"Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Richard Feynman was that rare combination of genius and accessibility to the non-physicist. If there was one thing he was confident in it was sitting down with a seemingly impossible puzzle until he solved it. He also played the bongos, told funny stories, and pulled a great poker face on the (in)appropriate occasion.

If you read any of his stories from the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", I recommend Safecracker Meets Safecracker. It's a great example of how Feynman rolls, and I cracked a grin (bad pun?) while reading it.

Feynman developed an active observance of social irresponsibility from the great mathematician John Von Neumann, who gave him this advice:

You don't have to be responsible for the world you're in.

Perhaps due to this lack of seriousness, Feynman romps through some entertaining twists and turns in life.

Read The Dignified Professor to find out how the whole business that got him the Nobel Prize "came from piddling with a wobbling plate". Burned out from working on the atomic bomb project during WWII, he felt an unusual twinge of disgust for physics in his new life as a young college professor. He asked himself why he had once enjoyed doing physics and realized it was because he used to do whatever he felt like doing - i.e. play with it.

An example of Feynman's idea of play: figuring out how to determine the curve for water running out of a faucet.

So when he was at the cafeteria he saw a guy throw a plate in the air and noticed the plate wobbled. For fun he set out to determine the motion of the plate wobbles. "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!"

Maybe a little more effortless for him than for the average person, but he set out to actively play just like anyone might. In science I see this sense of play slip through fingers like sand (I include my own undergraduate experiences here). It gets replaced with talk of "the future of science and the betterment of society", or maybe just getting a good grade.

At any rate Feynman's stories are a good read and he packs a joy for physics into them.