What bothers me the most when I read this kind of stuff, is that there is no clear reason why the success of Feynman & co. should be attributed to some innate t

What bothers me the most when I read this kind of stuff, is that there is no clear reason why the success of Feynman & co. should be attributed to some innate talent rather than to hard work, and yet most people firmly believe in the former explanation. A very plausible reason for the 'genius' of all these physicists is that when faced with challenging problems, they didn't despair like most people, and instead tried experimenting with various approaches, or temporarily switched to different problems. In fact, in many interviews, Feynman himself claimed that 'intelligence' had nothing to do with his success. It's also interesting to observe how different the comments are on Cosmic Variance and on Hacker News. Maybe the fact that so many physicists share the views expressed in that post has something to do with there being so few Feynmans, Hawkings and Einsteins.