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

can happen is that the tubes are heating up in the wrong order - that is,
the amplifier's all hot, the tubes are ready to go, and there's nothing
feeding in, or there's some back circuit feeding in, or something wrong in
the beginning part - the RF part - and therefore it's making a lot of
noise, picking up something. And when the RF circuit's finally going, and
the grid voltages are adjusted, everything's all right.
So the guy says, "What are you doing? You come to fix the radio, but
you're only walking back and forth!"
I say, "I'm thinking!" Then I said to myself, "All right, take the
tubes out, and reverse the order completely in the set." (Many radio sets in
those days used the same tubes in different places - 212's, I think they
were, or 212-A's.) So I changed the tubes around, stepped to the front of
the radio, turned the thing on, and it's as quiet as a lamb: it waits until
it heats up, and then plays perfectly - no noise.
When a person has been negative to you, and then you do something like
that, they're usually a hundred percent the other way, kind of to
compensate. He got me other jobs, and kept telling everybody what a
tremendous genius I was, saying, "He fixes radios by thinking!" The whole
idea of thinking, to fix a radio - a little boy stops and thinks, and
figures out how to do it - he never thought that was possible.
Radio circuits were much easier to understand in those days because
everything was out in the open. After you took the set apart (it was a big
problem to find the right screws), you could see this was a resistor, that's
a condenser, here's a this, there's a that; they were all labeled. And if
wax had been dripping from the condenser, it was too hot and you could tell
that the condenser was burned out. If there was charcoal on one of the
resistors you knew where the trouble was. Or, if you couldn't tell what was
the matter by looking at it, you'd test it with your voltmeter and see
whether voltage was coming through. The sets were simple, the circuits were
not complicated. The voltage on the grids was always about one and a half or
two volts and the voltages on the plates were one hundred or two hundred,
DC. So it wasn't hard for me to fix a radio by understanding what was going
on inside, noticing that something wasn't working right, and fixing it.
Sometimes it took quite a while. I remember one particular time when it
took the whole afternoon to find a burned-out resistor that was not
apparent. That particular time it happened to be a friend of my mother, so I
had time - there was nobody on my back saying, "What are you doing?"
Instead, they were saying, "Would you like a little milk, or some cake?" I
finally fixed it because I had, and still have, persistence. Once I get on a
puzzle, I can't get off. If my mother's friend had said, "Never mind, it's
too much work," I'd have blown my top, because I want to beat this damn
thing, as long as I've gone this far. I can't just leave it after I've found
out so much about it. I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is
the matter with it in the end.
That's a puzzle drive. It's what accounts for my wanting to decipher
Mayan hieroglyphics, for trying to open safes. I remember in high school,
during first period a guy would come to me with a puzzle in geometry, or
something which had been assigned in his advanced math class. I wouldn't
stop until I figured the damn thing out - it would take me fifteen or
twenty minutes. But during the day, other guys would come to me with the