Gleick, James (1992), Genius, Pantheon Books, New York: NY. ISBN 0-679-40836-3
In this segment from his biography of Feynman, Gleick frames the often overused word genius as it applies to categorizing a particular type of intelligence - a level of analysis, comprehension, and insight that produces results that have the potential to redefine an area of knowledge.
In the spring of 1955 the man most plainly and universally identified with the word genius died at Princeton Hospital. Most of his body was cremated, the ashes scattered, but not the brain. The hospital's pathologist, Dr. Thomas S. Harvey, removed this last remnant to a jar of formaldehyde.
Harvey weighed it. A mediocre two and two-thirds pounds. One more negative datum to sabotage the notion that the brain's size might account for the difference between ordinary and extraordinary mental ability - a notion that various nineteenth-century researchers had labored futilely to establish (claiming along the way to have demonstrated the superiority of men over women, white men over black men, and Germans over Frenchmen. The brain of the great mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss had been turned over to such scientists. It disappointed them. Now, with Einstein's cerebrum on their hands, researchers proposed more subtle ways of searching for the secret of genius: measuring the density of surrounding blood vessels, the percentage of glial cells, the degree of neuronal branching. Decades passed. Microscopic sections and photographic slides of Einstein's brain circulated among a tight circle of anatomically minded psychologists, called neuropsychologists, unable to let go the idea that a detectable sign of the qualities that made Einstein famous might remain somewhere in these fragmentary trophies. By the 1980s this famous of brains had been whittled down to small gray shreds preserved in the office of a pathologist retired to Wichita, Kansas - a sodden testament to the elusiveness of the quality called genius.
Eventually the findings were inconclusive, though that did not make them unpublishable. (One researcher counted a large excess of branching cells in the parietal sector called Brodmann area 39.) Those searching for genius's corporeal basis had little enough material from which to work. "Is there a neurological substrate for talent?" asked the editors of one neuropsychology volume. "Of course, as neuropsychologists we hypothesize that there must be such a substrate and would hardly think to relegate talent somehow to 'mind.' What evidence currently exists would be the results of the work on Einstein's brain ..." - the brain that created the post-Newtonian universe, that released the pins binding us to absolute space and time, that visualized (in its parietal lobe?) a plastic fourth dimension, that banished the ether, that refused to believe God played dice, that piloted such a kindly, forgetful form about the shaded streets of Princeton. There was only one Einstein. For schoolchildren and neuropsychologists alike, he stood as an icon of intellectual power. He seemed - but was this true? - to have possessed a rare and distinct quality, genius as an essence, not a mere statistical extremum on a supposed bell-curve of intelligence. This was the conundrum of genius. Was genius truly special? Or was it a matter of degree - a miler breaking 3:50 rather than 4:10? (A shifting bell-curve, too: yesterday's record-setter, today's also-ran.) Meanwhile, no one had thought to dissect the brains of Niels Bohr, Paul A. M. Dirac, Enrico Fermi; Sigmund Freud, Pablo Picasso, Virginia Woolf, Jascha Heifetz, Isadora Duncan, Babe Ruth; or any of the other exceptional, creative, intuitive souls to whom the word was so often and so lubricously applied.
What a strange and bewildering literature grew up around the term genius - defining it, analyzing it, categorizing it, rationalizing and reifying it. Commentators have contrasted it with such qualities as (mere) talent, intellect, imagination, originality, industriousness, sweep of mind and elegance of style; or have shown how genius is composed of these in various combinations. Psychologists and philosophers, musicologists and art critics, historians of science and scientists themselves have all stepped into this quagmire, a capacious one. Their centuries of labor have produced no consensus on any of the necessary questions. Is there such a quality? If so, where does it come from? (A glial surplus in Brodmann area 39? A doting, faintly unsuccessful father who channels his intellectual ambition into his son? A frightful early encounter with the unknown, such as death of a sibling?) When otherwise sober scientists speak of the genius as magician, wizard, or superhuman, are they merely indulging in a flight of literary fancy? When people speak of the borderline between genius and madness, why is it so evident what they mean? And a question that has barely been asked (the where-are-the-.400-hitters question): Why, as the pool of available humans has risen from one hundred million to one billion to five billion, has the production of geniuses - Shakespeares, Newtons, Mozarts, Einsteins - seemingly choked off to nothing, genius itself coming to seem like the property of the past?
"Enlightened, penetrating, and capacious minds," as William Duff chose to put it two hundred years ago, speaking of such exemplars as Homer, Quintilian, and Michelangelo in one of a string of influential essays by mid-eighteenth-century Englishmen that gave birth to the modern meaning of the word genius. Earlier, it had meant spirit, the magical spirit of a jinni or more often the spirit of a nation. Duff and his contemporaries wished to identify genius with the godlike powers of invention, of creation, of making what never was before, and to do so they had to create a psychology of imagination: imagination with a "RAMBLING and VOLATILE power"; imagination "perpetually attempting to soar" and "apt to deviate into the mazes of error."
