"It's not quite true that Feynman could not accept an idea until he had torn it apart. Rather, the idea could not yet be part of his way of thinking and looking at the world. Before an idea could contribute to that worldview, Feynman wanted to turn over the idea, to see why it was true, from any angle that he could find...In other words, he wanted to connect a new idea to what he already understood and thereby extend his understanding."

Perspective is the key to genius. Feynman wanted to understand problem from all angles and understand why something was true, not just that it merely was true. Your perspective is your answer to "Why?" (see http://jamesthornton.com/blog/how-to-get-to-genius). His approach resulted in a tight mental framework that enabled him to connect new ideas and build upon insights from the outside in -- breadth before depth.

I'm glad this article exists.

How can a person honestly argue that another person should have spent their time elsewhere or researched in a different manner? Feynman wrote a lot about how he was forced into researching in certain methods and researching certain things, and he realized he hated it and was ineffective as a result. It wasn't until he allowed his playful, curious, and lighthearted self to come out that he really started enjoying his work and getting somewhere. Supposedly his breakthroughs in QED all began from a simple curiosity into the wobbling nature of a plate that a student one day threw into the air.

People are stimulated in different ways.

Reading new things about an old topic of interest is so refreshing --- until the moment where you come across one fact which you know --- and which author got wrong. Feynman was from Far Rockaway in Queens, not Long Island, as implied by Lawrence Krauss in the first page of his book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman