“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

I thought to myself, “Now I could write a safecracker book that would beat every one, because at the beginning I would tell how I opened safes whose contents were bigger and more valuable than what any safecracker anywhere had opened—except for a life, of course—but compared to the furs or the gold bullion, I have them all beat: I opened the safes which contained all the secrets to the atomic bomb: the schedules for the production of the plutonium, the purification procedures, how much material is needed, how the bomb works, how the neutrons are generated, what the design is, the dimensions—the entire information that was known at Los Alamos: the whole shmeer! ”

I went back to the second filing cabinet and took out the document I wanted. Then I took a red grease pencil and a piece of yellow paper that was lying around in the office and wrote, “I borrowed document no. LA4312—Feynman the safecracker.” I put the note on top of the papers in the filing cabinet and closed it.

Then I went to the first one I had opened and wrote another note: “This one was no harder to open than the other one-Wise Guy” and shut the cabinet.

Then in the other cabinet, in the other room, I wrote, “When the combinations are all the same, one is no harder to open than another—Same Guy” and I shut that one. I went back to my office and wrote my report.

That evening I went to the cafeteria and ate supper. There was Freddy de Hoffman. He said he was going over to his office to work, so just for fun I went with him.

He started to work, and soon he went into the other room to open one of the filing cabinets in there-something I hadn’t counted on—and he happened to open the filing cabinet I had put the third note in, first. He opened the drawer, and he saw this foreign object in there—this bright yellow paper with something scrawled on it in bright red crayon.

I had read in books that when somebody is afraid, his face gets sallow, but I had never seen it before. Well, it’s absolutely true. His face turned a gray, yellow green—it was really frightening to see. He picked up the paper, and his hand was shaking. “L-l-look at this!” he said, trembling.

The note said, “When the combinations are all the same, one is no harder to open than another—Same Guy.”

“What does it mean?” I said.

“All the c-c-combinations of my safes are the s-s-same!” he stammered.

“That ain’t such a good idea.”

“I-I know that n-now!” he said, completely shaken.

Another effect of the blood draining from the face must be that the brain doesn’t work right. “He signed who it was! He signed who it was!” he said.

“What?” (I hadn’t put my name on that one.)

“Yes,” he said, “it’s the same guy who’s been trying to get into Building Omega!”

All during the war, and even after, there were these perpetual rumors: “Somebody’s been trying to get into Building Omega!” You see, during the war they were doing experiments for the bomb in which they wanted to get enough material together for the chain reaction to just get started. They would drop one piece of material through another, and when it went through, the reaction would start and they’d measure how many neutrons they got. The piece would fall through so fast that nothing should build up and explode. Enough of a reaction would begin, however, so they could tell that things were really starting correctly, that the rates were right, and everything was going according to prediction—a very dangerous experiment!

Naturally, they were not doing this experiment in the middle of Los Alamos, but off several miles, in a canyon several mesas over, all isolated. This Building Omega had its own fence around it with guard towers. In the middle of the night when everything’s quiet, some rabbit comes out of the brush and smashes against the fence and makes a noise. The guard shoots. The lieutenant in charge comes around. What’s the guard going to say—that it was only a rabbit? No. “Somebody’s been trying to get into Building Omega and I scared him off!”

So de Hoffman was pale and shaking, and he didn’t realize there was a flaw in his logic: it was not clear that the same guy who’d been trying to get into Building Omega was the same guy who was standing next to him.

He asked me what to do.

“Well, see if any documents are missing.”

“It looks all right,” he said. “I don’t see any missing.”

I tried to steer him to the filing cabinet I took my document out of. “Well, uh, if all the combinations are the same, perhaps he’s taken something from another drawer.”

“Right!” he said, and he went back into his office and opened the first filing cabinet and found the second note I wrote: “This one was no harder than the other one—Wise Guy.”

By that time it didn’t make any difference whether it was “Same Guy” or “Wise Guy”: It was completely clear to him that it was the guy who was trying to get into Building Omega. So to convince him to open the filing cabinet with my first note in it was particularly difficult, and I don’t remember how I talked him into it.