"Imagination is that faculty whereby the mind not only reflects on its own operations, but which assembles the various ideas conveyed to the understanding by the canal of sensation, and treasured up in the repository of the memory, compounding or disjoining them at pleasure; and which, by its plastic power of inventing new associations of ideas, and of combining them with infinite variety, is enabled to present a creation of its own, and to exhibit scenes and objects which never existed in nature."
These were qualities that remained two centuries later at the center of cognitive scientists' efforts to understand creativity: the mind's capacity for self-reflection, self-reference, self-comprehension; the dynamical and fluid creation of concepts and associations. The early essayists on genius, writing with a proper earnestness, attempting to reduce and regularize a phenomenon with (they admitted) an odor of the inexplicable, nevertheless saw that genius allowed a certain recklessness, even a lack of craftsmanship. Genius seemed natural, unlearned, uncultivated. Shakespeare was - "in point of genius," Alexander Gerard wrote in 1774 - Milton's superior, despite a "defective" handling of poetic details. The torrent of analyses and polemics on genius that appeared in those years introduced a rhetoric of ranking and comparing that became a standard method of the literature. Homer versus Virgil, Milton versus Virgil, Shakespeare versus Milton. The results - a sort of tennis ladder for the genius league - did not always wear well with the passage of time. Newton versus Bacon? In Gerard's view Newton's discoveries amounted to a filling in of a framework developed with more profound originality by Bacon - "who, without any assistance, sketched out the whole design." Still, there were those bits of Newtonian mathematics to consider. On reflection Gerard chose to leave for posterity "a question of very difficult solution, which of the two had the greatest genius."
He and his contemporary essayists had a purpose. By understanding genius, rationalizing it, celebrating it, and teasing out its mechanisms, perhaps they could make the process of discovery and invention less accidental. In later times that motivation has not disappeared. More overtly than ever, the nature of genius - genius as the engine of scientific discovery - has become an issue bound up with the economic fortunes of nations. Amid the vast modern network of universities, corporate laboratories, and national science foundations has arisen an awareness that the best financed and best organized of research enterprises have not learned to engender, perhaps not even to recognize, world-turning originality.
Genius, Gerard summed up in 1774, "is confessed to be a subject of capital importance, without the knowledge of which a regular method of invention cannot be established, and useful discoveries must continue to be made, as they have generally been made hitherto, merely by chance." Hitherto, as well. In our time he continues to be echoed by historians of science frustrated by the sheer ineffability of it all. But they keep trying to replace awe with understanding. J.D. Bernal said in 1939:
"It is one of the hopes of the science of science that, by careful analysis of past discovery, we shall find a way of separating the effects of good organization from those of pure luck, and enabling us to operate on calculated risks rather than blind chance."
Yet how could anyone rationalize a quality as fleeting and accident-prone as a genius's inspiration: Archimedes and his bath, Newton and his apple? People love stories about geniuses as alien heroes, possessing a quality beyond human understanding, and scientists may be the world's happiest consumers of such stories. A modern example:
A physicist studying quantum field theory with Murray Gell-Mann at the California Institute of Technology in the 1950s, before standard texts have become available, discovers unpublished lecture notes by Richard Feynman, circulating samizdat style. He asked Gell-Mann about them. Gell-Mann says no, Dick's methods are not the same as the methods used here. The student asks, well, what are Feynman's methods? Gell-Mann leans coyly against the blackboard and says, Dick's method is this. You write down the problem. You think very hard. (He shuts his eyes and presses his knuckles parodically to his forehead.) Then you write down the answer.
The same story appeared over and over again. It was an old genre. From an 1851 tract title Genius and Industry:
( A professor from the University of Cambridge calls upon a genius of mathematics working in Manchester as a lowly clerk.) "... from Geometry to Logarithms, and to the Differential and Integral Calculus; and thence again to questions the most foreign and profound: at last, a question was proposed to the poor clerk - a question which weeks had been required to solve. Upon a simple slip of paper it was answered immediately. 'But how,' said the professor, ' do you work this? show me the rule! ... The answer is correct but you have reached it by a different way.'
"'I have worked it,' said the clerk, 'from a rule in my own mind. I cannot show you the law - I never saw it myself; the law is in my mind.'
"'Ah' said the Professor, 'if you talk of a law within your mind, I have done; I cannot follow you there.'"
