Feynman's wobbling plate: how to recover from burnout

http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html

by neilk • 15 years ago

204 22 15 years ago

h34t• 15 years ago

"So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever."

The full acceptance of burnout seems important. ie, rather than cling to old ideas about who you are and what you want, at a certain point it's best to let go of your ambitions and simply embrace life in whatever way you can. I remember one conversation I had on a bus in Thailand some years back:

"What do you do?" "Oh, I'm a burnout from China. I mean, I was starting a company there, and I sort of imploded. Oh, the business didn't fail, it's still running... I just failed. At being me."

It was the first time in my adult life that I didn't have an impressive story to tell about what I was achieving.

Failure, instead of driving people away (as I'd feared), led to more empathy and deeper relationships. And instead of harming my career, it gave me the freedom to explore my interests without the pressure to achieve, which helped me figure out what I really enjoy. I'm now working crazy hours again, but it's so well aligned with my values and interests that I rarely feel stressed. (And I take better care of myself, because I know what can happen if I don't.)

xiaoma• 15 years ago

That was very insightful. Thank you.

exch• 15 years ago

I've solved my burnout problems slightly differently. I too made the conscious choice to stop pressuring myself into performing above and beyond what I was able to deliver and decided that my programming work was hence forth strictly going to be done as a hobby. I stopped working in IT completely because it simply was too stressful and no fun at all anymore.

I decided that it was time for a very radical change. So I deliberately went and looked for a profession I would otherwise never even have considered. A friend of mine invited me to a book binding workshop. The old fashioned kind that is. Before that I have never ever done anything with my hands. I was utterly convinced I didn't have this sort of thing in me at all, but I gave it a try anyway because this was exactly the kind of radical change I was looking for. I fell in love with it immediately and have never looked back again. It turned out to be such a wonderful and fulfilling job. No more stress, no more over-ambition. Instead I get to learn a fascinating profession and I go home every day feeling utterly and completely satisfied.

I do still write code, but strictly in my spare time and strictly those projects I know I will enjoy doing. This ensures that it will always remain as much fun as it was when I first started out.

sigurrostyp• 15 years ago

Make things fun, how simple, but yet so true

andrewheins• 15 years ago

While on a significantly smaller scale, this is exactly why I program in my off-time. Nobody's going to make a lot of money or solve an important problem by messing around with an app that creates fake iPhone SMS conversations, but it keeps me sane.

It's the same reason the pomodoro technique is so effective, or why productivity actually goes down under a highly regimented work environment. Creativity comes from fooling around, you can't force it.

Devilboy• 15 years ago

I know this is kinda off-topic but could someone explain why the wobble rate and the spin rate of the plate would have a 2 to 1 ratio? Is this somehow related to the spin numbers of elementary particles?

splat• 15 years ago

It's a little complicated, although not so complicated that it has anything to do with the spin of elementary particles.

The basic reason is due to perpendicular axis theorem. If you have a plate, there is some moment of inertia about the axis perpendicular to the plate, and a different moment of inertia about any axis in the plane of the plate. The perpendicular axis theorem says that the moment of inertia about the axis perpendicular to the plate is twice that about the axis in the plane of the plate.

Now, suppose you attach a rod through the plate, but at a bit of an angle, and then you spin the plate around this rod. As you can imagine, it'll take some effort to keep the plate spinning about the rod; it'll be rattling around trying to spin in a different way. Because you're not spinning it about any axis of symmetry, the angular velocity vector is not lined up with the angular momentum vector and so it requires some torque to keep the plate spinning around the axis you want. But if you're just throwing a plate up in the air, you can't exert any torque on it---it's just going on its own. So if the plate is spinning about some funny axis, it has to do so in a special way in order that the angular momentum vector lines up with the angular velocity vector.

So, draw a diagram of this lopsided plate turning around a rod. The angular velocity will have some component perpendicular to the plate and some component parallel to the plate so that the overall angular velocity is parallel to the rod. Let's suppose that the angular momentum vector's component perpendicular to the plate is exactly as long as the component of the angular velocity perpendicular to the plate. Because the moment of inertia in the plane of the plate is half that perpendicular to the plate, the length of the component of angular momentum in the plane of the plate is half the length of the component of angular velocity in the plane of the plate. As you can see, the angular velocity vector is not lined up with the angular momentum vector.

