My favorite physicist (I hope you have one too), isn’t Einstein, Fermi, Heisenberg, or Hawking. He’s a bongo-drumming kook named Richard Feynman. Once while teaching at Cornell, Feynman found himself feeling palpable disinterest in what was supposed to be his passion. He was trapped in the throes of a feeling familar to many creatives: burnout.
And he sought a way out:
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.
[…]
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.
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