Magicians again. As Mark Kac said: "... The working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark." The notion places a few individuals at the margin of their community - the impractical margin, since the stock in trade of the scientist is the method that can be transferred from one practitioner to the next.
If the most distinguished physicists and mathematicians believe in the genius as magician, it is partly for psychological protection. A merely excellent scientist could suffer an unpleasant shock when he discussed his work with Feynman. It happened again and again: physicists would wait for an opportunity to get Feynman's judgment of a result on which they had staked weeks or months of their career. Typically Feynman would refuse to allow them to give a full explanation. He said it spoiled his fun. He would let them describe just the outline of the problem before he would jump up and say, Oh I know that ... and scrawl on the blackboard not his visitor's result, A, but a harder, more general theorem, X. So A (about to be mailed, perhaps to the Physical Review) was merely a special case. This could cause pain. Sometimes it was not clear whether Feynman's lightning answers came from instantaneous calculation or from a storehouse of previously worked-out - and unpublished - knowledge. The astrophysicist Willy Fowler proposed at a Caltech seminar in the 1960s that quasars - mysterious blazing radiation sources lately discovered in the distant sky - were supermassive stars, and Feynman immediately rose, astonishingly, to say that such objects would be gravitationally unstable. Furthermore, he said that the instability followed from general relativity. The claim required a calculation of the subtle countervailing effects of stellar forces and relativistic gravity. Fowler thought he was talking through his hat. A colleague later discovered that Feynman had done a hundred pages of work on the problem years before. The Chicago astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar independently produced Feynman's result - it was part of the work for which he won a Nobel Prize twenty years later. Feynman himself never bothered to publish. Someone with a new idea always risked finding, as one colleague said, "that Feynman had signed the guest book and already left."
A great physicist who accumulated knowledge without taking the trouble to publish could be a genuine danger to his colleagues. At best it was unnerving to learn that one's potentially career-advancing discovery had been, to Feynman, below the threshold of publishability. At worst it undermined one's confidence in the landscape of the known and not known. There was an uneasy subtext to the genus of story prompted by this habit. It was said of Lars Onsager, for example, that a visitor would ask him about a new result; sitting in his office chair he would say, I believe that is correct; then he would bend forward diffidently to open a file drawer, glance sidelong at a long-buried page of notes, and say, Yes, I thought so; that is correct. This was not always precisely what the visitor had hoped to hear.
A person with a mysterious storehouse of unwritten knowledge was a wizard. So was a person with the power to tease from nature its hidden secrets - a scientist, that is. The modern scientist's view of his quest harkened back to something ancient and cabalistic: laws, rules, symmetries for knowledge became overwhelming, even oppressive. John Maynard Keynes, facing a small audience in a darkened room at Cambridge a few years before his death, spoke of Newton as "this strange spirit, who was tempted by the Devil to believe ... that he could reach all the secrets of God and Nature by the pure power of mind - Copernicus and Faustus in one."
"Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to this esoteric brotherhood ... He did read the riddle of the heavens. And he believed that by the same powers of his introspective imagination he would read the riddle of the Godhead, the riddle of past and future events divinely foreordained, the riddle of the elements and their constitution..."
In his audience, intently absorbing these words, aware of the cold and the gloom and the seeming exhaustion of the speaker, was the young Freeman Dyson. Dyson came to accept much of Keynes's view of genius, winnowing away the seeming mysticism. He made the case for magicians in the calmest, most rational way. No "magical mumbo-jumbo," he wrote. "I am suggesting that anyone who is transcendentally great as a scientist is likely also to have personal qualities that ordinary people would consider in some sense superhuman." The greatest scientists are deliverers and destroyers, he said. Those are myths, of course, but myths are part of the reality of the scientific enterprise. When Keynes, in that Cambridge gloom, described Newton as a wizard, he was actually pressing back to a moderate view of genius - for after the eighteenth century's sober tracts had come a wild turning. Where the first writers on genius had noticed in Homer and Shakespeare a forgivable disregard for the niceties of prosody, the romantics of the late nineteenth century saw powerful, liberating heroes, throwing off shackles, defying God and convention. They also saw a bent of mind that could turn fully pathological. Genius was linked with insanity - was insanity. That feeling of divine inspiration, the breadth of revelation seemingly from without, actually came from within, where melancholy and madness twisted the brain. The roots of this idea were old. "Oh! how near are genius and madness!" Denis Diderot had written. "...Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them." It was a side effect of the change in focus from God-centeredness to human-centeredness. The very notion of revelation, in the absence of a Revealer, became disturbing, particularly to those who experienced it: "... something profoundly convulsive and disturbing suddenly becomes visible and audible with indescribable definiteness and exactness," Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. "One hears - one does not seek; one takes - one does not ask who gives: a thought flashes out like lightning ..." Genius now suggested Charles-Pierre Baudelaire or Ludwig van Beethoven, flying off the tracks of normality. Crooked roads, William Blake had said: "Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius."
