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

correct gravitational theory." Einstein appreciated that things might be
different from what his theory stated; he was very tolerant of other ideas.
I wish I had remembered what Pauli said, because I discovered years
later that the theory was not satisfactory when it came to making the
quantum theory. It's possible that that great man noticed the difficulty
immediately and explained it to me in the question, but I was so relieved at
not having to answer the questions that I didn't really listen to them
carefully. I do remember walking up the steps of Palmer Library with Pauli,
who said to me, "What is Wheeler going to say about the quantum theory when
he gives his talk?"
I said, "I don't know. He hasn't told me. He's working it out himself."
"Oh?" he said. "The man works and doesn't tell his assistant what he's
doing on the quantum theory?" He came closer to me and said in a low,
secretive voice, "Wheeler will never give that seminar."
And it's true. Wheeler didn't give the seminar. He thought it would be
easy to work out the quantum part; he thought he had it, almost. But he
didn't. And by the time the seminar came around, he realized he didn't know
how to do it, and therefore didn't have anything to say.
I never solved it, either - a quantum theory of half-advanced,
half-retarded potentials - and I worked on it for years.


----
Mixing Paints


The reason why I say I'm "uncultured" or "anti-intellectual" probably
goes all the way back to the time when I was in high school. I was always
worried about being a sissy; I didn't want to be too delicate. To me, no
real man ever paid any attention to poetry and such things. How poetry ever
got written - that never struck me! So I developed a negative attitude
toward the guy who studies French literature, or studies too much music or
poetry - all those "fancy" things. I admired better the steel-worker, the
welder, or the machine shop man. I always thought the guy who worked in the
machine shop and could make things, now he was a real guy! That was my
attitude. To be a practical man was, to me, always somehow a positive
virtue, and to be "cultured" or "intellectual" was not. The first was right,
of course, but the second was crazy.
I still had this feeling when I was doing my graduate study at
Princeton, as you'll see. I used to eat often in a nice little restaurant
called Papa's Place. One day, while I was eating there, a painter in his
painting clothes came down from an upstairs room he'd been painting, and sat
near me. Somehow we struck up a conversation and he started talking about
how you've got to learn a lot to be in the painting business. "For example,"
he said, "in this restaurant, what colors would you use to paint the walls,
if you had the job to do?"
I said I didn't know, and he said, "You have a dark band up to
such-and-such a height, because, you see, people who sit at the tables rub
their elbows against the walls, so you don't want a nice, white wall there.
It gets dirty too easily. But above that, you do want it white to give a