[JackFr]

You mistake my point -- the nature of the work Feynman did at Los Alamos was different than the nature of the work he did at the Institute for Advanced Study. All of the work was science, but at Los Alamos the target was a working bomb, at Princeton it was a deeper and more fundamental understanding of nature, and thus criteria for judging is different.

The Manhattan Project can be judged by the simple question, is there a working bomb? Evaluating basic research is much harder.