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By Root 2334 0

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