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

The result was, when guys at MIT or Princeton had trouble doing a
certain integral, it was because they couldn't do it with the standard
methods they had learned in school. If it was contour integration, they
would have found it; if it was a simple series expansion, they would have
found it. Then I come along and try differentiating under the integral sign,
and often it worked. So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only
because my box of tools was different from everybody else's, and they had
tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.


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Mindreaders


My father was always interested in magic and carnival tricks, and
wanting to see how they worked. One of the things he knew about was
mindreaders. When he was a little boy, growing up in a small town called
Patchogue, in the middle of Long Island, it was announced on advertisements
posted all over that a mindreader was coming next Wednesday. The posters
said that some respected citizens - the mayor, a judge, a banker - should
take a five-dollar bill and hide it somewhere, and when the mindreader came
to town, he would find it.
When he came, the people gathered around to watch him do his work. He
takes the hands of the banker and the judge, who had hidden the five-dollar
bill, and starts to walk down the street. He gets to an intersection, turns
the corner, walks down another street, then another, to the correct house.
He goes with them, always holding their hands, into the house, up to the
second floor, into the right room, walks up to a bureau, lets go of their
hands, opens the correct drawer, and there's the five-dollar bill. Very
dramatic!
In those days it was difficult to get a good education, so the
mindreader was hired as a tutor for my father. Well, my father, after one of
his lessons, asked the mindreader how he was able to find the money without
anyone telling him where it was.
The mindreader explained that you hold onto their hands, loosely, and
as you move, you jiggle a little bit. You come to an intersection, where you
can go forward, to the left, or to the right. You jiggle a little bit to the
left, and if it's incorrect, you feel a certain amount of resistance,
because they don't expect you to move that way. But when you move in the
right direction, because they think you might be able to do it, they give
way more easily, and there's no resistance. So you must always be jiggling a
little bit, testing out which seems to be the easiest way.
My father told me the story and said he thought it would still take a
lot of practice. He never tried it himself.
Later, when I was doing graduate work at Princeton, I decided to try it
on a fellow named Bill Woodward. I suddenly announced that I was a
mindreader, and could read his mind. I told him to go into the "laboratory"
- a big room with rows of tables covered with equipment of various kinds,
with electric circuits, tools, and junk all over the place - pick out a
certain object, somewhere, and come out. I explained, "Now I'll read your