Richard Feynman was one of the great scientists of the 20^th century. If you’ve ever read Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, you would’ve quickly noticed he always followed his curiosity and was willing to think different. Even if it meant working on problems others thought were a waste of time.

Wobbling plates

While a professor at Cornell, Feynman found himself burned out with physics. He would say

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.

To find that love again, he decided he’d “play with physics” like he’d “read Arabinan Nights for pleasure.”

Shortly after that decision, he was sitting in the university cafeteria watching someine throwing a plate up in the air when he noticed how it moved. He decided to figure out the motion of the rotating plate “for the fun of it.”

After working out the motion and accelarations of the wobbling plate, he goes to his colleague Hans Bethe and shows him the working.

“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 equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equatioin in elctrodynamics. And then quantum eletrodynamics. 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…

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.

What’s to lose?

You never know what’ll happen next. Sometimes, following your interests and intuition can lead to a dead end. But, sometimes it can lead you somewhere you never imagined.

I did (and still do) question whether writing online was the right project for me. I really wasn’t sure why anybody would choose my writing over others. But then I figured, what’s to lose? It’d be fun. I could practice writing and making. And I’d learn new things. My gut said do it and if there’s nothing to lose, then it must be antifragile.