An 1891 treatise on genius by Cesare Lombroso listed some associated symptoms. Degeneration. Rickets. Pallor. Emaciation. Lefthandedness. A sense of the mind as a cauldron in tumult was emerging in European culture, along with an often contradictory hodgepodge of psychic terminology, all awaiting the genius of Freud to provide a structure and a coherent jargon. In the meantime: Misoneism. Vagabondage. Unconsciousness. More presumed clues to genius. Hyperesthesia. Amnesia. Originality. Fondness for special words. "Between the physiology of the man of genius, therefore, and the pathology of the insane," Lombroso concluded, "There are many points of coincidence..." The genius, disturbed as he is, makes errors and wrong turns that the ordinary person avoids. Still, these madmen, "despising and overcoming obstacles which would have dismayed the cool and deliberate mind - hasten by whole centuries the unfolding of truth."
The notion never vanished; in fact it softened into a cliché. Geniuses display an undeniable obsessiveness resembling, at times, monomania. Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity. Nevertheless, the lunatic-genius-wizard did not play as well in America, notwithstanding the relatively unbuttoned examples of writers like Whitman and Melville. There was a reason. American genius as the nineteenth century neared its end was not busy making culture, playing with words, creating music and art, or otherwise impressing the academy. It was busy sending its output to the patent office. Alexander Graham Bell was a genius. Eli Whitney and Samuel Morse were geniuses. Let European romantics celebrate the genius as erotic hero (Don Juan) or the genius as martyr (Werther). Let them bend their definitions to accommodate the genius composers who succeeded Mozart, with their increasingly direct pipelines to the emotions. In America what newspapers already called the machine age was under way. The consummate genius, the genius who defined the word for the next generation, was Thomas Alva Edison.
By his own description he was no wizard, this Wizard of Menlo Park. Anyone who knew anything about Edison knew that his genius was ninety-nine percent perspiration. The stories that defined his style were not about inspiration in the mode of the Newtonian apple. They spoke of exhaustive, laborious trial and error: every conceivable lamp filament, from human hair to bamboo fiber. "I speak without exaggeration," Edison declared (certainly exaggerating), "when I say that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light, each of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true." He added that he had methodically disproved 2,998 of them by experiment. H claimed to have carried out fifty thousand individual experiments on a particular type of battery. He had a classic American education: three months in a Michigan public school. The essential creativity that led to the phonograph, the electric light, and more than a thousand other patented inventions was deliberately played down by those who built and those who absorbed his legend. Perhaps understandably so - for after centuries in which a rationalizing science had systematically drained magic from the world, the machine-shop inventions of Edison and other heroes were now loosing a magic with a frightening, transforming power. This magic buried itself in the walls of houses or beamed itself invisibly through the air.
"Mr. Edison is not a wizard," reported a 1917 biography.
"Like all people who have prodigiously assisted civilization, his processes are clear, logical, and normal.
Wizardry is the expression of superhuman gifts and, as such, is an impossible thing...
And yet, Mr. Edison can bid the voices of the dead to speak, and command men in their tombs to pass before our eyes."
"Edison was not a wizard," announced a 1933 magazine article. "If he had what seems suspiciously like a magic touch, it was because he was markedly in harmony with his environment...." And there the explication of Edisonian genius came more or less to an end. All that remained was to ask - but few did - one of those impossible late-night what if questions: What if Edison had never lived? What if this self-schooled, indefatigable mind with its knack for conceiving images of new devices, methods, processes had not been there when the flood began to break? The question answers itself, for it was a flood that Edison rode. Electricity had burst upon a world nearing the limits of merely mechanical ingenuity. The ability to understand and control currents of electrons had suddenly made possible a vast taxonomy of new machines - telegraphs, dynamos, lights, telephones, motors, heaters, devices to sew, grind, saw, toast, iron, and suck up dirt, all waiting at the misty edge of potentiality. No sooner had Hans Christian Oersted noticed, in 1820, that a current could move a compass needle than inventors - not just Samuel Morse but André-Marie Ampére and a half-dozen others - conceived of telegraphy. Even more people invented generators, and by the time enough pieces of technology had accumulated to make television possible, no one inventor could plausibly serve as its Edison.
The demystification of genius in the age of inventors shaped the scientific culture - with its plainspoken positivism, its experiment-oriented technical schools - that nurtured Feynman and his contemporaries in the twenties and thirties, even as the pendulum swung again toward the more mysterious, more intuitive, and conspicuously less practical image of Einstein. Edison may have changed the world, after all, but Einstein seemed to have reinvented it whole, by means of a single, incomprehensible act of visualization. He saw how the universe must be and announced that it was so. Not since Newton...
