Richard Feynman Lecture -- "Los Alamos From Below"

this place can be raided by the police department anyway, today we are going to start with the speaker, as you know, it is Richard Phillips Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and scientist extraordinaire, the difference between an idiot Feynman and other people It's that he is more logical. and he has a greater imagination, this is a rare combination, most people who are logical do not have much imagination, as a great Russian physicist said. Frankel, knowledge progresses through illogical steps. Feynman uses his imagination to probe scientific frontiers beyond the limits of logic in much of the world.

In the same way that mathematicians use complex variables to make an analytical continuation z'ah in Los Alamos and less elms, Robert Oppenheimer attacked Dick as his most valuable player, in addition to being an extremely talented theoretical physicist, he is a problem solver super stupid, you can enter an experimental laboratory that by asking the right questions find the reasons why the experiment does not work it is a great pleasure to have a cock here and thank you very much how are you hello down there and however to everyone else that introduction is quite inappropriate for my talk which is Los Alamos from below when I mean from below because Oh Lois mr.

Hershfeld says that in my field I am currently a slightly famous man at the time. He wasn't anyone famous at all. I didn't even have my degree when I started working on things associated with the Manhattan Project, so I want to describe that many of the other people who tell you about Los Alamos know something are in some higher echelon of the organization's government or something like that. or are worried about some important decisions. I was worried that there wouldn't be any big decisions. It was always hovering underneath somewhere. I wasn't at the absolute bottom, as it turned out.

I climbed some steps, but I wasn't one of the tallest people, so I want you to try putting yourself in a different condition than the intro said. and imagine this young graduate student who doesn't have his degree yet is working on his thesis and I'll start by saying how I got into the project and then what happened to me, that's all that happened to me during the project. I was working at Princeton in my room one day when Bob Wilson walked in. I was working on what the hell, it's not funny, but I got a lot better.

Bob Wilson came in and said that he had been funded to do some work that was a secret and he wasn't supposed to tell anyone, but he was going to tell me because he knew that as soon as he knew what he was going to do, I would see that he had I had to accept it, so he told me about the problem of separating different isotopes of uranium, he had to finally invent and make a bomb. He had a process for separating uranium isotopes that is different from the one that was ultimately used, that he wanted to try to develop and he taught me about and he said there's a meeting I told him I didn't want to do it he says okay there's a meeting at 3 o'clock I'll see you there he said I told him it's okay that you told me the secret because I'm I'm not going to tell anyone, but I'm not going to do it, so I went back to working on my thesis for about three minutes and then I started walking away. back and forth to think about the Germans having Hitler and the possibility of developing an atomic bomb was obvious and the possibility of them being developed before us was very terrifying, so I decided to go to the meeting at 3 o'clock 4.

I already had a desk in a room that was trying to calculate whether this particular method was limited by the total amount of current that can be obtained in an ion beam, etc. I won't go into details, but I had a desk and paper and I'm working as hard as I can. I could and as fast as I could while the companions were building the apparatus to do the experiments right there, the other companions who joined in and it was like those moving images that you see where you see a piece of equipment go bloop bloop bloop every time I I looked up, the thing was getting bigger and what was happening, of course, is that all the kids had decided to work on this and stop their scientific research.

All science stopped during the war, except for the little that was done at Los Alamos. It wasn't a lot of science, it was a lot of engineering and they were stealing their research equipment and they were putting together all the different research equipment to make the new devices to do the experiments, try to separate the uranium isotopes and I left it. my job too for the same reason, it's true that I took a six-week vacation after a while from that job and I finished writing my thesis, so I got my D right before I got my degree at Los Alamos, so I was not as Until now, as I led you to believe, one of the first experiences that were very interesting for me in this project at Princeton was meeting great men.

