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

They were working with the instrument. They built the instrument; they knew
where everything was, they knew how everything worked, there was no engineer
involved, except maybe he was working there too. It was much smaller than
the cyclotron at MIT, and "gold-plated"? - it was the exact opposite. When
they wanted to fix a vacuum, they'd drip glyptal on it, so there were drops
of glyptal on the floor. It was wonderful! Because they worked with it. They
didn't have to sit in another room and push buttons! (Incidentally, they had
a fire in that room, because of all the chaotic mess that they had - too
many wires - and it destroyed the cyclotron. But I'd better not tell about
that!)
(When I got to Cornell I went to look at the cyclotron there. This
cyclotron hardly required a room: It was about a yard across - the diameter
of the whole thing. It was the world's smallest cyclotron, but they had got
fantastic results. They had all kinds of special techniques and tricks. If
they wanted to change something in the "D's" - the D-shaped half circles
that the particles go around - they'd take a screwdriver, and remove the
D's by hand, fix them, and put them back. At Princeton it was a lot harder,
and at MIT you had to take a crane that came rolling across the ceiling,
lower the hooks, and it was a hellllll of a job.)
I learned a lot of different things from different schools. MIT is a
very good place; I'm not trying to put it down. I was just in love with it.
It has developed for itself a spirit, so that every member of the whole
place thinks that it's the most wonderful place in the world - it's the
center, somehow, of scientific and technological development in the United
States, if not the world. It's like a New Yorker's view of New York: they
forget the rest of the country. And while you don't get a good sense of
proportion there, you do get an excellent sense of being with it and in it,
and having motivation and desire to keep on - that you're specially chosen,
and lucky to be there.
So MIT was good, but Slater was right to warn me to go to another
school for my graduate work. And I often advise my students the same way.
Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.
I once did an experiment in the cyclotron laboratory at Princeton that
had some startling results. There was a problem in a hydrodynamics book that
was being discussed by all the physics students. The problem is this: You
have an S-shaped lawn sprinkler - an S-shaped pipe on a pivot - and the
water squirts out at right angles to the axis and makes it spin in a certain
direction. Everybody knows which way it goes around; it backs away from the
outgoing water. Now the question is this: If you had a lake, or swimming
pool - a big supply of water - and you put the sprinkler completely under
water, and sucked the water in, instead of squirting it out, which way would
it turn? Would it turn the same way as it does when you squirt water out
into the air, or would it turn the other way?
The answer is perfectly clear at first sight. The trouble was, some guy
would think it was perfectly clear one way, and another guy would think it
was perfectly clear the other way. So everybody was discussing it. I
remember at one particular seminar, or tea, somebody went up to Prof. John
Wheeler and said, "Which way do you think it goes around?"
Wheeler said, "Yesterday, Feynman convinced me that it went backwards.
Today, he's convinced me equally well that it goes around the other way. I