On Sun, 21 Sep 2008, Mike Carrell wrote: > Feyman didn't reall crack safes. At Los Alamos, file cabinets were shipped > with combination locks set at the factory to a standard combination.
Hmmm, that doesn't sound familiar at all. Which page of the book describes that? Feynman recounts in great detail a number of different methods of how he could crack one particular combination lock. Cheating: "feeling" some of the numbers while the lock was open. Cheating: tilting the file cabinet and grabbing papers via the hollow bottom. Cheating: looking in the office secretary's middle desk drawer for combination hint sheet. Brute force: trying all possible combinations in hours (since on those particular locks not every number needed testing.) Frightening luck: testing an example number while explaining the lock to a friend, and the number by sheer chance turned out to be the combination. He got famous when he brute-force cracked a huge office vault owned by a commander... which used the same cheap crappy combo lock mechanism he'd been studying all along. > The user could reset the combination to one of his choice. Many were too > lazy to do so. So Feynman opened a few with the factory combination and > embarassed a number of staff by doing so. No real "harm" done. I'd like to know the source of that story. (((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (O) ) ) ) ) ))))))))))))))))))) William J. Beaty SCIENCE HOBBYIST website billb at amasci com http://amasci.com EE/programmer/sci-exhibits amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair Seattle, WA 206-762-3138 unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
