Free Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman

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 shoulders 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 conduits, 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 _hellllll_ of a job.)
    I learned a lot of different things from different schools. MIT is a _very_ good place; I’m not trying to put it down. I was just in love with it. It has developed for itself a spirit, so that every member of the whole place thinks that it’s the most wonderful place in the world–it’s the _center_, somehow, of scientific and technological development in the United States, if not the world. It’s like a New Yorker’s view of New York: they forget the rest of the country. And while you don’t get a good sense of proportion there,