I had never met many great men before, but there was an evaluation committee that had to decide which one. direction we are going and to try to help us ultimately decide which direction we are going to separate the Iranians. This evaluation committee had men like Tolman and Smyth and URI and Robbie and Oppenheimer and so on and there was Compton to For example, one of the things that was a terrible shock he made fun of sitting there because he had understood the theory of this process that we were doing and then they asked me questions and I was there and then we discussed it and then they started arguing. something you know, one guy would make a comment, then Conklin would explain a different point of view and he would be absolutely right and it was the correct identification and he said it should be like that, another guy would say well, there may be a chance that you have to consider against another possible you have to consider I'm jumping they should repeat the Compton thing we should say it again he should say it again because everyone disagrees when the wall surrounds the table so finally at the end a Tamil news the president says well after having Having heard all these arguments, I guess it's true that the Eichmann company is the best of all.

I know we have to move forward and it was a big shock to me to see that a committee of men could come up with a lot of ideas each. think of a new facet and remember what the other said to have paid attention to and in the end you make the decision of which idea was the best summary without having to say it three times, so it was a shock and These were very big men, indeed , it was finally decided that this project was not going to be the way they were going to separate the uranium and then they told us that we were going to stop it and that they would start in Los Alamos in New Mexico the project that would actually make the bomb and that we would all go out to make it there would be experiments that we would have to do theoretical work that we would have to do I was in the theoretical work all the rest of the classmates were experimental work the question was what could we do because we had this carefree time, they just told us to turn off, but without The Alamos was not ready yet, a Bob Wilson tried to take advantage of his time by saying that they sent me to Chicago to look for We found out everything we could about the pump and the problems so that we could start building in our laboratory equipment counters of various types of Sol which would come in handy when we got to Los Alamos, so we didn't waste any time.

They sent me to Chicago. with instructions to go to each group, tell them that I was going to work with them, ask them to tell me about a problem to the extent that I knew enough details so that I could sit down and start working on the problem, and as soon as I would understand. away go to another guy in s for a problem that way I would understand the details of everything it was a very good idea my conscience bothered me a little but it turned out accidentally I was very lucky and one of the guys explained the promise to me I wanted to do it that way and In half an hour I had it resolved.

I've been working on it for three months, so I did something, so I came back from Chicago and described this situation, how much energy was released, what bomb I was going to do. be like and so on with your colleagues. I remember a friend of mine was working with me. The mathematician Paul Olam came up to me and said that when they made a movie about this, the guy should go back to Chicago to tell Princeton about it. man all about the bomb and he'll be dressed in a suit and he'll carry a briefcase and stuff and he'll urinate on his dirty shirt sleeves and he'll just tell us all about it, but anyway it's a very serious thing and that's why he appreciated the difference between the world real and that in the movies well this still seemed to be a delay and Wilson went to Los Alamos to find out what was delaying things and how they were progressing and when he got there he found that the construction company was working very hard and had finished the theater and some buildings because they understood how, but they had not received clear instructions on how to build a laboratory, how many pipes for gas, how much for water, so he just stood there and decided how much water, how much gas, etc., and told them .

He started building the labs and then came back to us. We were all ready to go. You see, an Oppenheimer was having some difficulty discussing some issues with Groves and we were getting impatient. So, as I understand it from the position he was in. at Wilson they called Manley in Chicago and it all came together and they decided we were going to go there anyway when it wasn't ready, so we all went to Los Alamos before it was ready, by the way, we were recruited by Oppenheimer and other people and he went very patient with everyone, he paid attention to everyone's problems, he worried about my wife who had tuberculosis and whether there would be a hospital there and everything, and it was the first time I met him in such a personal way and he was such a wonderful man, We were told, among other things, to be careful not to buy a train ticket in Princeton because Princeton was a very small train station and if everyone bought a train ticket to Albuquerque New Mexico in paper form, there would be some suspicion that something was going on.

So everyone bought that ticket somewhere else in a second because I thought if everyone bought it, they would take it somewhere else, so when I went to the commercial station and said I wanted to go to Albuquerque, New Mexico, he always told me. The material is for you. We've been shipping boxes full of counters for weeks and were hoping they wouldn't realize the dress was from Albuquerque, so I at least explained why we were shipping our boxes. I was going to pass through Albuquerque. when we arrived we went ahead and the houses for the dormitories and things like that were not ready in fact the laboratories were not quite ready we were pushing it we were driving it down ahead of time they went crazy with the other In the end, they rented ranch houses in everything the neighborhood and at first we stayed in a ranch-type house and we would go there in the morning.