By then the profession of science was expanding rapidly, counting not hundreds but tens of thousands of practitioners. Clearly most of their work, most of science, was ordinary - as Freeman Dyson put it, a business of "honest craftsmen," "solid work," "collaborative efforts where to be reliable is more important than to be original." In modern times it became almost impossible to talk about the processes of scientific change without echoing Thomas S. Kuhn, whose Structure of Scientific Revolutions so thoroughly changed the discourse of historians of science. Kuhn distinguished between normal science - problem solving, the fleshing out of existing frameworks, the unsurprising craft that occupies virtually all working researchers - and revolutions, the vertiginous intellectual upheavals through which knowledge lurches genuinely forward. Nothing in Kuhn's scheme required individual genius to turn the crank of revolutions. Still, it was Einstein's relativity, Heisenberg's uncertainty, Wegener's continental drift. The new mythology of revolutions dovetailed neatly with the older mythology of genius - minds breaking with the standard methods and seeing the world new. Dyson's kind of genius destroyed and delivered. Schwinger's quantum electrodynamics and Feynman's may have been mathematically the same, but one was conservative and the other revolutionary. One extended an existing line of thought. The other broke with the past decisively enough to mystify its intended audience. One represented an ending: a mathematical style doomed to grow fatally overcomplex. The other, for those willing to follow Feynman into a new style of visualization, served as a beginning. Feynman's style was risky, even megalomaniacal. Reflecting later on what had happened, Dyson saw his own goals, like Schwinger's, as conservative ("I accepted the orthodox view...I was looking for a neat set of equations...") and Feynman's as visionary: "He was searching for general principles that would be flexible enough so that he could adapt them to anything in the universe.
Other ways of seeking the source of scientific creativity had appeared. It seemed a long way from such an inspirational, how-to view of discovery to the view of neuropsychologists looking for a substrate, refusing to speak merely about "mind." Why had mind become such a contemptible word to neuropsychologists? Because they saw the term as a soft escape route, a deus ex machina for a scientist short on explanations. Feynman himself learned about neurons; he taught himself some brain anatomy when trying to understand color vision; but usually he considered mind to be the level worth studying. Mind must be a sort of dynamical pattern, not so much founded in a neurological substrate as floating above it, independent of it. "So what is this mind of ours?" he remarked. "What are these atoms with consciousness?"
"Last week's potatoes! They can now remember what was going on in my mind a year ago - a mind which has long ago been replaced ... The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out - there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday."
Genius was not a word in his customary vocabulary. Like many physicists he was wary of the term. Among scientists it became a kind of style violation, a faux pas suggesting greenhorn credulity, to use the word genius about a living colleague. Popular usage had cheapened the word. Almost anyone could be a genius for the duration of a magazine article. Briefly, Stephen Hawking, a British cosmologist esteemed but not revered by his peers, developed a reputation among some nonscientists as Einstein's heir to the mantle. For Hawking, who suffered from a progressively degenerative muscular disease, the image of genius was heightened by the drama of a formidable intelligence fighting to express itself within a withering body. Still, in terms of raw brilliance and hard accomplishment, a few score of his professional colleagues felt that he was no more a genius than they.
In part, scientists avoided the word because they did not believe in the concept. In part, the same scientists avoided it because they believed all too well, like Jews afraid to speak the name of Yahweh. It was generally safe to say only that Einstein had been a genius; after Einstein, perhaps Bohr, who had served as a guiding father figure during the formative era of quantum mechanics; after Bohr perhaps Dirac, perhaps Fermi, perhaps Bethe ... All these seemed to deserve the term. Yet Bethe, with no obvious embarrassment or false modesty, would quote Mark Kac's faintly oxymoronic assessment that Bethe's genius was "ordinary," by contrast to Feynman's :"An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better." You and I would be just as good ... Much of what passes for genius is mere excellence, the difference a matter of degree. A colleague of Fermi's said: "Knowing what Fermi could do did not make me humble. You just realize that some people are smarter than you are, that's all. You can't run as fast as some people or do mathematics as fast as Fermi."
