Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [188]
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at the California Institute of Technology in the 1950s, before standard texts have become available, discovers unpublished lecture notes by Richard Feynman, circulating samizdat style.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 asks 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 titled 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