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

I could pick up ants and ferry them from one place to another. I put the
folded strips of paper in two places: Some were by the sugar (hanging from
the string), and the others were near the ants in a particular location. I
sat there all afternoon, reading and watching, until an ant happened to walk
onto one of my little paper ferries. Then I took him over to the sugar.
After a few ants had been ferried over to the sugar, one of them
accidentally walked onto one of the ferries nearby, and I carried him back.
I wanted to see how long it would take the other ants to get the
message to go to the "ferry terminal." It started slowly, but rapidly
increased until I was going mad ferrying the ants back and forth.
But suddenly, when everything was going strong, I began to deliver the
ants from the sugar to a different spot. The question now was, does the ant
learn to go back to where it just came from, or does it go where it went the
time before?
After a while there were practically no ants going to the first place
(which would take them to the sugar), whereas there were many ants at the
second place, milling around, trying to find the sugar. So I figured out so
far that they went where they just came from.
In another experiment, I laid out a lot of glass microscope slides, and
got the ants to walk on them, back and forth, to some sugar I put on the
windowsill. Then, by replacing an old slide with a new one, or by
rearranging the slides, I could demonstrate that the ants had no sense of
geometry: they couldn't figure out where something was. If they went to the
sugar one way, and there was a shorter way back, they would never figure out
the short way.
It was also pretty clear from rearranging the glass slides that the
ants left some sort of trail. So then came a lot of easy experiments to find
out how long it takes a trail to dry up, whether it can be easily wiped off,
and so on. I also found out the trail wasn't directional. If I'd pick up an
ant on a piece of paper, turn him around and around, and then put him back
onto the trail, he wouldn't know that he was going the wrong way until he
met another ant. (Later, in Brazil, I noticed some leaf-cutting ants and
tried the same experiment on them. They could tell, within a few steps,
whether they were going toward the food or away from it - presumably from
the trail, which might be a series of smells in a pattern: A, B, space, A,
B, space, and so on.)
I tried at one point to make the ants go around in a circle, but I
didn't have enough patience to set it up. I could see no reason, other than
lack of patience, why it couldn't be done.
One thing that made experimenting difficult was that breathing on the
ants made them scurry. It must be an instinctive thing against some animal
that eats them or disturbs them. I don't know if it was the warmth, the
moisture, or the smell of my breath that bothered them, but I always had to
hold my breath and kind of look to one side so as not to confuse the
experiment while I was ferrying the ants.
One question that I wondered about was why the ant trails look so
straight and nice. The ants look as if they know what they're doing, as if
they have a good sense of geometry. Yet the experiments that I did to try to
demonstrate their sense of geometry didn't work.
Many years later, when I was at Caltech and lived in a little house on