From Burnout to Breakthrough
The end of the story is, he wins the Nobel Prize.
The unexpected part was the twist in the middle of the roller coaster. I’ll let Feynman speak for himself:
“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…
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 — 2 to 1. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, ‘Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces of the dynamics, why it's 2 to 1?
I don't remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particle is, and how all the acceleration is balanced to make it come out to 2 to 1.
“I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, ‘Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here are the plate goes around so, and the reason it's 2 to 1 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 that I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked… 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 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 in the whole business that I got the Nobel prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.”
The point that struck me was, Feynman’s ultimate breakthrough came as a result of focusing on what he enjoyed — after he allowed himself liberty to “play with physics” again.
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