Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [191]
“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 Ampère 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