every night we wore academic gowns to dinner. The first night it scared
the life out of me, because I didn't like formality. But I soon realized
that the gowns were a great advantage. Guys who were out playing tennis
could rush into their room, grab their academic gown, and put it on. They
didn't have to take time off to change their clothes or take a shower. So
underneath the gowns there were bare arms, T-shirts, everything.
Furthermore, there was a rule that you never cleaned the gown, so you could
tell a first-year man from a second-year man, from a third-year man, from a
pig! You never cleaned the gown and you never repaired it, so the first-year
men had very nice, relatively clean gowns, but by the time you got to the
third year or so, it was nothing but some kind of cardboard thing on your
shoulders with tatters hanging down from it.
So when I got to Princeton, I went to that tea on Sunday afternoon and
had dinner that evening in an academic gown at the "College." But on Monday,
the first thing I wanted to do was to see the cyclotron.
MIT had built a new cyclotron while I was a student there, and it was
just beautiful! The cyclotron itself was in one room, with the controls in
another room. It was beautifully engineered. The wires ran from the control
room to the cyclotron underneath in conduits, and there was a whole console
of buttons and meters. It was what I would call a gold-plated cyclotron.
Now I had read a lot of papers on cyclotron experiments, and there
weren't many from MIT. Maybe they were just starting. But there were lots of
results from places like Cornell, and Berkeley, and above all, Princeton.
Therefore what I really wanted to see, what I was looking forward to, was
the PRINCETON CYCLOTRON. That must be something.
So first thing on Monday, I go into the physics building and ask,
"Where is the cyclotron - which building?"
"It's downstairs, in the basement - at the end of the hall."
In the basement? It was an old building. There was no room in the
basement for a cyclotron. I walked down to the end of the hall, went through
the door, and in ten seconds I learned why Princeton was right for me - the
best place for me to go to school. In this room there were wires strung all
over the place! Switches were hanging from the wires, cooling water was
dripping from the valves, the room was full of stuff, all out in the open.
Tables piled with tools were everywhere; it was the most godawful mess you
ever saw. The whole cyclotron was there in one room, and it was complete,
absolute chaos!
It reminded me of my lab at home. Nothing at MIT had ever reminded me
of my lab at home. I suddenly realized why Princeton was getting results.