But I do think that Feynman's anti-scholarly approach let him to waste a great deal of time, at the very least (and he died too young, with too much undone). Despite his stunning raw mental power, Feynman was a self-proclaimed and vigorous philistine. He simply would not consult anyone else's work or acknowledge that anything already in the literature might be worth his attention. He insisted on working everything out for himself for first principles.

One may admire the audacity, but what an inefficient system. The world, after all, is not entirely inhabited by morons, and some conclusions of quality can be found in published sources Several years ago, I visited CALTECH to give a lecture and spent the night in a suite that Einstein had occupied. In the best conceivable follow-up, my host told me the next mooring that Richard Feynman wanted to have breakfast with me because he has "figured out some things about evolution" and wanted to discuss them with me ( tell them at me would be more accurate, as it turned out ). I was delighted, of course, for I had never met the man and knew him only by incandescent reputation. We sat for three hours, long past closing time for bacon and eggs. I was fascinated but also disturbed.

Feynman told me that he had reached some conclusions about evolution that were probably important and no doubt novel -- all by reasoning from basic principles of Darwin's theory of natural selection. Well, he had figure out about half a dozen things, and they were all correct ( so far as we know ). But I was dumb struck as I have ever been in my intellectual life. Every one of his conclusions can be found in chapter one of any elementary evolution textbook. They were all figured out more than a 100 years ago, mostly by Darwin himself. (Feynman, for example, had rediscovered Darwin's principle of sexual selection in both versions of male combat and female choice.) I said to him, "Dick, that's all well and true, but we really do know these things; they are the basis of our science; didn't you ever encounter them in our readings ?"

He replied that he had read nothing, on purpose.

Now Feynman could get away with such an antischolarly approach because he was so brilliant, and because the method had served him well. But he had frittered some time away in this case -- and I would certainly not recommend this tactic to ordinary mortals, even highly intelligent and creative ones.

My colleague Sid Coleman spoke to Feynman's willful ignorance of past work
( quoted by James Gleick, New York Times magazine, September 20, 1992 --- Gleick has written a 700 page biography of Feynman, called GENIUS; he wrote the long NYTimes obituary - not the one you read first )

"I'm sure Dick thought of that as a virtue, as nobel. I don't think it's so. I think it's kidding yourself. Those other guys are not all a collection of yo-yos. Sometimes it would be better to take the recent machinery they have build and not try to rebuild it, like reinventing the wheel. Dick could get away with a lot because he was so goddamn smart." 4/13st/96