Ebook rtf mathematics Feynman, Richard Surely You’…

coffee
, or 
tea
, Mr. Feynman?" 
"Tea," I said, "thank you." 
A few moments later Mrs. Eisenhart's daughter and a schoolmate came over, and we were introduced to each other. The whole idea of 
this
"heh-
heh-heh" was: Mrs. Eisenhart didn't want to talk to me, she wanted me over there getting tea when her daughter and friend came over, so they would 
have someone to talk to. That's the way it worked. By that time I knew what to do when I heard "Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh." I didn't say, "What do you 
mean, 'Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh'?"; I knew the "heh-heh-heh" meant "error," and I'd better get it straightened out. 
Every night we wore academic gowns to dinner. The first night it scared the life out of me, because I didn't like formality. But I soon realized 
that the gowns were a great advantage. Guys who were out playing tennis could rush into their room, grab their academic gown, and put it on. They 
didn't have to take time off to change their clothes or take a shower. So underneath the gowns there were bare arms, T-shirts, everything. Furthermore, 

---

there was a rule that you never cleaned the gown, so you could tell a first-year man from a second-year man, from a third-year man, from a pig! You 
never cleaned the gown and you never repaired it, so the first-year men had very nice, relatively clean gowns, but by the time you got to the third 
year or so, it was nothing but some kind of cardboard thing on your sh oulders with tatters hanging down from it. 
So when I got to Princeton, I went to that tea on Sunday afternoon and had dinner that evening in an academic gown at the "College." But on 
Monday, the first thing I wanted to do was to see the cyclotron. 
MIT had built a new cyclotron while I was a student there, and it was just 
beautiful
! The cyclotron itself was in one room, with the controls in 
another room. It was beautifully engineered. The wires ran from the control room to the cyclotron underneath in conduit s, and there was a whole 
console of buttons and meters. It was what I would call a gold-plated cyclotron. 
Now I had read a lot of papers on cyclotron experiments, and there weren't many from MIT. Maybe they were just starting. But there were lots of 
results from places like Cornell, and Berkeley, and above all, Princeton. Therefore what I really wanted to see, what I was looking forward to, was 
the PRINCETON CYCLOTRON. That must be 
something! 
So first thing on Monday, I go into the physics building and ask, "Where is the cyclotron--which building?" 
"It's downstairs, in the basement--at the end of the hall." 
In the
 basement
? It was an old building. There was no room in the basement for a cyclotron. I walked down to the end of the hall, went through 
the door, and in ten seconds I learned why Princeton was right for me--the best place for me to go to school. In this room there were wires strung 
all 
over the place! 
Switches were hanging from the wires, cooling water was dripping from the valves, the room was 
full
of stuff, all out in the open. 
Tables piled with tools were everywhere; it was the most godawful mess you ever saw. The whole cyclotron was there in one room, and it was 
complete, absolute chaos! 
It reminded me of my lab at home. Nothing at MIT had ever reminded me of my lab at home. I suddenly realized why Princeton was getting 
results. They were working with the instrument. They 
built
the instrument; they knew where everything was, they knew how everything worked, 
there was no engineer involved, except maybe he was working there too. It was much smaller than the cyclotron at MIT, and "gold-plated"?--it was 
the exact opposite. When they wanted to fix a vacuum, they'd drip glyptal on it, so there were drops of glyptal on the floor. It was wonderful! 
Because they 
worked
with it. They didn't have to sit in another room and push buttons! (Incidentally, they had a fire in that room, because of all the 
chaotic mess that they had--too many wires--and it destroyed the cyclotron. But I'd better not tell about that!) 
(When I got to Cornell I went to look at the cyclotron there. This cyclotron hardly required a room: It was about a yard across--the diameter of 
the whole thing. It was the world's smallest cyclotron, hut they had got fantastic results. They had all kinds of special techniques and tricks. If they 
wanted to change something in the "D's"--the D-shaped half circles that the particles go around--they'd take a screwdriver, and remove the D's by 
hand, fix them, and put them back. At Princeton it was a lot harder, and at MIT you had to take a crane that came rolling across the ceiling, lower the 
hooks, and it was a