Richard Feynman had decided he was finished.
He had spent the last years of the war at Los Alamos, working alongside some of the best physicists of his generation. He came out of it with a teaching job at Cornell. He sat down to do research and nothing came.
He was, he wrote, "burned out", and he was sure he would "never accomplish anything" again. At least he had "this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy."
Then he remembered how physics used to feel.
In high school he had watched water running out of a faucet, growing narrower as it fell, and wondered what decided the curve. He worked it out.
"I didn't have to do it; it wasn't important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it."
He did it because it was interesting. That was the whole reason, and it had been enough.
So he gave himself permission.
"I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever."
Within a week he was in the cafeteria when, as he told it, "some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air."
The plate wobbled as it flew. On it was the red Cornell medallion, and it went round at a different speed from the wobble.
Feynman wanted to know why. He started working out the motion.
It was a useless problem. Decades later, telling the story, he got the ratio the wrong way round, which shows how little the answer mattered.
He took his calculations to Hans Bethe, who had brought him to Cornell. Bethe asked the obvious question. "What's the importance of it? Why are you doing it?"
"There's no importance whatsoever," Feynman said. "I'm just doing it for the fun of it."
The play carried on. From the wobbling plate to the way electrons move in orbit. From there to the equations behind them. From there into quantum electrodynamics, the theory of how light and matter behave together. The work came, he said, "like uncorking a bottle."
In 1965 it won him a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
"The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for," he wrote, "came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."
His talent had been there all along. What he lacked was permission to play.
The work that made his name began as a game he was too tired to take seriously.
EVERYTHING HAS TO COUNT
Somewhere in adult life, fun starts needing a reason.
The run has to be training for something.
The guitar needs lessons and a goal.
The project in the garage has to save money, or sell.
The book has to be useful.
The hobby you love gets turned into a side income, and a year later you dread it.
Each one picks up a purpose, and the purpose gets heavier than the thing.
That is why so many men find they do not enjoy their hobbies any more. Nothing went wrong with the hobby. Something got attached to it.
Research on small children shows how fast that happens. Preschoolers who already loved drawing with coloured markers were split into groups. Some were promised a certificate with a gold seal and a red ribbon if they drew. Others drew with no prize promised. A week or two later the markers came out again during free play. The children who had drawn for the certificate spent about half as much time drawing as the others.
Same markers. Same free time. The only difference was the promise, and it halved the drawing.
A REASON TURNS PLAY INTO WORK.
Grown men need no certificate for this. The reason gets supplied from inside: get fitter, get better, get something to show for it. The thing you loved becomes one more item to keep up with, and the day you skip it starts to feel like a missed appointment.
The fun never went in one go. It got traded away, one sensible reason at a time.
Learning to have fun again as an adult means getting it back.
This content is only available to subscribers
Subscribe now and have access to all our stories, enjoy exclusive content and stay up to date with constant updates.
Unlock contentAlready have an account? Sign In