In the domains of criticism that fell under the spell of structuralism and then deconstructionism, even this unmagical view of genius became suspect. Literary and music theory, and the history of science as well, lost interest not only in the old-fashioned sports-fan approach - Homer versus Virgil - but also in the very idea of genius itself as a quality in the possession of certain historical figures. Perhaps genius was an artifact of a culture's psychology, a symptom of a particular form of hero worship. Reputations of greatness come and go, after all, propped up by the sociopolitical needs of an empowered sector of the community and then slapped away by a restructuring of the historical context. The music of Mozart strikes certain ears as evidence of genius, but it was not always so - critics of another time considered it prissy and bewigged - nor will it always be. In the modern style, to ask about his genius is to ask the wrong question. Even to ask why he was "better" than, say, Antonio Salieri would be the crudest of gaffes. A modern music theorist might, in his secret heart, carry an undeconstructed torch for Mozart, might feel the old damnably ineffable rapture; still he understands that genius is a relic of outmoded romanticism. Mozart's listeners are as inextricable a part of the magic as the observer is a part of the quantum-mechanical equation. Their interests and desires help form the context without which the music is no more than an abstract sequence of notes - or so the argument goes. Mozart's genius, if it existed at all, was not a substance, not even a quality of mind, but a byplay, a give and take within a cultural context.
How strange, then, that coolly rational scientists should be the last serious scholars to believe not just in genius but in geniuses; to maintain a mental pantheon of heroes; and to bow, with Mark Kac and Freeman Dyson, before the magicians.
"Genius is the fire that lights itself," someone had said. Originality; imagination; the self-driving ability to set one's mind free from the worn channels of tradition. Those who tried to take Feynman's measure always came back to originality. "He was the most original mind of his generation," declared Dyson. The generation coming up behind him, with the advantage of hindsight, still found nothing predictable in the paths of his thinking. If anything he seemed perversely and dangerously bent on disregarding standard methods. "I think if he had not been so quick people would have treated him as a brilliant quasi-crank, because he did spend a substantial amount of time going down what later turned out to be dead ends," said Sidney Coleman, a theorist who first knew Feynman at Caltech in the fifties.
"There are lots of people who are too original for their own good, and had Feynman not been as smart as he was, I think he would have been too original for his own good.
There was always an element of showboating in his character. he was like the guy that climbs Mont Blanc barefoot just to show that it can be done. A lot of things he did were to show, you didn't have to do it that way, you can do it this other way. And this other way, in fact, was not as good as the first way, but it showed he was different."
Feynman continued to refuse to read the current literature, and he chided graduate students who would begin their work on a problem in the normal way, by checking what had already been done. That way, he told them, they would give up chances to find something original. Coleman said:
"I suspect that Einstein had some of the same character. I'm sure Dick thought of that as a virtue, as noble. I don't think it's so. I think it's kidding yourself. Those other guys are not all a collection of yo-yos. Sometimes it would be better to take the recent machinery they have built and not try to rebuild it, like reinventing the wheel.
I know people who are in fact very original and not cranky but have not done as good physics as they could have done because they were more concerned at a certain juncture with being original than with being right. Dick could get away with a lot because he was so goddamn smart. He really could climb Mont Blanc barefoot."
Coleman chose not to study with Feynman directly. Watching Feynman work, he said, was like going to the Chinese opera.
"When he was doing work he was doing it in a way that was just -- absolutely out of the grasp of understanding. You didn't know where it was going, where it had gone so far, where to push it, what was the next step. With Dick the next step would somehow come out of -- divine revelation."
So many of his witnesses observed the utter freedom of his flights of thought, yet when Feynman talked about his own methods he emphasized not freedom but constraints. The kind of imagination that takes blank paper, blank staves, or a blank canvas and fills it with something wholly new, wholly free - that, Feynman contended, was not the scientist's imagination. Nor could one measure imagination as certain psychologists try to do, by displaying a picture and asking what will happen next. For Feynman the essence of the scientific imagination was a powerful and almost painful rule. What scientists create must match reality. It must match what is already known. Scientific creativity, he said, is imagination in a straitjacket. "The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines," he said. "They overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know..." This is a conservative principle, implying the existing framework of science is fundamentally sound, already a fair mirror of reality. Scientists, like the freer-seeming arts, feel the pressure to innovate, but in science the act of making something new contains the seeds of paradox. Innovation comes not through daring steps into unknown space,
"not just some happy thoughts which we are free to make as we wish, but ideas which must be consistent with all the laws of physics we know. We can't allow ourselves to seriously imagine things which are obviously in contradiction to the known laws of nature. And so our kind of imagination is quite a difficult game."
Creative artists in modern times have labored under the terrible weight of the demand for novelty. Mozart's contemporaries expected him to work within a fixed, shared framework, not to break the bonds of convention. The standard forms of the sonata, symphony, and opera were established before his birth and hardly changed in his lifetime; the rules of harmonic progression made a cage as unyielding as the sonnet did for Shakespeare. As unyielding and as liberating - for later critics found the creators' genius in the counterpoint of structure and freedom, rigor and inventiveness.
