Security Old PCsenvironmental hazard
Charlie Gibbs
Actually, other books note that. Feynman merely noted the literature. I was in the lecture when he noted Safecracker Suite (he wrote about it really, he...
For those unfamilar, Feynman broke into safes by thinking about the person and trying codes like birthdays, physical constants (ie pi and "e"), looking through peoples' desks, and looking over their shoulders as they opened their safes.
Nothing has changed since those days, Feynman's techniques are just as valid today. People are lazy. Instead of a combination of a safe it would be a log-on pbuttword.
As to Feynman's numerous antics at Los Alamos, what has been left unsaid is how the military felt about it. General Groves and his people was fanatic about security and procedure, and Feynman's games were a direct affront to that. I believe Feynman kept his technqiues secret at the time to enhance his image (per his book), so the military wouldn't know that people were being sloppy. I wonder if there ever was consideration to fire Feynman that perhaps his superiors had to fight because of his talents. I suspect that Feynman was well-tailed and monitored during that time.
Supposedly the scientists were restricted as to when they could leave Los Alamos and monitored when they did leave. I'm not sure how they overlooked Fuchs in that case during his Sante Fe excursions, esp since Fuchs was a senior scientist and very knowledgeable.
Eugene Miya At the time of WW II, the authorities were suspicious of communists and rightly so. After the USSR made a treaty with Germany and the show trials went on, many...
As an aside, the scientists hated Groves' "compartmentalization", but that policy kept Fuchs from doing even more damage than he did.
In recent years a third spy, Hall, was uncovered. I'm not sure how much damage he did. While very brilliant, I believe he was lower level and didn't have as much access. But he was vital in confirming what Fuchs and Greenglbutt were sending over as being valid and not intentional misinformation.
Without those three (and maybe others), it would've taken the Soviets much longer to develop their own plant. The scientists claimed "there was no secrets in nature", but Los Alamos and Hanford were not about science--they were about engineering. The basic scientific principles were already known or not that hard to discover. (I was surprised how much information was deemed safe to put into the postwar Smythe report, probably more than they should've as the Soviets made use of it.) The engineering work, however, was very difficult and expensive.
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