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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Funny they list Feynman in the familiar 'cast of characters' responsible for the Los Alamos effort. He was a lowly graduate student at the time, responsible for organizing others in the compute lab using mechanical calculators (if I remember his biography right). Not a shining star. More of a pain in the side - he messed with security protocols and made life hard for everybody.

But its fun to put famous names in the article I guess.

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Feynman was the youngest group leader at Los Alamos. He was also fairly instrumental in ensuring Oak Ridge didn't have an accidental criticality incident due to the way they were storing uranium oxide.

Sure but it didn't require a Nobel Prize to do that. He was definitely on the administration side there, don't you think?

You can hear it straight from the horse's mouth (Hans Bethe, director of the technical division at Los Alamos) about Feynman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4e1jdt-n8U

Exactly! Popular history is very much driven and sometimes twisted by the colorful characters that people like to talk about. Feynman wasn't important in Los Alamos at that time, he wrote a book of his favourite stories some of which were about his time at Los Alamos. He became famous/important later, due to his work on quantum theory, his lectures and the Challenger investigation.

Wasn't that where he invented (or adopted) pipelining for improving the mechanical calculators throughput?

The people he was leading definitely used it (against original instructions), and most likely invented, to his surprise. But he does not credit himself for it in Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman.

> More of a pain in the side - he messed with security protocols and made life hard for everybody.

Messing with security protocols is actually a good thing to ensure they keep getting followed

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