ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Fun in Physics: From Reverence to Play in Twentieth-Century Science

• In Event: Shifting Perspectives: Diversity, Geographies, and Possibilities in the Physical Sciences (no 1)

English Abstract

Today, many physicists describe doing science “for the fun of it.” Yet this framing—celebrating pleasure, play, and passion as central to scientific life—is historically new. Fifty years ago, such claims might have seemed frivolous or even disrespectful. The Fun in Physics project traces a mid-twentieth-century shift in the emotional culture of science: from reverence and duty to cheerfulness and play. It examines how a distinctly American embrace of fun, rooted in Cold War optimism and neoliberal ideals of self-realization, reshaped global understandings of what science is and who scientists are.
This presentation will focus on two Nobel laureates—Richard Feynman (1965) and Donna Strickland (2018)—to explore how “fun” became a key moral and rhetorical resource in scientific storytelling.
For Feynman, fun signified independence, virtuosity, and harmless irreverence within a Cold War context. For Strickland, it conveys approachability, resilience, and an underdog spirit in relation to contemporary academic hierarchies. Across both cases, fun emerges as a language of authenticity that naturalizes passion as a professional virtue.
By historicizing this emotional turn, Fun in Physics reveals how fun became not only a way to describe science, but a broader tool for self-evaluation in neoliberal societies—shaping how work, creativity, and personal worth are understood today.

Author

• Annelie Elisabeth Drakman, The Department for the History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University