The first morning I arrived it was tremendously impressive, the beauty of the landscape for a person from the east who does not travel much was sensational there is a great brightness, you have probably seen the photos. I won't go into many details. This thing was on top of a Mason. You came up from below and saw these big cliffs and we were very surprised. The most impressive thing to me was that, as I was going up, I said that maybe there were Indians even living here. The guy driving the car just stopped, stopped the car and went around the corner in the Indian caves of the time, they took it with respect, so it was really very exciting in that sense when I arrived at the site the first time I saw at the DC gate that it was a technical area where you are supposed to do work with a fencer, I guess I have a fence around that ultimately. but since they were still building it was open so there was supposed to be a city and then a big fence around the city, yes they were still building and my friend Paul Olam who was my assistant was standing with a clipboard checking the trucks That they were coming. walking in and out and telling him which way to go to deliver the materials to different places when I entered the laboratory, I would meet men I had heard about from seeing his articles in Physical Review, etc.

I had never met him before this. It's John Williams, they said the guy comes standing from a desk that's covered in blueprints, the sleeves are all that and he's standing next to some windows in one of the buildings or during the trucks going in different directions to build things, otherwise we took over the construction company and then they finished it as the work of the physicists, in other words, at the beginning the experimental physicists particularly had nothing to do until their buildings were already in the ready apparatus, so they just built the buildings or theoretical physicist Daniel helped build the buildings, it was decided that they would not live in the ranch houses but would live on site because they could start working immediately, so we started working immediately and that meant that each of us We went into some rooms, there was no blackboard except one, a roll-up blackboard, you know, on wheels, that you rolled and we rolled, and Sir Burwood explained to us all the things they had thought of in Berkeley.riding every day.

I write a lot of things. It's very peculiar. Notice what happens if you take one divided by 273 and you get point zero zero four one one five two two six three three sevens, pretty nice and then it turns into a little coconut. when taking your car is only for about three numbers and then you can see how the 10 10 13 is actually equivalent to one one four again one one five again and it goes on and I explained to him how well it repeated itself after a couple of cycles that I thought they were kind of funny, well I put it in the mail and it comes back to me, it doesn't complete and there's a little note, look at paragraph 17, I look at paragraph 17, hey, we should just write to each other. in English, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, God shows what I can't, German, etc., permission to use any other language must be obtained in writing and then he said without clothes, so I wrote to the sensor that it will be included in my letter. which said of course this can't be a cold because there is no more if you actually divide one you actually get and I discarded it there and therefore there is no more information in the number one one zero zero one point so there is no a number 273 that barely contains any information, etc.

Therefore, I ask permission to write my letters in Arabic numerals. I like Arabic numerals in my load so I got it right, there was always some kind of difficulty with the letters going back and forth, for example at one point my wife kept insisting on mentioning the fact that she feels uncomfortable writing feeling that the sensor is looking at the soda and there was a rule that we were not supposed to mention censorship, but how can we? They tell him so they keep sending me a note your wife mentioned censorship sir my wife mentioned sexting so finally they send me a note and say please inform your wife not to mention censorship and all that so I take my letter and start.

I have been I have been ordered to inform you not to mention the censorship in her honor. He comes like this. I am right. I have been ordered to inform you that legend says how the hell I am going to do it. Also, why do I have to be an instructor and not the tutoring that you maintain? Something on my part is very interested, the set has to tell me to tell my wife not to tell me that she is there, but they got a response, they said yes, but they are worried that the male will be intercepted on the way from Albuquerque and that They would find out that there was censorship if they looked at the email in which please act much more normal, so the next time I went down to have a cookie and I talked to her and I said to Malick, let's not mention the censorship, but we had so many problems that in the end we had drawn up a somewhat illegal code we had a code if I put a period at the end of my signature it meant I was really in trouble again and she would move on to the next move that she had a concoction there all day while he was sick and she thought about things to do, the last thing he did was send it to me because he perfectly legitimately found an ad that said, "Send your boyfriend a letter in a puzzle here." They are the blank that we sell you the blank that you write the letter on, take it all apart, put a little sack on the man, so I got that one with the note, let's say we don't have time to play, please instructor, Please instruct your wife that we will limit ourselves to ordinary lyrics well, we are ready with the most point but they prepared just in time but what we had ready for the next one was that the lyrics would begin.

