I like Gell-Mann's story about how Feynman would intentionally 'forget' his coat and tie when going to dine in the campus formal dining room and instead wear their scabby leftover tie and coat.
How might have things turned out differently if Gell-Mann had been the sort to realize that a good practical joke would have been to replace the scabby attire with Feynman's own tie and coat provided by some fleet-footed student. When Feynman arrived he would instead of being the iconoclast as usual he would have had to settle for just conforming as his own tie and coat would be sitting there waiting for him.
I once took a class with Gell-Mann with only a handful of other students. He did a lot of impressions of people's accents, so I asked him if he would imitate Feynman's, but he claimed he couldn't do it.
The funny thing about him complaining about Feynman's anecdotes is that Gell-Mann seemed to have just as many about himself.
A very interesting guy to talk to, as you might expect, though at times a little overwhelming.
Thanks for the tale; I recall reading from other sources (perhaps in the book "Genius"...?) that both Feynman and Gell-Mann had enormous egos that would butt against each other from time to time. It doesn't strike me that there's really a "bad guy" in this story.
I think Gell-Mann's problem is not Feynman's generation of anecdotes about himself, but Feynman's generation of anecdotes about Gell-Mann.
The bit about brushing teeth. I once knew a very intelligent young man who once concluded that sleeping was a superstition. He tried to not sleep. But he was in grade school at the time, and he hadn't heard about the Uberman polyphasic sleep schedule.
I wonder if Feynman knew what annoyed Gel-Mann and would do things just to fuck with him. It seems like the sort of practical joke Feynman might enjoy.
I believe that Feynman created anecdotes primarily because he was bored (not because of an ego), and he didn't spend tremendous effort on them (as Gell-Mann says) but rather he spent some effort on them and still had energy left over: he needed more to do, not less.
But wouldn't Gell-Mann, a guy who worked with him be a better judge of that, maybe Feynman did spend a good amount of energy of generating anecdotes, noone is perfect. It's becuase of all these anecdotes that we like him, not because we understand his papers of quantum electrodynamics. So maybe Gell-Mann has a point there !
I have read many opinions of Feynman by people who knew him personally. Sometimes they contradict, so we can't just assume they are all true. In any case, people can be mistaken and we should think for ourselves. There is a lot of evidence about Feynman publicly available. Based on that evidence, including Gell-Mann's testimony, I think what I said.
I do not say this in an attempt to make Feynman perfect (in fact inability to find enough to do is a flaw).
For all his accomplishments, Gell-Mann couldn't be happy until he had written a best seller like Feynman's. Adding to his melancholy, "Surely, You're Joking" was followed in 1988 by Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which sold more than nine million copies. To Gell-Mann's colleagues, a book of light-hearted anecdotes told by their intense and pedantic friend seemed a dubious prospect. It would have to be called, one of them said, "Dammit, Murray, You're Right Again!" Others remarked that Gell-Mann, unlike Hawking, didn't have the advantage of being confined to a wheelchair.
How might have things turned out differently if Gell-Mann had been the sort to realize that a good practical joke would have been to replace the scabby attire with Feynman's own tie and coat provided by some fleet-footed student. When Feynman arrived he would instead of being the iconoclast as usual he would have had to settle for just conforming as his own tie and coat would be sitting there waiting for him.
Feynman might have appreciated that.