The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
NSIT Lounge released a inspiring interview with Richard P. Feynman on Google Video. Feynman talks about his childhood, his first encounter with calculus reading "Calculus for the Practical Man" at age thirteen, how they build the Bomb in Los Alamos, how they threw a party while Hiroshima was burning, how a seemingly simple problem of rotating bodies led to to quantum electrodynamics. Here's Feynman commenting on the Nobel prize he received:
I don't like honours. I appreciate it for the work that I did and for people who appreciate it and I notice when other phycicists use my work. I don't need anything else. I don't think there's any sense to anything else.I don't see that it makes any point, that someone in the Swedish academy decides that this work is nobel enough to receive a prize. I've already got the price! The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation of the people who use it. Those are the real things! The honours are unreal to me. I don't believe in honours.


