Per Richard Feynman — "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.
I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate - two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, 'Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it's two to one?'"
"I started playing with this "rotation" and it led me to think about a similar problem of the rotation of the spin of an electron according to the Dirac equation and from there I moved on to quantum electrodynamics, which I was already working on. I continued to play with those ideas in a completely relaxed way and, at a certain point, it was as if I had opened a bottle of champagne: everything came out, and in a short time I found myself working on the ideas that won me the Nobel."
Surely you're joking
Quote from: RichHSurely you're joking
Why do you care?
Quote from: TrotskyQuote from: RichHSurely you're joking
Why do you care?
For the pleasure of finding things out!
These barbs are the mean-ing of it all. ::twak::