I see IQ measurements as a rough estimate of certain cognitive skills that have some predictive ability of how well you will fare in solving classical school problems.

The pattern recognition skills that most IQ tests ask are fairly similar to solving a lot of exam questions. But they're only a part of the skillset that you need to become a great physicist.

If Feynman had prepared for an IQ test I bet he could have made it to 160. The kinds of patterns you see on IQ tests can be trained. But it's not a particularly interesting pursuit. I've personally done a professional IQ test and reached 130 while in university. Because in school you're training similar kind of problems regularly. I'm sure if I did an IQ test now I wouldn't even get close to 130, because I don't do exam questions regularly anymore. I also can't quote any successes similar to Mr. Feynman, so I doubt this is meaningful.

What IQ doesn't measure is curiosity. It doesn't measure how well you connect disparate disciplines. It doesn't measure how ready you are to upset the status quo. And if I read Feynman's book "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" correctly (great read btw), it was these things that actually made him think about physics problems from a different perspective.

Well first off, 120 is very smart. I don't see how saying that suggests he wasn't highly intelligent. My only point is that there's a reasonable case to be made that his contributions had more to do with how he acted, his personality, his drive, etc., than just with being born smarter than everyone. I really dislike the notion of "genius"; because I think it gives people an excuse to never develop themselves or to be happy with whatever intellectual plateau they've reached. Whenever I hear someone say "well so and so was a genius" I always feel like there's an unstated but implicit message of "so why bother?"