Physics Work is Like Building a House of Cards

To do high, real good physics work you do need absolutely solid lengths of time, so that when you're putting ideas together which are vague and hard to remember, it's very much like building a house of cards and each of the cards is shaky, and if you forget one of them the whole thing collapses again. You don't know how you got there and you have to build them up again, and if you're interrupted and kind of forget half the idea of how the cards went together--your cards being different-type parts of the ideas, ideas of different kinds that have to go together to build up the idea--the main point is, you put the stuff together, it's quite a tower and it's easy [for it] to slip, it needs a lot of concentration--that is, solid time to thing--and if you've got a job in administering anything like that, then you don't have the solid time.

Building ideas upon ideas to figure out physics is like constructing a house of cards, requiring intense concentration and a chain of ideas.