I hope you remember to open this letter carefully because I have included the pepto. -bismol for your stomach how we fixed it it would be a letter full of dust in their office we hope they open it quickly the dust would spread all over the floor they get upset because they are not supposed to disturb anything they see in the meeting this was still torn busy but we didn't have to use that one, well, as a result of all these experiences with the sensor, I knew exactly what could happen and what couldn't, no one else knew as well as I did, so I finally made a little money.

Out of all this, one day placing bets on the outer fence, the outer fence I discovered that a worker who lives even further away from the one we wanted to enter was too lazy to cross the gate and that is why they had made a hole for themselves at some distance. So I walked out the door, walked over to the hole, and went in. I went out again to fit in and so on until the guy, the sergeant at the door, starts wondering what's going on. This guy always leaves and never comes in. Of course, his natural reaction was to call a lieutenant and then try to put me in jail for doing this.

I explained to him that it was a hole, so he was always trying to set people straight, point out that there was a hole, so I made a bet with someone he liked. to say where the hole in the fence was in a man-man allowed and I already did it and the way I did it like I said you should see the way they ran this place look that's what we were allowed to say there's a hole in the fence 71 feet from this or that place that is this size and that size you can walk through now, what can they do?

You can't tell me that no such hole exists. I mean, what are they going to do? It's yours. Look carefully, there is a hallway like that. I should fix the hole so they could pass through. I also received a letter telling how one of the kids who worked in one of my groups had been woken up in the middle of the night and interrogated with lights in front of them by some idiots in the military because they found out something about his father or something I don't want. to be exposed here comes his name was Khomeini, the famous man well, there were also other things that he was always trying to straighten out, like pointing out the holes in the fence and so on, but always these things where he was always pointing things out in a way direct and one of the things I wanted to point out was that in the beginning we had a couple of important secrets we discovered a lot of things about uranium, how it worked and everything it was and the documents that were in file cabinets made of wood that had little common padlocks and currents and various things made in the workshop such as a rod. that would go down and then a padlock to hold it on, but the padlock was lost, plus you could take things out even without opening the padlock on these wooden counties, it leaned back in the bottom drawer, you know, it has a little rod that is supposed to that you have to make a hole in the wood underneath, you can take the papers out from underneath, so I used to pick the locks all the time and point out that it was very easy to do and every time we all got together, I get up and tell him that we have important secrets and that we need better locks, so one day the teller got up in the meeting that I got up for and said yes, well, I don't keep my most important secrets in my filing cabinet, my desk drawer doesn't.

It's better I said I don't know, I haven't seen your desk drawer, well he's sitting near the front of the meeting and I'm sitting further back, so the meeting continues and I sneak out. the meeting and I go down to look at his desk drawer, okay, I don't even have to open the lock on the desk drawer, it turns out that if you put your hand in the back, underneath, you can take out a piece of paper like those toilet paper dispensers What do you use? take one out, take another one, take something out, I empty the whole damn draw, I took everything out and put it away and then I went up to the top floor and I came back and the meeting just ended and everyone is leaving and I joined in on the blow. so you see him walking with him and you run to catch up with the cashier and he says, by the way, let me see your desk drawer, you see it, no, then he says, certainly he said, so we walk into his office and he shows me the desk and I look at it like that seems pretty good to me, that's pretty safe, I think it's pretty safe, I said, let's see what you have there, so he says, I'd love to show it to you, he says, putting the key in, it opens.

