Читать книгу Creative Synergy - Bunny Paine-Clemes - Страница 36

Richard Feynman, who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1965, characterizes himself as “a bit of a clown.”⁴⁷ While he was working on the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, he amused himself by figuring out ways to crack the locks on safes and filing cabinets in offices at the Los Alamos compound. He narrates his adventures in a delightfully humorous tone: “I had just opened two safes cold. I was getting good. Now I was professional.” After he’d cracked a drawer or safe, he often left a note like: “‘This one was no harder to open than the other one—Wise Guy.’” His colleagues were alarmed, suspecting an outside job, until they realized it was just Feynman goofing around again. The goofing could be productive, though. Once as he watched someone in the Cornell cafeteria throwing a plate into the air, he began to calculate the parameters of motion involved. Eventually he derived a complicated equation. He showed it to a colleague, who proclaimed it “‘interesting’” but asked, “‘What’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?’” “‘Ha!’” said Feynman. “‘There’s no importance whatsoever; I’m just doing it for the fun of it.’” The calculations were to win him the Nobel Prize.⁴⁸