Charles Mann

So he says to himself, huh, that looks like a fun little thing to work out.

And he works it out.

And then he takes it to his mentor, Hans Bethe, the one who got him to Cornell, having met him at Los Alamos.

He said, hey, Hans, check this out.

Look at this.

Look at this.

And Hans says, well, what's it good for?

And Feynman says, absolutely nothing.

But isn't it amazing?

Isn't it great?

And his Nobel Prize winning work actually came from the spin of the plate.

And then it goes to spin of electrons and equations.

He said it all came tumbling out from working out the wobble of a spinning plate.

It has to do with curiosity.

It has to do with people wondering what makes something do something.

And then to discover that if you try to get answers, that they're related to each other.

The things that make the wind make the waves.

And the motion of water is like the motion of air is like the motion of sand.

The fact that things have common features turns out more and more universal.

What we're looking for is how everything works and what makes everything work.