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

tour the Bell Labs. Bill Shockley, the guy who invented transistors, would
show me around. I remember somebody's room where they had marked a window:
The George Washington Bridge was being built, and these guys in the lab were
watching its progress. They had plotted the original curve when the main
cable was first put up, and they could measure the small differences as the
bridge was being suspended from it, as the curve turned into a parabola. It
was just the kind of thing I would like to be able to think of doing. I
admired those guys; I was always hoping I could work with them one day.
Some guys from the lab took me out to this seafood restaurant for
lunch, and they were all pleased that they were going to have oysters. I
lived by the ocean and I couldn't look at this stuff; I couldn't eat fish,
let alone oysters.
I thought to myself, "I've gotta be brave. I've gotta eat an oyster."
I took an oyster, and it was absolutely terrible. But I said to myself,
"That doesn't really prove you're a man. You didn't know how terrible it was
gonna be. It was easy enough when it was uncertain."
The others kept talking about how good the oysters were, so I had
another oyster, and that was really harder than the first one.
This time, which must have been my fourth or fifth time touring the
Bell Labs, they accepted me. I was very happy. In those days it was hard to
find a job where you could be with other scientists.
But then there was a big excitement at Princeton. General Trichel from
the army came around and spoke to us; "We've got to have physicists!
Physicists are very important to us in the army! We need three physicists!"
You have to understand that, in those days, people hardly knew what a
physicist was. Einstein was known as a mathematician, for instance - so it
was rare that anybody needed physicists. I thought, "This is my opportunity
to make a contribution," and I volunteered to work for the army.
I asked the Bell Labs if they would let me work for the army that
summer, and they said they had war work, too, if that was what I wanted. But
I was caught up in a patriotic fever and lost a good opportunity. It would
have been much smarter to work in the Bell Labs. But one gets a little silly
during those times.
I went to the Frankfort Arsenal, in Philadelphia, and worked on a
dinosaur: a mechanical computer for directing artillery. When airplanes flew
by, the gunners would watch them in a telescope, and this mechanical
computer, with gears and cams and so forth, would try to predict where the
plane was going to be. It was a most beautifully designed and built machine,
and one of the important ideas in it was non-circular gears - gears that
weren't circular, but would mesh anyway. Because of the changing radii of
the gears, one shaft would turn as a function of the other. However, this
machine was at the end of the line. Very soon afterwards, electronic
computers came in.
After saying all this stuff about how physicists were so important to
the army, the first thing they had me doing was checking gear drawings to
see if the numbers were right. This went on for quite a while. Then,
gradually, the guy in charge of the department began to see I was useful for
other things, and as the summer went on, he would spend more time discussing
things with me.
One mechanical engineer at Frankfort was always trying to design things