Introduction

In his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman suggested that rather than vacation like other folks, he chose to “vacation” in other academic disciplines, and in one particular instance, he worked the summer in the biology labs at Cal Tech. The religion scholar J. Z. Smith recalled this instance to highlight an important, if subtle, point: what he referred to as “the disciplinary lie.” Feynman claimed to have done some breakthrough work, and said that he had been invited to write up his work for publication and possibly some seminars at Harvard (through his acquaintance the eminent biologist James Watson). When he asked a biologist friend of his to review the written work, his colleague laughed at Feynman. Feynman reported, “It wasn’t in the standard form that biologists use, first procedures and so forth. I spent a lot of time explaining things that all the biologists knew. [The biologist] made a shortened version, but now I couldn’t understand it.” ¹ Feynman claimed to have learned much, including the pronunciation of key terms and how to recognize poor laboratory technique. But, according to Smith, “What he could not recognize was the fictive modes of accepted disciplinary discourse. As a result, we have a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who, when he writes up an experiment, is laughed at by his biological colleagues; when they write it up ‘properly,’ he is incapable of understanding his own work.” ²