Science & Tech Quote by Richard P. Feynman

Feynman frames curiosity as a contagion, and the joke lands because it’s only half a joke. Calling it a “very serious disease” borrows the grave voice of institutional warnings, then swerves into a confession that every technical person recognizes: the machine is irresistible. The subtext isn’t that computers are frivolous; it’s that they invite a mode of engagement that looks suspiciously like procrastination to outsiders and like discovery to the initiated.

The sly hinge is the word “play.” In labs and offices, “play” is what you’re not supposed to do when the budget, the deadline, and the grant report are looming. But for Feynman - patron saint of productive messing around - play is the engine of insight. Early computing, especially in the mid-century research world he inhabited, was interactive in a way that older instruments weren’t. You could poke the system, get feedback, iterate. That loop turns work into a game: hypothesis, tweak, surprise, repeat. It’s exhilarating, and it can absolutely “interfere” with the narrowly defined task at hand.

There’s also an implicit jab at managerial notions of productivity. Computers expose how porous the boundary is between “wasting time” and inventing the future. What looks like idle tinkering is often the precondition for mastery - and occasionally, for the breakthrough that makes the official work obsolete. Feynman isn’t warning you off; he’s admitting the seduction, then smuggling in a defense of it.