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So I'm finishing the night.....
- Thread starter javaguru
- Start date
I'm reading Gleick's Genius again.
Highly recommended.
http://www.amazon.com/Genius-Life-Science-Richard-Feynman/dp/0679747044
Highly recommended.
http://www.amazon.com/Genius-Life-Science-Richard-Feynman/dp/0679747044
Stefka said:
Well, yeah, lol, but this is a very well-written and wordy book.
Excerpt:
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.
Stefka said:
"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."
