Driving under the influence of Feynman seems to have touched off some discussion over at Blogcritics, where I repost some of my work. Scroll down to the end to read and participate in the Feynman free-for-all.

If you're interested, here are some of my other Blogcritics posts, all of which have also appeared on NanoBot.

Blogcritics is an excellent conglomeration of bloggers, by the way, and it certainly gets my vote for a blog site that will "make it" after the blog hype settles down and only the profitable survive. Not that I'm any kind of Website soothsayer, but way back during the go-go late '90s, I had faith that Beliefnet.com would live to tell the greatest economic boom story ever told, and I was right. Some of my contributions from a few years and career turns back can be found here and here.

Back to Feynman. In my previous post, I talked about how the nanotech founding father's words get me through my morning commute. Feynman was big on making science understandable to everyday slobs like me. I've written about this subject before, and I do wish that I had been around during his heyday. But I wonder how I would have handled this interview, relayed by Robert P. Crease in a March 2001 article in Physics Web, Revenge of the Science Writer.

"In my own encounter with Feynman - which, incidentally, is recounted in the epilogue to James Gleick's biography Genius ( ) - I asked him questions about episodes of his intellectual development. Feynman's replies were direct, but accompanied by intense curiosity about why I was asking; he sought to learn. Then I asked him about progress in science. This did not interest him. A physiological change in his face told me that I had abruptly gone from scholar to scribbler.

All at once he grew angry, stood up, and began shouting. "It's a dumb question," he yelled, "I don't know how to answer it. Cancel everything I said!" He slammed his fist into the mountains of papers on his desk, then strode to the door. "It's all so stupid. All of these interviews are always so damned useless." He walked down the corridor, shouting: "It's goddamned useless to talk about these things! It's a complete waste of time! The history of these things is nonsense! You're trying to make something difficult and complicated out of something that's simple and beautiful!"

In that instant, witnessing his curiosity evaporate, I realized this had nothing to do with me, nor with contempt for outsiders, nor with scorn for history. Rather, it had everything to do with Feynman's absorption in his own work - the same kind of absorption that made him a great physicist.

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