He looks at him and says: if you haven't seen it already, the problem with playing a prank on a very intelligent man like Mr. tella is the time it takes for him to realize from the moment he sees something is wrong until he understands exactly what happened. It's too small to give you pleasure. Well, I had a lot of fun with the safes, but that's how it was. nothing to do with Los Alamos, so I won't discuss it further there where I want to talk about some of the social problems I had there, one quite interesting one of them had to do with the safety of the plant at Oak Ridge Los Alamos. is going to make the bomb but everything is on grids, they are trying to separate the isotopes of uranium uranium 238 and uranium 236, the latter being sharp 35, which is the explosive, very well, so they were just beginning to obtain infinitesimal quantities of an experimental thing called 235 and at the same time they were practicing, there was a big plant that was going to be, we're going to have that for these things and they go to chemicals when we take the purification things and then we purify them again and prepare them for the next stage in the purification in several stages, so they were practicing chemistry on the one hand and they were just getting a little bit of one of the pieces of the apparatus experimentally, on the other hand and they were trying to learn how to ask and say it. at that time and how much uranium-235 is in it and we sent them instructions and they never quite understood it, so finally Gray said the only possible way to make it go up is to go down, yeah, to see what they're doing.

I understand why what I'm saying is wrong, the military people said no, a lot of politics to keep all the information from Los Alamos in one place and people knowing you wouldn't know anything about what it was used for, they just do what they want. they were trying to do. I mean the people at the top knew they were separating uranium but didn't know how powerful vawa are, exactly how it works or anything, and the people at the bottom knew what they were doing and the military wanted to keep it that way? There was no information coming and going, but Gray finally insisted that it was important that you never do the rehearsals right, it would all go up in smoke, so Gray went to see what they were doing and while he walked.

He saw them pushing a tank with a water jug. Green water. Green water is uranium nitrate. He says that you are going to handle it like this when it is purified. They also said of course why not, well, it won't explode. He says hey, it explodes harder and then the army said that. We were not to let any information get out. It turned out that the military had realized how much stuff we needed to make a 20-kilogram bomb or whatever, and they realized that that much purified material would never be in the plant. so there was no danger, but they didn't know that neutrons are huge, we are most effective when they slow down in water, so in water it takes less than 1/10.

I know that 2100 much less material can be made a reaction that makes radioactivity makes a big explosion makes the radioactivity kills people around and so on, so it was very dangerous and they had not paid any attention to safety, so it comes a telegram from above and I, Minister Gray, review all the notice from the plant where all the concentrations are supposed to be with the process as designed, in the meantime we will calculate how much material can come together before there is an explosion, so two groups started working on Christie's, the group worked on water solutions and I worked on dry powder. in boxes, my group and we calculated how much material and Christy was going to go down and tell everyone in Oakridge what the situation was, everything broke down, we have to go down and tell them now, so I happily give all my numbers to Christy and tell her you have all things, see Christy got pneumonia.

I tried. I never traveled on a plane before traveling with them there. A plane tied the secrets to the little thing with a belt on its back. The plane in those days. like a bus, you stop from time to time, except the stations were afraid of a part where you stop and wait. There's a guy standing next to me with a chain swinging like this saying something like it must be awfully difficult to fly without a priority. on the planes these days I couldn't resist I said well I don't know I said I have a priority a little later it seems that some generals are coming they are going to take some of us out number three okay, I'm a number two he probably wrote to his congressman if not was the same congressman saying what are they doing sending these little kids with number two priorities in the middle of the wall and anyway I got there and the first thing I did was have them take me through the plant and I didn't say anything I just looked at everything and I found out that the situation was even worse than what Sue Gray reported because he was confused the first time he noticed certain boxes in Big Lots and he didn't notice other boxes in another room in a big lot, but it was the same room on the other side and stuff like that , so if you have too many things together, go up, you see, that's how it was.

I checked the entire plant and I have a very bad memory. but when I work hard I have a good short term memory and that's why I can remember all kinds of crazy things like building VAT number 92007 so and so etc. you see shy in all that is different I went home that night and went through everything explaining where all the dangers were, what you would have to do to fix it is pretty easy: you put cadmium in the solutions to absorb the neutrons in the water, separate the boxes so they are not too dense, too much uranium together, etc. in accordance withthat I start to leave the office and I remember the book on psychology and I said: you know, but psychologically it's true.

I'm right, nice, Hoffman is the guy The guy used a mathematical constant for his safe combination, so the other important mathematical constant is e, so I went back to safes 27 18 28, click on it to open . By the way, I verified that all the combinations were the same. Well, there are many stories about but it's getting late and that's a good one, so we'll leave it at that.