While some physicists are known for their hearty support of atheism, even they can have some personal dieties. High in the physicist’s pantheon sits Richard Feynman, due not only to his obvious smarts and good work, but also to an outsized personality chonicled in a wealth of popular writings (and even a movie!). I’ve always had mixed feelings about Feynman as a cult figurehead, however. It’s nothing personal against Feynman in particular, but about the hero worship he represents. During high school or college, many aspiring physicists latch onto Feynman or Einstein or Hawking as representing all they hope to become. The problem is, the vast majority of us are just not that smart. Oh sure, we’re plenty clever, and are whizzes at figuring out the tip when the check comes due, but we’re not Feynman-Einstein-Hawking smart. We go through a phase where we hope that we are, and then reality sets in, and we either (1) deal, (2) spend the rest of our career trying to hide the fact that we’re not, or (3) drop out. It’s always bugged the crap out of me that physicists’ worship of genius conveys the simultaneous message that if you’re not F-E-H smart, then what good are you? In physics recommendation land, there is no more damning praise than saying someone is a “hard worker”.
Well, screw that. Yes, you have to be clever, but if you have good taste in problems, an ability to forge intellectual connections, an eye for untapped opportunities, drive, and yes, a willingness to work hard, you can have major impacts on the field. While my guess is that this is broadly understood to be true by those of us clever-but-not-F-E-H-smart folks who’ve survived the weeding of graduate school, postdoctoral positions, and assistant professorhood, we do a lousy job of communicating this fact to our students. I’ve always suspected that we lose talent from the field because people opt for Door #3 (drop out) when they face up to the fact that physics is frequently hard, even for very clever people. The idea that you have to be F-E-H smart to succeed gives little encouragement to continue when the going gets rough. (I have no idea if other fields have this same problem — my guess is that physicists are particularly prone to it, since we are trained early on to think that physicists are simply smarter than chemists or biologists. Those other fields are for the hard workers. We don’t put mathemeticians on this scale, because we secretly believe they’re smarter than us. Note to the biologist lynch mob: tounge is in cheek.)
Anyways, I’ve been thinking about this again in light of Po Bronson’s excellent article in New York Magazine about Carol Dweck’s research (which I read via Nordette in Blogher is coming out in a popular book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success). The article is focused on how to effectively handle praise for smart kids. The upshot (verified by a number of clever experiments), is that when you praise a kid for being smart in general, rather than for specific accomplishments or efforts, you risk paralyzing the kid with a fear of not looking smart, to the point where they will tend to shun challenges.
In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.
Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure).
While Dweck is working primarily with preK-12 students, everything covered in the article rings true for what I’ve seen at the higher levels (both for myself, my colleagues, and students). Those of us who are fortunate enough to sail through high school often crumple when the stuff we’re allegedly good at finally becomes hard. Whether you “make it” as a physicist after that has a lot to do with how you respond at that moment. Do you take it as a sign that you’re not cut out for the game? Do you feel like a failure, and stop enjoying physics as a whole? Do you buck up and forge ahead? (Like a neutrino, you’ll probably wind up oscillating among the three mixed states for a while, before collapsing into one of them.)
I was most struck in Bronson’s article by a description of an experiment by Lisa Blackwell and Dweck on the impact on performance of how one perceives intelligence. In a science magnet school with low acheiving students, Blackwell studied 700 students, all of whom were taught a multi-session unit on study skills. One half of the group, however, also received a “special module on how intelligence is not inate”:
The teachers—who hadn’t known which students had been assigned to which workshop—could pick out the students who had been taught that intelligence can be developed. They improved their study habits and grades. In a single semester, Blackwell reversed the students’ longtime trend of decreasing math grades.
The only difference between the control group and the test group were two lessons, a total of 50 minutes spent teaching not math but a single idea: that the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone improved their math scores.
These studies have lots of implications for higher ed in the sciences. Physics, with its strong cult of genius, is probably the canary in the coal mine.
I remember several friends from grad school who chose the third option of “dropping out”. They found out the hard way that particle/gravity/string theory was not as easy as they thought it would be, and that they were not the smartest guys in the room anymore. A few dropped out of grad school completely, while the others stumbled along in grad school until they finished their thesis.
Most of them eventually got over the fact that they were not Einsteins or Feynmans, while one or two still haven’t gotten over it yet. The two who still haven’t gotten over it yet, were the types who were the most intellectually arrogant and had huge overinflated egos.
