Field notes · Nº 19 2 min read Growth and ambition

In a Cornell cafeteria, someone fooling around threw a plate in the air.

By Pallav Sharma · Co-founder & CTO
On a dark background, at the left, a tilted plate drawn as a thin ellipse, with a small gold medallion near its rim and a dashed gold orbit and arrow showing it going round. A faint dashed arc drifts right to an abstract diagram: two pairs of straight white strokes meeting at two gold points, joined by a gold wavy line. Labels: 'A plate in the air' and 'The diagrams'. Headline: 'Importance is what delight looks like years later.' Pallav Sharma, www.pallavsharma.com.

Richard Feynman watched its red medallion go round and worked out the motion “for the fun of it.”

He later traced his Nobel Prize to that moment: “The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.”

I love that the prize came last.

Importance is what delight looks like years later.

Which of your best ideas began as something you did purely for fun?

Going deeper

After the Second World War, Richard Feynman took up a post at Cornell. One day in the cafeteria, as he told it in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, someone fooling around threw a plate in the air. Feynman noticed the red Cornell medallion on it going round, and that it went round faster than the plate wobbled. He had nothing else to do, so he sat down to work out the motion.

When he showed the equations to Hans Bethe, Bethe asked what the importance of it was. Feynman’s answer is one of my favourite sentences in science: “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.”

He did not stop at the plate. From wobbles he moved on to how electron orbits behave in relativity, and from there back into the physics of the electron itself. He described the work that followed as effortless, “like uncorking a bottle.” In 1965 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics. His diagrams, the small drawings of lines and vertices he used to keep track of particles, became one of the standard languages of the field.

What I admire is the order of events. The question came before its importance did. Nobody could have commissioned the wobbling plate; it was too small to be anyone’s priority. It became the opening of a great body of work because one person found it delightful and followed the delight further than anyone expected.

Finished work tends to hide this part of its history. The result arrives later and takes the credit, but it travels on a road that play laid down first.

The plate is still the best proof I know that curiosity is not a detour from great work. It is the way in.

Sources

Science News: A celebration of curiosity for Feynman’s 100th birthday · Creativity Post: Spinning plates and the serious play of Richard Feynman · Chad Orzel: Feynman’s plate · Excerpt from Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! · NobelPrize.org: The Nobel Prize in Physics 1965