Feynman's Nobel Ambition

From ``Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman'', by<br>Richard Feynman,<br>Copyright 1985, pg. 157-158. Dr. Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning<br>physicist who, among other things, worked on the first atomic bomb at<br>Los Alamos, NM. He died in 1988.

Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I<br>used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to<br>play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing - it<br>didn't have to do with whether it was important for the development of<br>nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to<br>play with. When I was in high school, I'd see water running out of a<br>faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what<br>determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn't<br>have to do it; it wasn't important for the future of science;<br>somebody else had already done it. That didn't make any difference.<br>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<br>never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university<br>teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the<br>Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play<br>with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance<br>whatsoever.

Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around,<br>throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it<br>wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going<br>around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around<br>faster than the wobbling.

I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating<br>plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion<br>rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate - two to one [Note: Feynman mis-remembers here---the factor of 2 is the other way]. It came out of a<br>complicated equation! Then I thought, ``Is there some way I can see in a<br>more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it's<br>two to one?''

I don't remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion<br>of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it<br>come out two to one.

I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, ``Hey, Hans! I noticed<br>something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it's<br>two to one is ...'' and I showed him the accelerations.

He says, ``Feynman, that's pretty interesting, but what's the importance of<br>it? Why are you doing it?''

``Hah!'' I say. ``There's no importance whatsoever. I'm just doing it for<br>the fun of it.'' His reaction didn't discourage me; I had made up my mind<br>I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.

I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how<br>electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there's the Dirac<br>Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before<br>I knew it (it was a very short time) I was ``playing'' - working, really -<br>with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working<br>on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those<br>old-fashioned, wonderful things.

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like<br>uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to<br>resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately<br>there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize<br>for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.