Win a Nobel Prize with this One Trick

8 months ago (Edited)

The coolest physicist of all times is without a doubt, Mr. Richard Feynman. Don't believe me? Just read his book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Mr. Feynman was not just a physicist but also a renaissance man who mastered various technical and non-technical subjects. He's famous for various breakthroughs in physics and because of his work figuring out what caused the space shuttle disaster. Mr. Feynman was also a Nobel prize winner for his work in quantum electrodynamics, which I haven't the slightest clue as to what it is. He created his famous diagrams that facilitated work in this area.

In the book I mentioned, Mr. Feynman tells the story of how he came up with his Nobel prize winning idea. This anecdote stayed with me after I read it because it made a lot of sense. Prior to his award, he was already a successful man by those standard measures by which we judge success, having a nice position in the university. As he tells it in the book, this happened:

“Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing – it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference. I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.”

“So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever. Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.

I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate. Then I thought, `Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics?' I don't remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance...

I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, 'Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it's two to one is ...' and I showed him the accelerations.
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. It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. 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 ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.

Now read that last sentence again. He got the Nobel prize because of the work that came out from playing around with spinning plates. We often consider play a waste of time or something that children do, but once you grow older, you're expected to be serious about things. Yet, Mr. Feynman challenged his own social conditioning, and like a child, he began to play again. Fascinating!

I'm not suggesting that play will solve your content creator woes, but I hope you agree with me that a little bit of selective neoteny could be a good way to get those creative juices flowing. And who knows, maybe developing award-winning ideas from play is not so far-fetched. It also worked for Newton, but that's a whole other ball of crazy wax.

A word about the title of the book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman(Amazon). Like many engineer/sciencey types, Mr. Feynman had a somewhat low emotional quotient and high level of mischief intelligence. So, it was difficult for him to tell when he had crossed a social boundary in the stuffy middle- to upper-class atmosphere he inhabited. He learned to tell that he had crossed a social line when after saying something that to him sounded perfectly normal, the listener would say, "surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman." This was a clue that he used to reign in the mischief so as not to confound his audience and possibly lead to some major faux pas. Yet, he never lost his sense of humor and childlike sense of wonder about the world.