Harry: All right. Pop quiz. Airport. Gunman with one hostage. He's using her for cover. He's almost to a plane. You're a hundred feet away... Jack?
Jack: Shoot the hostage.
Harry: What?
Jack: Take her out of the equation. Go for the good wound and he can't get to the plane with her. Clear shot.
- Speed
In most cases, when Feynman solved a problem, it was the result of very intense work over a short period of time. The way I work, and the way every scientist I know works, there are very intense periods of time when you forget to eat, you forget to sleep, you forget your wife, and your students, and everything else, and you get consumed by a problem until you solve it - or else decide that you can't solve it, and give up. Most of the rest of the time is quite routine, and your life is like everybody else's. I think Feynman was much the same way.
He had long, long fallow periods. I remember going on a trip with him one time - this is an interesting story. We were at the University of Chicago, where he had been invited to give a talk. I came down to join him for breakfast one morning in the faculty club there, and he was talking to somebody. I didn't know who this person was, and Feynman sort of mumbled the introductions, so I didn't catch the name. I just listened, and ate my eggs, and after a while it dawned on me that this was Jim Watson, of Watson and Crick. Watson had a manuscript with him, which one day would be The Double Helix. But this was a year before it was published, and it was still in manuscript form. He asked Feynman to read it - he was hoping to get a testimonial for the dust jacket. Feynman agreed.
That night there was a party for Feynman, and he wasn't there, which was embarrassing. I went looking for him, and I found him in our room reading Watson's book. I made him come to the party for a while, but he left early, and when I arrived back at the room, very late, he said, "You've got to read this book."
I said, "Great! I'll look forward to it."
And he said, "No, I mean now."
So I read that book, from one o'clock to five o'clock in the morning, with Feynman sitting across the room watching me, waiting for me to finish so we could discuss it. At a certain point, I said, "Watson must have been either very lucky or very smart, because he never knew anything that anybody else was doing, and he still made the crucial discovery."
Feynman had been doodling on a pad of paper, and he had written the one word DISREGARD, which he had then illuminated, decorated. He jumped up and said, "That's what I learned from reading it. I used to know it, and I forgot it - I have to disregard everybody else, and then I can do my own work."
As soon as it was a respectable hour in California he called his wife, and he said, "I think I'm going to be able to work again!"
- David Goodstein, No Ordinary Genius
