In his eccentric collection of autobiographical stories see reference Richard Feynman recounts I was in the cafeteria and some guy fooling around throws a plate in the air As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling I had nothing to do so I start figuring out the motion of the rotating plate I discovered that when the angle is very slight the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one It came out of a complicated equation I went on to work out equations for wobbles Then I thought about how the electron orbits start to move in relativity Then theres the Dirac equation in electrodynamics And then quantum electrodynamics And before I knew it… the whole business that I got the Nobel prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate A replica of the Cornell plate is now part of an exhibit marking the centennial of the Nobel Prize Actually Feynman misremembered or was being mischievous the factor of 2 actually goes the other way In the Details section below the motion of the plate is derived using Eulers equations for a rigid body In this Demonstration the trajectory of the plate is shown in slow motion The initial conditions to be chosen are the inclination of the plates symmetry axis to the vertical and the rate of rotation about this axis It is found that the wobble rate is actually slightly more than twice the rotation rate The ratio approaches 2 as but at the same time the wobble amplitude decreases