The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines. They try to test our imagination in the following way. They say, “Here is a picture of some people in a situation. What do you think will happen next?” When we say, “I can’t imagine,'' they may think we have a weak imagination. They over look the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know; that the electric fields and the waves we talk about are not just some happy thoughts which we are free to make as we wish, but ideas which must be consistent with all the laws of physics we know. We can't allow ourselves to seriously imagine things, which are obviously in contradiction to the known laws of nature. And so our kind of imagination is quite a difficult game. One has to have the imagination to think of something that has never been seen before, never been heard of before. At the same time the thoughts are restricted in a straitjacket, so to speak, limited by the conditions that come from our knowledge of the way nature really is. The problem of creating something which is new, but which is consistent with everything which has been seen before, is one of extreme difficulty.
Have you read about his obsession with visiting TUVA? Whatta' guy!
One of my favourite stories about Feynman is that he used to drive a battered old van with Feynman Diagrams drawn all over it. Often, people would recognise the diagrams but not him, and would ask why he had them on his van and if he knew what they meant.
Yup, he was that cool.... Those diagrams as of this day, are simple tools to handle deep concepts. He was a clover dude.... Many great stories. He was an "amateur" bongo player that performed several times in Brazil crazy carnaval parades. Why is he not a role model to today's young minds, beats me...