Richard Feynman and the Power of Play

The brilliant physicist Richard Feynman was known for making the complex simple. But his true genius may have been his relentless, joyful curiosity. This story explores how Feynman's playful approach to problem-solving—from cracking safes to rethinking physics—was not a distraction from his work, but the very source of his breakthroughs.

The Wobbling Plate

It began, as it so often did for Richard Feynman, with a moment of unserious play. He was in the cafeteria at Cornell University, a cavernous room filled with the clatter of trays and the drone of conversation. A student, trying to liven up the post-lunch lull, flung a dinner plate into the air. It was a simple, goofy act. The plate soared, a spinning disc of Cornell-red ceramic. But Feynman saw something else. He saw the wobble. As the plate spun, it also tilted, wobbling on its axis. And he noticed something peculiar about the red medallion printed in the center. The medallion was spinning faster than the wobble. Much faster. It was a trivial observation, a piece of physics fluff, the kind of thing most people, even most physicists, would see and forget. But for Feynman, this was not a distraction. It was an invitation. He started to play with the numbers right there in the noisy cafeteria. He calculated the relationship between the spin and the wobble, the equations for the motion of a rigid, rotating disc. It was a simple problem, something you might find in an undergraduate textbook, but it was fun. It was a puzzle. He got so absorbed in the dance of that spinning plate that it led him down a path—a winding, intuitive, playful path—that would eventually lead to a Nobel Prize. The silly, wobbling plate opened a door in his mind. And through that door, he would begin to see the invisible dance of electrons and photons, the very architecture of reality. The diagrams that would revolutionize quantum mechanics, that would make his name immortal in the halls of science, began not in a sterile laboratory under the pressure of a great problem, but here, with the simple, joyful act of watching a plate fly through the air.

The Wobbling Plate

The Safecracker of Los Alamos

Years earlier, during the Second World War, Feynman’s playground had been a place of deadly seriousness: Los Alamos, New Mexico. He was a junior physicist then, a kid really, surrounded by the titans of science—Oppenheimer, Bohr, Fermi—all gathered in the high desert to build the atomic bomb. The pressure was immense, the work classified, the stakes existential. And Richard Feynman was bored. He wasn’t bored by the physics. The physics was the most exciting game in the world. But he was surrounded by bureaucracy, by the suffocating blanket of military security. Everything was locked away in drab, gray filing cabinets and safes. To Feynman, a locked safe wasn't a symbol of security; it was a challenge. It was a puzzle begging to be solved. He started with the filing cabinets. They had simple locks, and he discovered he could pick them with a bent paperclip and a small screwdriver. But that was too easy. The real prize were the combination safes, manufactured by the Mosler Safe Company, each boasting a million possible combinations. He didn’t attack them with force or with sophisticated tools. He attacked them with curiosity. He started by listening, by feeling the subtle mechanics of the lock. He learned that the factory-set combination, 25-50-75, was often left unchanged by lazy or forgetful staff. He’d wander into an office, try the factory setting, and—click—the door would swing open. He found that one in five safes at the top-secret facility still had the default combination. For the others, he used his mind. He realized that the machines weren't perfect. The numbers on the dial had a tolerance. You didn’t have to land exactly on the number; you just had to be close. This dramatically reduced the number of possibilities. He also figured out that by fiddling with the handle, he could get a feel for when the last number in the combination was correct. This gave him the last digit. Then, if he ever got a glimpse of a safe when it was open, he could deduce the other two numbers by examining the mechanism. He kept a little notebook with the last two numbers for nearly every safe on the project. It became a legendary performance. An officer would be locked out of a cabinet containing vital secrets. Feynman would be summoned. He’d make a show of it, asking for his "tools"—often just a screwdriver in his back pocket to maintain the mystique. He would insist on privacy, close the door, and then, instead of cracking the safe, he’d often sit down and read a magazine for twenty minutes. After a suitable amount of time had passed, he'd open the safe using the numbers he already knew, wipe a bit of theatrical sweat from his brow, and emerge a hero. He wasn't doing it to steal secrets; he was doing it to expose a truth: real security wasn't about imposing rules, but about understanding a system's weaknesses. He was playing, but his play had a purpose. It revealed the flaws in a system everyone else took for granted.

