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