For the creative mind of the old school, inventing by pressing against constraints that seem ironclad, subtly bending a rod here or slipping a lock there, science has become the last refuge. The forms and constraints of scientific practice are held in place not just by the grounding in experiment but by the customs of a community more homogeneous and rule-bound than any community of artists. Scientists still speak unashamedly of reality, even in the quantum era, of objective truth, of a world independent of human construction, and they sometimes seem the last members of the intellectual universe to do so. Reality hobbles their imaginations. So does the ever more intricate assemblage of theorems, technologies, laboratory results, and mathematical formalisms that make up the body of known science. How, then, can the genius make a revolution? Feynman said, "Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend these things which are there."
It was the problem he faced in the gloomiest days of 1946, when he was trying to find his way out of the mire that quantum mechanics had become. "We know so very much," he wrote to his friend Welton, "and then subsume it into so very few equations that we can say we know very little (except these equations)...Then we think we have the physical picture with which to interpret the equations." The freedom he found then was a freedom not from the equations but from the physical picture. He refused to let the form of the mathematics lock him into any route to visualization: "There are so very few equations that I have found that many physical pictures can give the same equations. So I am spending my time in study - in seeing how many new viewpoints I can take of what is known." By then Welton had mastered the field theory that was becoming standard, and he was surprised to discover that his old friend had not. Feynman seemed to hoard shadow pools of ignorance, seemed to protect himself from the light like a waking man who closes his eyes to preserve a fleeting image left over from a dream. He said later, "Maybe that's why young people make success. They don't know enough. Because when you know enough it's obvious that every idea that you have is no good." Welton, too, was persuaded that if Feynman had known more, he could not have innovated so well.
"Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken." An Egyptian scribe fixed those words in stone at the very dawn of recorded utterance - already jaded, a millennium before Homer. Modern critics speak of the burden of the past and the anxiety of influence, and surely the need to innovate is an ancient part of the artist's psyche, but novelty was never as crucial to the artist as it became in the twentieth century. The useful lifetime of a new form or genre was never so short. Artists never before felt so much pressure to violate such young traditions.
Meanwhile, before their eyes, the world has grown too vast and multifarious for the towering genius of the old kind. Artists struggle to keep their heads above the tide. Norman Mailer, publishing yet another novel doomed to fall short of ambitions formed in an earlier time, notices: "There are no large people any more. I've been studying Picasso lately and look at who his contemporaries were: Freud, Einstein." He saw the change in his own lifetime without understanding it. (Few of those looking for genius understood where it had gone.) He appeared on a literary scene so narrow that conventional first novels by writers like James Jones made them appear plausible successors to Faulkner and Hemingway. He slowly sank into a thicket of hundreds of equally talented, original, and hard-driving novelists, each just as likely to be tagged as a budding genius. In a world into which Amis, Beckett, Cheever, Drabble, Ellison, Fuentes, Grass, Heller, Ishiguro, Jones, Kazantzakis, Lessing, Nabokov, Oates, Pym, Queneau, Roth, Solzhenitsyn, Theroux, Updike, Vargas Llosa, Waugh, Xue, Yates, and Zoshchenko - or any other two dozen fiction writers - had never been born, Mailer and any other potential genius would have had a better chance of towering. In a less crowded field, among shorter yardsticks, a novelist would not just have seemed bigger. He would have been bigger. Like species competing in ecological niches, he would have had a broader, richer space to explore and occupy. Instead the giants force one another into specialized corners of the intellectual landscape. They choose among domestic, suburban, rural, urban, demimondaine, Third World, realist, postrealist, semirealist, antirealist, surrealist, decadent, ultraist, expressionist, impressionist, naturalist, existentialist, metaphysical, romance, romanticist, neoromanticist, Marxist, picaresque, detective, satiric, and countless other fictional modes - as sea squirts, hagfish, jellyfish, sharks, dolphins, whales, oysters, crabs, lobsters, and countless hordes of marine species subdivide the life-supporting possibilities of an ocean that was once, for billions of years, dominated quite happily by blue-green algae.
"Giants have not ceded to mere mortals," the evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould wrote in an iconoclastic 1983 essay. "Rather, the boundaries...have been restricted and the edges smoothed." He was not talking about algae, artists, or paleontologists but about baseball players. Where are the .400 hitters? Why have they vanished into the mythic past, when technical skills, physical conditioning, and the population on which organized baseball draws have all improved? his answer: Baseball's giants have dwindled into a more uniform landscape. Standards have risen. The distance between the best and worst batters, and between the best and worst pitchers, has fallen. Gould showed by statistical analysis that the extinction of the .400 hitter was only the more visible side of a general softening of extremes: the .100 hitter has faded as well. The best and worst of all come closer to the average. Few fans like to imagine that Ted Williams would recede toward the mean in the modern major leagues, or that the overweight, hard-drinking Babe Ruth would fail to dominate the scientifically engineered physiques of his later competitors, or that dozens of today's nameless young base-stealers could outrun Ty Cobb, but it is inevitably so. Enthusiasts of track and field cannot entertain the baseball fan's nostalgia; their statistics measure athlete against nature instead of athlete against athlete, and the lesson from decade to decade is clear. There is such a thing as progress. Nostalgia conceals it while magnifying the geniuses of the past.
