Spaw, great analogy. Feynman's great. Have you read his autobiographies? I also recommend James Gleik's biography of him, Genius.

Annap, there's an story (possibly apocryphal) about a physics test question that asked students how they would go about determining the height of the school building if they had a clock and some other stuff (I forget exactly what). The idea was to use a particular formula, but the question didn't specify that. A particularly clever (albeit somewhat irreverent) student came up with a completely different way, rational if a little silly (like, I'd tie a string to the clock, lower it down, mark how far it went and measure the string with a ruler). The teacher marked him off. He complained, she gave him another shot, and got another rational answer different from the expected one (something involving throwing the clock of the roof), she gave him a third chance, and sticking to his guns that a right answer is a right answer his final reply was that he would sell the clock and pay the janitor get his long tape measure and measure the height of one story then multiply by the number of floors in the school. Supposedly the teacher wrote the author Issac Assimov and asked his advice. He told her to give the kid an A. "After all", he wrote, "if you can describe what you know and how you know it, that's science. It doesn't matter if you use the same method as everybody else."