Richard Feynman On Thinking

Physics disgust me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing it. Why? I used to play with it. When I was in high school, i'd see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and I'd wonder if I could figure out what determined that curve. I didn't have to do it; it wasn't important for the future of science. I'd invent things for my own entertainment.
So I got this new attitude: Now that I'm burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes that I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics whenever I want to.
I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, threw a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red Cornell medallion on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.
I had nothing to do, so I started to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discovered that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate - two to one. Then I thought, "Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it's two to one?" I don't remember how I did it, but I ultimatley worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it come out two to one.
I remember going to Hans Bethe and showing him.
He says, "Feynman, that's pretty interesting, but what's the importance of it? Why are you doing it?"
"Hah!" I say. "There's no importance whatsoever. I'm just doing it for the fun of it." His reaction didn't discourage me. I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.
I went on to work out the equation of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there's the Dirac equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electroynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was "playing" - working, really - with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.
It was easy. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing. But ultimateley there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Noble Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.

Excerpt from the 'Creators on Creating'
and taken from the Utne Reader's July-August issue of 1998 on
"How To Think Like A Genius"....

Laurie Anderson | Slur