A nostalgic music lover will put on a scratchy 78 of Lauritz Melchior and sigh that there are no Wagnerian tenors any more. Yet in reality musical athletes have probably fared no worse than any other kind.
Is it only nostalgia that makes genius seem to belong to the past? Giants did walk the earth - Shakespeare, Newton, Michelangelo, DiMaggio - and in their shadows the poets, scientists, artists, and baseball players of today crouch like pygmies. No one will ever again create a King Lear or hit safely in fifty-six consecutive games, it seems. Yet the raw material of genius - whatever combination of native talent and cultural opportunity that might be - can scarcely have disappeared. On a planet of five billion people, parcels of genes with Einsteinian potential must appear from time to time, and presumably more often than ever before. Some of those parcels must be as well nurtured as Einstein's, in a world richer and better educated than ever before. Of course genius is exceptional and statistics-defying. Still, the modern would-be Mozart must contend with certain statistics: that the entire educated population of eighteenth-century Vienna would fit into a large New York apartment block; that in a given year the United States Copyright Office registers close to two hundred thousand "works of the performing arts," from advertising jingles to epic tone poems. Composers and painters now awake into a universe with a nearly infinite range of genres to choose from and rebel against. Mozart did not have to choose an audience or style. His community was in place. Are the latter-day Mozarts not being born, or all they all around, bumping shoulders with one another, scrabbling for cultural scraps, struggling to be newer than new, their stature inevitably shrinking all the while?
The miler who triumphs in the Olympic Games, who places himself momentarily at the top of the pyramid of all milers, leads a thousand next-best competitors by mere seconds. The gap between best and second-best, or even best and tenth-best, is so slight that a gust of wind or a different running shoe might have accounted for the margin of victory. Where the measuring scale becomes multidimensional and nonlinear, human abilities more readily slide off the scale. The ability to reason, to compute, to manipulate the symbols and rules of logic - this unnatural talent, too, must lie at the very margin, where small differences in raw talent have enormous consequences, where a merely good physicist must stand in awe of Dyson and where Dyson, in turn, stands in awe of Feynman. Merely to divide 158 by 192 presses most human minds to the limit of exertion. To master - as modern particle physicists must - the machinery of group theory and current algebra, of perturbative expansions and non-Abelian gauge theories, of spin statistics and Yang-Mills, is to sustain in one's mind a fantastic house of cards, at once steely and delicate. To manipulate that framework, and to innovate within it, requires a mental power that nature did not demand of scientists in past centuries. More physicists than ever rise to meet this cerebral challenge. Still, some of them, worrying that the Einsteins and Feynmans are nowhere to be seen, suspect that the geniuses have fled to microbiology or computer science - forgetting momentarily that the individual microbiologists and computer scientists they meet seem no brainier, on the whole, than physicists and mathematicians.
Geniuses change history. That is part of their mythology, and it is the final test, presumably more reliable than the trail of anecdote and peer admiration that brilliant scientists leave behind. Yet the history of science is a history not of individual discovery but of multiple, overlapping, coincidental discovery. All researchers know this in their hearts. It is why they rush to publish any new finding, aware that competitors cannot be far behind. As the sociologist Robert K. Merton has found, the literature of science is strewn with might-have-been genius derailed or forestalled - "those countless footnotes...that announce with chagrin: 'Since completing this experiment, I find that Woodworth (or Bell or Minot, as the case may be) had arrived at the same conclusion last year, and that Jones did so fully sixty years ago.'" The power of genius may lie, as Merton suggests, in the ability of one person to accomplish what otherwise might have taken dozens. Or perhaps it lies - especially in this exploding, multifarious, information-rich age - in one person's ability to see his science whole, to assemble, as Newton did, a vast unifying tapestry of knowledge. Feynman himself, as he entered his forties, prepared to undertake this very enterprise: a mustering and a reformulating of all that was known about physics.
Scientists still ask the what if questions. What if Edison had not invented the electric light - how much longer would it have taken? What if Heisenberg had not invented the S matrix? What if Fleming had not discovered penicillin? Or (the king of such questions) what if Einstein had not invented general relativity? "I always find questions like that ... odd," Feynman wrote to a correspondent who posed one. Science tends to be created as it is needed.
"We are not that much smarter than each other." he said.
