In Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens, Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up, Frank Oppenheimer discusses the importance of play and experimentation:
So much time is spent just playing around with no particular end in mind," he wrote: "One sort of mindlessly observes how something works or doesn't work or what its features are, much as I did when, as a child, I used to go around the house with an empty milk bottle pouring a little bit of every chemical, every drug, every spice into the bottle to see what would happen. Of course, nothing happened. I ended up with a sticky grey-brown mess, which I threw out in disgust. Much research ends up with the same amorphous mess and is or should be thrown out only to then start playing around in some other way. But a research physicist gets paid for this 'waste of time' and so do the people who develops exhibits in the Exploratorium. Occasionally though, something incredibly wonderful happens."
"He asked his friend Bob Karpus, a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, if he thought there was anything a young person must learn before it is too late, and Karpus's answer was: "play."