Now we decouple the plate from the rod so that it can also spin about an axis perpendicular to the plate. If we spin the plate about this axis backwards at half the speed it was originally spinning about this axis, the length of the component of angular momentum perpendicular to the plate is now half the length of the same component of the angular velocity. And so the angular momentum vector is now lined up with the rod that we're spinning the overall system around. But because the angular momentum vector and the angular velocity vector are parallel, there's no need to exert any torque on the system to keep it going. So we can remove the rod entirely and the plate will wobble in the air in a ratio of 2:1.

codelieb• 15 years ago

For a similar, but more complete, description (with figures), see "Feynman's Tips on Physics," Section 4-10, The Spinning Disk, and "The Feynman Lectures on Physics," Volume I, Section 20-4 Angular Momentum of a Spinning Body.

Mike Gottlieb Editor, The Feynman Lectures on Physics Coauthor, Feynman's Tips on Physics

abecedarius• 15 years ago

The water-from-a-faucet thing he mentioned was mildly fun, too, and a lot easier.

sharmajai• 15 years ago

I read 'Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman' few years back. I can recall bits and pieces of this prose, but after two not-so-popular android apps - made in part time, the ideas for the next app were drying out, partially due to the fear of failure.

I think I needed this more than any other time, thank-you for posting this.

pjscott• 15 years ago

This is completely off-topic, but I've been seeing this weird style of quotation marks occasionally for a while now. It uses two backticks at the beginning, and two apostrophes at the end: ``quoted''. If you're not using TeX, doing that will generally look pretty weird. So why do we still see it?

naradaellis• 15 years ago

Force of habit from writing too much TeX?

jrockway• 15 years ago

How else do you make `curly quotes' with ASCII?

kragen2• 15 years ago

From the 1970s until about 2001, the common fonts on Unix systems drew those two characters as something approximating ‘ and ’. This gave us Unix users a simple and easy way to put ‘single’ or “double” quotes into our man pages, our web pages, our TeX documents, pretty much everywhere we would put text.

Unfortunately, the stupid losers at Microsoft and Apple never picked up on this, and eventually the glyph for the apostrophe was standardized as that ugly vertical piece of shit you probably see on your screen right now, which comes from the typewriter days when you would overstrike it with a period in order to make a shitty exclamation point, thus eliminating the need for one key on your cheap-shit typewriter; and the backtick was standardized as being an accent grave with no fucking letter underneath it, which makes a lot of sense when you're printing things out on a fucking dot-matrix printer with backspace, but not on a VT100, let alone a fucking window system.

Well, in the early 2000s, the folks at the X Consortium decided to standardize on making X-Windows apostrophes look like the shitty Microsoft Windows apostrophes, instead of waiting for the douchenozzles at Microsoft to catch up to the ASCII typography we had in the 1970s. So now instead of having shitty quotes only on Microsoft and Macintosh systems, we have shitty quotes everywhere, unless you use non-ASCII characters. (To be fair, all the glyphs looked shitty on X back then, so it's not like we were giving up some kind of Caslonian paradise.) The saving grace is that you actually can use non-ASCII characters now, and they will work everywhere with no problems. They look like this: âHello, world!â .

Anyway, the reason you still sometimes see the old kind of ASCII quote marks is that not every fucking document on the web gets thrown away in six months, because some of us fucking try to write shit that people will still want to read ten or twenty or a hundred years from now. When you see ``this'', you're looking back in time, to the days when characters were bytes and men were men. I mean, you’re looking back—oh, fuck it.

pekinb• 15 years ago

what work do your "fuck"s and "shit"s do?

ZoFreX• 15 years ago

> and they will work everywhere with no problems

It's deliciously ironic that they do not display properly for me in your post (Chrome on Windows here).

YuriNiyazov• 15 years ago

You should meet Kenny Tilton from comp.lang.lisp - the writing style of your comment made me think of him.

noonespecial• 15 years ago

All the people I've ever met seem whom I'd consider in the genius category seem to share this trait. They see ordinary things that everyone else overlooks and wonder about them in a playful and curious way. Plates wobbling, apples falling from trees, or even as PG so eloquently put it, "looking at Maxwell's equations and saying, what the hell is going on here?"

Its like driving a wedge into a tiny crack in the unknown and splitting it open to reveal all of the cool stuff.

akamaka• 15 years ago

Feynman's description of his curiousity and eagerness to experiment most of all reminds me of Steve Wozniak describing his early years!

Feynman's wobbling plate: how to recover from burnout

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