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

feeling of cleanliness to the restaurant."
The guy seemed to know what he was doing, and I was sitting there,
hanging on his words, when he said, "And you also have to know about colors
- how to get different colors when you mix the paint. For example, what
colors would you mix to get yellow?"
I didn't know how to get yellow by mixing paints. If it's light, you
mix green and red, but I knew he was talking paints. So I said, "I don't
know how you get yellow without using yellow."
"Well," he said, "if you mix red and white, you'll get yellow."
"Are you sure you don't mean pink?" "No," he said, "you'll get yellow"
- and I believed that he got yellow, because he was a professional painter,
and I always admired guys like that. But I still wondered how he did it.
I got an idea. "It must be some kind of chemical change. Were you using
some special kind of pigments that make a chemical change?"
"No," he said, "any old pigments will work. You go down to the
five-and-ten and get some paint - just a regular can of red paint and a
regular can of white paint - and I'll mix 'em, and I'll show how you get
yellow."
At this juncture I was thinking, "Something is crazy. I know enough
about paints to know you won't get yellow, but he must know that you do get
yellow, and therefore something interesting happens. I've got to see what it
is!" So I said, "OK, I'll get the paints." The painter went back upstairs to
finish his painting job, and the restaurant owner came over and said to me,
"What's the idea of arguing with that man? The man is a painter; he's been a
painter all his life, and he says he gets yellow. So why argue with him?"
I felt embarrassed. I didn't know what to say. Finally I said, "All my
life, I've been studying light. And I think that with red and white you
can't get yellow - you can only get pink."
So I went to the five-and-ten and got the paint, and brought it back to
the restaurant. The painter came down from upstairs, and the restaurant
owner was there too. I put the cans of paint on an old chair, and the
painter began to mix the paint. He put a little more red, he put a little
more white - it still looked pink to me - and he mixed some more. Then he
mumbled something like, "I used to have a little tube of yellow here to
sharpen it up - a bit - then this'll be yellow."
"Oh!" I said. "Of course! You add yellow, and you can get yellow, but
you couldn't do it without the yellow."
The painter went back upstairs to paint.
The restaurant owner said, "That guy has his nerve, arguing with a guy
who's studied light all his life!"
But that shows you how much I trusted these "real guys." The painter
had told me so much stuff that was reasonable that I was ready to give a
certain chance that there was an odd phenomenon I didn't know. I was
expecting pink, but my set of thoughts were, "The only way to get yellow
will be something new and interesting, and I've got to see this."
I've very often made mistakes in my physics by thinking the theory
isn't as good as it really is, thinking that there are lots of complications
that are going to spoil it - an attitude that anything can happen, in spite
of what you're pretty sure should happen.