Safecracker Meets Safecracker

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Science Story

Topics: Physics, Quantum Mechanics

Key Personalities: Richard Feynman

Country: USA

Time: Mid 20th Century

What makes the story captivating?:
It's a story of one of the greatest scientists who mastered the art of cracking locks while working on a project during the World War.

Story:

Richard Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in New York City. Feynman showed an early interest in science and mathematics. When he was 15 years old, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a freshman.

He received his bachelor's degree in 1939 and his doctorate in 1942, both from MIT.

In 1948, Feynman was working on the Manhattan Project, helping to create the atomic bomb. As a young physicist, he was full of questions and ideas, and wasn't content just to do what he was told.

One day, he noticed that the supposedly secure filing cabinets containing America's nuclear secrets were unlocked. He amused himself by learning to pick the combination locks in these cabinets fascinated by the challenge of figuring out how the locks worked & how to defeat them.

Feynman described his technique for opening a lock in a 1993 interview: "I would try different combinations until I found one that worked. If I couldn't find one that worked, I would look at the lock and see how it was made and then try to figure out how to defeat it."

In his book "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!", Feynman describes in a greater detail how he was able to crack the safes at Los Alamos National Laboratory during the Manhattan Project. He observed that the people who designed the safes had made a mistake in their calculations, and he was able to exploit this mistake to figure out the combination.

Despite his skill at defeating combination locks, Feynman never managed to get into the most secure filing cabinet at Los Alamos - the one containing America's nuclear arsenal. As he once said, "That's where they keep the real stuff."

After the war, Feynman went to Cornell University to get his doctorate. While at Cornell, Feynman developed the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED), which is a fundamental part of modern physics. In 1965, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the same theory of quantum electrodynamics.

Richard Feynman died on February 15, 1988.

Topics
Physics, Quantum Mechanics