👋 Hi fellow dumdums,

Meet the Patron Saint of Dumb‑Thinking

Richard Feynman may have won a Nobel Prize, but he also spent his lunch breaks cracking safes, playing bongos, dunking rocket parts into his drinking water on purpose, and asked enough dumb questions to accidentally reinvent quantum physics.

Basically, a chaos gremlin with tenure.

Like you, he got distracted by trivial nonsense. A spinning cafeteria plate. A printer making weird sounds. Stuff most people wisely ignore. But not Feynman. He poked at nonsense. He prodded it, obsessed over it, until it revealed something annoyingly profound.

We claim him not for his genius—but because he was brave enough to sound stupid until something smart popped out.

How a Wobbly Plate Won a Nobel Prize

(A Dumb‑Thinking parable starring Richard Feynman)

It’s 1946 and Richard Feynman watches a student fling a dinner plate like a frisbee across the cafeteria. Instead of ducking, Feynman is mesmerized by how the plate wobbles as it flies through the air.

Most of us would’ve just shrugged, chalk it up to cafeteria chaos, and get back to the midterms.

But Feynman does the “dumb” thing…

He clears his table, grabs some scrap paper, and continues to spend three solid weeks pondering the plate’s goofy mid-air rhythm with calculus.

The wobbly plate got under his skin.

He asked himself a very dumb question:

“If a cafeteria plate can wobble all over the place, why not an electron?”

Then an even dumber one:

“What if particles don’t pick one sensible path, but stagger drunkenly down all possible paths at once?”

It was a ridiculous thought.

And that’s how we got the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics.

Nineteen years later, that cafeteria-plate distraction earned him a Nobel Prize—and accidentally laid the groundwork for quantum computing.

The Dumbify Moral

1. Follow the trivial. That thing on the edge of your vision—broken coffee stirrer, weird app bug, oddly clustered customer complaint—could be your wobbling plate.

2. Play first, label later. Feynman didn’t start with “I shall revolutionise physics”; he started with “Huh, neat wobble.” Let curiosity write the grant proposal retroactively.

3. Ask the question everyone’s embarrassed to ask. “Why does it wobble like that?” felt childish. It was also the only question that cracked the code.

Dumb Word of the Day: Quidnunc

Meaning: A person who’s obsessively eager to know “What’s happening now?”—a news‑hound, gossip‑monger, or perpetual question‑asker. The term compresses the Latin question quid nunc?—“what now?”

Why it’s peak‑Feynman:
Feynman’s entire career was powered by a relentless quid nunc reflex. Plate wobbling in the cafeteria? What now? Rubber gasket in ice water? What now? Ask the “dumb” question first, refuse to stop until you understand it, and suddenly you’re sketching particle interactions on cocktail napkins—and winning Nobels.

Use it today:
"My inner quidnunc just spent fifteen minutes googling why squirrels never fall out of trees. No regrets."

(Bonus: Saying “quidnunc” out loud feels like popping bubble‑wrap in Latin. Highly recommended.)

The 5-Minute Wobble Challenge

1. Spot a Wobble
Notice one tiny absurdity today—a traffic light that hesitates, a coffee lid that always leaks, a printer coughing politely before each page.

2. Ask a Dumb Question
Immediately blurt out the dumbest, simplest question about your wobble. No editing allowed.

3. Five-Minute Rabbit Hole
Set a timer. Follow your curiosity—Google it, sketch it, guess wildly—until the timer rings. One interesting discovery or silly revelation equals victory.

Quick Feynman-Style Example:

Wobble: Your printer makes an awkward throat-clearing noise before printing.

Dumb Question: "Is it embarrassed? What's it actually doing?"

Five-Minute Rabbit Hole: A quick Google reveals it’s firing invisible pulses to align its nozzles—basically warming up its vocal cords.

Lateral Leap: If a printer needs a warm-up ritual to avoid messy prints, maybe I need a 30-second "nozzle-check" before big tasks (emails, presentations, angry texts) to prevent fuzzy thinking. What would that look like?