There is a video on google video by James Watson (the DNA man) called “DNA and the Brain” in which he talks about this stuff. He says his biggest advantage was that he was brought up to believe that he was not smart.
I am (was?) one of those intellectually arrogant graduate students. I sailed through a prestigious high school, and then through a top physics undergrad program with a “good enough” (~ A-) GPA. I am now enrolled in a top graduate program in theoretical physics.
In high school, I sort of gravitated toward physics because it had the highest fun-to-work ratio. Math that I couldn’t do intuitively was therefore boring, and chemistry, biology, etc. had too many pesky details. While college was a bit harder, I made the same mentality work: I put effort into labs and problem sets, but didn’t study a single minute.
Well, grad school has been a different ballgame. Every bit of the previously cavalier attitude has come back to haunt me, and understanding new ideas takes studying! Grinding through nasty field calculations has also lost its novelty. Quite a shock to my ego, and my world view: I thought I could always be smart beyond reproach, and that I could cruise through an occupation that was almost always fun, prestigious, and comfortable salary-wise.
All I can do is hope that I will be a better person having received this reality check, and that I will land somewhere with good people and interesting work (in academia or otherwise).
First off, GREAT post.
>I have no idea if other fields have this same problem
This is a subject of exceeding importance, across fields. Computer science is much the same way. I’ve seen people drop out when they realize they aren’t the smartest, and had to do some serious soul-searching myself when I realized that I wasn’t the smartest. The ego is a fragile thing, and that’s what this is all about.
I think maybe schools, research institutions, and individual professors are part of the problem, in that they tend to be on the lookout for people like this, to the exclusion of bright but not F-E-H bright students. Perhaps it’s not even a conscious bias. But I’m all in favor of programs like the above mentioned, that face this issue head-on. We need the Joan Feynmans of the world, too.
>We need the Joan Feynmans of the world, too.
It occurred to me after posting that this could be interpreted as a sexist comment. What I meant is that we need the people who make the smaller contributions as well.
Feynman and Hawking have done a great deal to introduce people to physical and scientific thinking through their books and lectures. They will be remembered for their discoveries and their brilliance, but they are loved for their teaching. Feynman and Hawking both had what many of their admirers and imitators seem to lack - a sense of humor, and a desire to explain their insights to others. As a great example, Feynman’s QED lectures are available online:
http://www.vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8
Perhaps it would also be wise for physics students to look into the life of another physics genius, Ted Taylor, who went from being a leading nuclear weapon designer to advocating nuclear disarmament. Think carefully about how you use whatever skills you develop, in other words.
I don’t at all think everything was so easy for Feynman and Co. In fact, in one occasion, he admitted that a sum would be difficult to do at first. For all the students whom he helped afterwords, he solved it in minutes. And as that was his nature, he used to pretend that he was solving the problem.
Einstein never did that, but he never said that things were just easy for him. He said instead that he had to work hard on the problems.
The article you talked about, JuliAnne, I also stumbled upon it. I found it really educating. Perhaps I myself am a victim of the same thing?
Who was the biologist who said that “Evolution is smarter than you are?”
Geologists don’t need a quote to remind us of this- Mother nature kicks our butt more often than not.
One possibility is that on the smartness scale,
physicists > evolution and nature > biologists and geologists.
But this doesn’t explain the case of Lord Kelvin, who was a clever physicist but the dumbest geochronologist ever.
As for smartness limits, I think one of the big jumps between undergrad and graduate studies is that, at least when I was taught undergrad, we were generally asked to solve problems that had answers. Whereas once you are doing research, it is quite possible that the problem you try to tackle simply isn’t gonna be tractable, even with infinite smarts.
And if I had infinite smarts, I’d be able to remember the point I was trying to make.
Hi Julianne
“whizzes at figuring out the tip when the check comes due…”
“trained early on to think that physicists are smarter than chemists or biologists … secretly believe they (mathematicians) are smarter”
You still work out tips in your head, do you use a calculator. Is service charge included?
“A total of 50 minutes spent teaching not math but a single idea: that the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone improved their math scores”
The brain is a muscle, some do body building and lift weights, others do brain building and juggle symbols and numbers
“(Note to the biologist lynch mob: tongue in cheek)”
Where does this expression come from, will a tongue in cheek lessen the sting from a ’slap in the face’ - lol!
