Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [192]
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