Little Squiggly Lines

That same instinct—to find the simple truth beneath the complex facade—was what he brought back to physics after the war. The problem he faced at Cornell was quantum electrodynamics, or QED, the theory of how light and matter interact. The theory was a mess. The equations were monstrously complicated, spitting out nonsensical infinities that physicists had to awkwardly sweep under the rug. It was a powerful theory, but it was ugly and unwieldy. Feynman, still thinking about that wobbling plate, began to visualize the interactions of particles in a new way. He started drawing pictures. Little, squiggly lines. He imagined an electron moving through space and time. It emits a photon—the particle of light—and changes its path. That photon travels along and is absorbed by another electron, which then changes *its* path. These weren’t just doodles. Each line, each vertex where lines met, corresponded to a precise mathematical expression. Suddenly, the hideous, multi-page calculations could be represented by a few simple diagrams. You could literally see what was happening. An electron positron annihilation? That was just two lines meeting, turning into a squiggly line, which then split into two new lines. When he first presented these "Feynman diagrams," the giants of physics were skeptical. At a conference, the great Niels Bohr listened patiently and then took him aside, unconvinced. Others thought it was a joke, a trick. Physics was supposed to be done with rigorous, formal mathematics, not with cartoons. But the younger generation of physicists saw the power in it immediately. The diagrams worked. They produced the right answers. More than that, they provided an intuition, a way of thinking that had been missing. Feynman had done what he did with the safes at Los Alamos. He hadn't broken the laws of physics. He had just looked at the system from a different angle, found the hidden simplicity, and turned a frustrating, opaque problem into a game you could play on a blackboard. He had done it by refusing to be intimidated by the formal complexity and instead asking a simple, almost childlike question: "What does it *look* like?"

A Piece of Rubber in Ice Water

Decades later, in the winter of 1986, that same irreverent clarity was called upon one last time, on a national stage. The space shuttle *Challenger* had exploded seventy-three seconds after liftoff, killing all seven astronauts aboard. The nation was in shock and mourning. A presidential commission was formed to find the cause, a panel of famous astronauts, generals, and politicians. And, somewhat strangely, one sixty-seven-year-old physicist: Richard Feynman. From the start, Feynman was an outsider. He hated the Washington bureaucracy, the endless meetings, the carefully managed flow of information. While the rest of the commission listened to official NASA presentations, Feynman went exploring. He did what he had always done: he talked to the people on the ground, the engineers and mechanics who actually built the shuttle. He quickly zeroed in on the O-rings, the rubber seals in the joints of the solid rocket boosters. The night before the launch had been brutally cold, far colder than any previous launch. The engineers told him, in hushed tones, that they worried the cold could make the rubber seals stiff and prevent them from sealing the joint properly. Hot gas could leak through. The idea was there, but it was buried in technical reports and bureaucratic defensiveness. During a televised public hearing, a NASA manager was giving a long, jargon-filled explanation about acceptable risks and flight readiness. Feynman sat there, growing more and more impatient. He had a glass of ice water in front of him, delivered by a waiter. He also had, thanks to a tip from a friendly general on the commission, a small sample of the O-ring material, which he’d compressed with a C-clamp he bought at a hardware store. He couldn’t wait any longer. He leaned forward to his microphone. “I took this stuff that I got out of your seal, and I put it in ice water,” he began, his voice cutting through the official drone. As the cameras zoomed in, he dunked the clamped piece of rubber into the frigid water. He let it sit there for a moment, the cold doing its silent work. Then he pulled it out, released the clamp, and showed the room. The rubber didn't spring back. It stayed compressed, lifeless. It had lost its resilience. In that moment, a complex national tragedy became devastatingly simple. A piece of rubber, in a glass of ice water. There were no equations, no charts, no technical jargon. Just a direct, undeniable demonstration of a physical truth. “I believe,” Feynman said with profound understatement, “that has some significance for our problem.” It was the ultimate act of Feynman's genius. It wasn't about discovering a new law of nature. It was about cutting through the noise, the complexity, and the self-deception to reveal the simple, observable fact at the heart of the matter. It was the same mind that had seen the essential physics in a wobbling plate, the same mind that had seen the human flaw in a locked safe. It was the mind of a man who never stopped playing with the world, who never stopped taking things apart to see how they worked, and who understood that the most powerful truths are often the ones you can hold in your hand.