You're not joking Professor Feynman?

By any account Richard Feynman was an extraordinary example of his species. Together with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger Feynman was awarded the1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for "fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles."

Below is an excerpt from the section "The Dignified Professor" in Feynman's first book of autobiographical sketches, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman*. Whether or not it will have any effect on the Coalition Government's approach to the support for Australia's universities is debatable; after all Feynman had little effect on how the state of California chose its secondary school science texts when he was asked to serve on the evaluation board, but that's another story.

    The Bob Wilson referred to by Feynman is Robert Wilson, later to become the first director of Fermilab who when soliciting funds for a high-energy particle accelerator, and asked at a Senate hearing: "How will the project contribute to national defence?" replied: "It has nothing to do with defending our country, except to make it worth defending." He got the funds.

Feynman writes:

Bob Wilson, who was head of the laboratory there at Cornell, called me in to see him. He said, in a serious tone, "Feynman, you're teaching your classes well; you're doing a good job, and we're very satisfied. Any other expectations we might have are a matter of luck. When we hire a professor, we're taking all the risks. If it comes out good, all right. If it doesn't, too bad. But you shouldn't worry about what you're doing or not doing." He said it much better than that, and it released me from the feeling of guilt.

    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 -- two to one. 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 or the dynamics, why it's two to one?"

    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 to make it come out two to one.

    I still remember going to Hans Bethe [1967 physics Nobel Laureate twelve years Feynman's senior] and saying, "Hay, 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.

    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 Equation [Paul Dirac, 1933 physics Nobel Laureate] in electrodynamics. And then the quantum electrodynamics. 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 stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems [at Princeton]; 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 [Feynman diagrams] and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.

 

"When you become a Cabinet Minister, the Prime Minister writes you ... a Charter Letter. It sets out the Prime Minister's expectations of what you will do and what will be the priorities for you in your portfolio. [I]n relation to Universities, [it] said that I should understand and enunciate the importance of higher education to the Australian community, and I should continue to progress workplace relations reform in the sector." [our emphasis]

[Minister for Education, Science and Training Brendan Nelson: the Chalmers Oration, Flinders Medical Centre, Adelaide July 17, 2003]

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any room in the Government's thinking regarding how it intends to dictate university endeavours to allow approaches such as, "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."

Note: Richard Feynman's1959 lecture There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom was instrumental in initiating a discipline apart from his fundamental contributions to quantum electrodynamics based on that wobbling dinner plate.

*Surely You're Joking,  Mr. Feynman. R. P. Feynman and R. Leighton, Unwin Paperbacks, 1985. ISBN 0-04-530023-2

Alex Reisner

The Funneled Web