|  Due to the top secret nature of the work, Los Alamos was isolated; in his own words, "There wasn't anything to do there". Bored, Feynman claims he indulged his curiosity by learning to pick the combination locks on cabinets and desks used to secure papers. Feynman played many jokes on colleagues; in one case he found the combination to a locked filing cabinet by trying the numbers a physicist would use (it was 27-18-28 after the base of natural logarithms, e=2.71828...), and found that the three Filing Cabinets in which a colleague kept a comprehensive set of atomic bomb research notes (for his convenience while selecting material for declassification) all had the same combination. He left a series of mischievous notes as a prank, which initially spooked his colleague into thinking a spy or saboteur had actually gained access to atomic bomb secrets. (Coincidentally, Feynman once borrowed the car of physicist Klaus Fuchs in order to visit his sick wife. Fuchs was later discovered to be a spy for the Soviets.) On another occasion, he noted that a captain in his building at Los Alamos had a massive safe, better than anything the bomb scientists had, installed with much ado in his office. Some time after the captain left Los Alamos, Feynman discovered that the captain with the massive safe had (1) never bothered to change the combination from the single generic factory setting, so that even an amateur safecracker could open it, and (2) there was nothing important being kept in the safe anyway, whereas all the secrets of the bomb scientists were mostly kept in relatively insecure locked cabinets. These anecdotes are related by him in the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
On occasion, Feynman would find an isolated section of the mesa to drum Indian-style; "and maybe I would dance and chant, a little". These antics did not go unnoticed, and rumors spread about a mysterious Indian drummer called "Injun Joe". He also became a friend of laboratory head J. Robert Oppenheimer, who unsuccessfully tried to court him away from his other commitments to work at the University of California, Berkeley after the war.
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Early career: Cornell University
After the project, Feynman started working as a professor at Cornell University, where Hans Bethe (who proved that the sun's source of energy was nuclear fusion) worked. However he felt uninspired there; despairing that he had burned out, he turned to less useful, but fun problems, such as analyzing the physics of a twirling, nutating dish, as it is being balanced by a juggler. (As it turned out, this work served him well in future research.) He was therefore surprised to be offered professorships from competing universities, eventually choosing to work at the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, California, despite being offered a position near Princeton, at the Institute for Advanced Study (which included, at that time, such distinguished faculty as Albert Einstein).
Feynman rejected the Institute on the grounds that there were no teaching duties. Feynman found his students to be a source of inspiration and also, during uncreative times, comfort. He felt that if he could not be creative, at least he could teach. Another major factor in his decision was just a desire to live in a mild climate, a goal he seized on while having to put snow chains on his car's wheels in the middle of a snowstorm in Ithaca, New York.
Related Resources: office cabinets, work desks
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