Excellent post. Of course, you must also look at it from the point of view of ordinary schmucks like…well…like…us. You might think yourself very smart compared to Feynman or Einstein, but compared to the average person (like me) you’re as much smarter than us as Einstein is than you.
Actrually, no — arguably much more so. The difference between the mathematical ability of the average person on the street and a research physicist is far greater than the differenc twixt you and Einstein.
Sure, I’ve got a degree in physics, but basically I’m too stupid to do anything useful. Linear homoegeon partial differential equations I can handle, conformal mapping and so forth, but that’s kiddy math. It’s trivial. That’s not real math. That undergrad stuff. The vast majority of the human race, including me, can’t do _real_ math. Case in point: I took a course on algebraic topology in college. Big mistake. My brain leaked out my ears within the first 10 minutes of the first lecture. I had _no_ idea what the professor was talking about. It was an eerie sensation, like listening to someone talking in Hittite cuneiform or Linear A. On the typical serious math paper, say, noncommutative loops over Lie algebra, or real homotopy theory of Kaehler manifolds, or compactification on Calabi-Yau manifolds, my head just starts to spin. I feel like a drooling idiot within about 2 paragraphs of a paper like that. It’s like trying to swim through tar. I get lost so fast you practically hear a sonic boom.
So you might take some encouragement from the fact that while you might not think you’re up to the standards of Hawking or Einstein, you’re about 1 inch from the top of a very tall pyarmid. The rest of us are several miles below, mucking about with itty bitty little kiddy math like vector analysisl. Anyone doing serious phsyics research has already attained such a high level, mathematically and intellectuall speaking, that you folks have nothing to complain about.
Oh well, It seemed to me that the problems given in uGrad years did not have solutions as well
Apart from that there are many gods.
There’s god money
Some will sell their mind and body for money
Some will sell their children, even their mother for money
And then go and worship in the churches (boutiques) and cathedrals (malls)
There’s god ‘muscle’
Some will sell their body and mind for power & authority
Some will sell their body and mind for knowledge
Some will sell their body and mind for muscles on the body
But in answer to your question YES, in other fields
soccer fields and other sports playing fields they have cult of personality
in the arena arts, theathre, fashion, movies, they clearly have the cult of personality.
And I may not want to be any known pop star, but many fancy the fantasy or dream of a ’successful’ rock star, others dream of becoming a successful rock climber.
Timely post for me. I’m just past my first such experience. I had been expecting it though. It was obvious that there should be some point where I would not be able to just sail by on minimal effort and a good general idea of what’s going on.
And heck was that a learning experience! A depressing one!
I think though that most good physicists are aware that nature is harder then we think it is. Goethe’s Faust in his yearning to understand (”was die Welt, im innersten zusammenhält”, the innermost connections of the world) conjures up the spirit of the earth only to be reprimanded:
Thou’rt like the spirit, thou dost comprehend,
Not me! (Vanishes.)
And Einstein certainly was no mathematical genius, as Hilbert reminds us:
“Every boy in the streets of Göttingen understands more about four-dimensional geometry than Einstein. Yet, in spite of that, Einstein did the work and not the mathematicians.” - Hilbert, 1915
or Einstein himself:
“Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater.”
“Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore.â€
Referring to the work of Minkowski I believe.
Simply I have always held that besides all human arrogance, the fundamental attitude of any good physicist must be one of humility towards our subject, which escapes us in every which way.
[…] On the cult of genius among physicists Julianne at Cosmic Variance, while discussing the cult of genius among physicists, has some tips on being a successful researcher in physics: Yes, you have to be clever, but if you have good taste in problems, an ability to forge intellectual connections, an eye for untapped opportunities, drive, and yes, a willingness to work hard, you can have major impacts on the field. […]
Just a quick annoying technical note: The words “excellent article” above look like a hyperlink, but it goes nowhere. You can get to the article via the BlogHer link (at least, I assume you’re talking about this excellent article), but you might want to fix that…
“We don’t put mathematicians on this scale, because we secretly believe they’re smarter than us.”
Actually, a large number of my fellow mathematicians are physics dropouts! So maybe physicists are smarter…
I think everything you’ve written applies equally well to us, except that there’s not such a consensus on who the gods are (I would vote for Grothendieck). Mathematicians have the extra twist of the biological clock, since no Fields medal are given beyond age 40.
mclaren: you might be like me. When the physicists do mathematics I am immediately lost; the lack of precision short circuits my brain. Precise mathematical descriptions I find much easier, and indeed I make my living by being an “expert” (i.e. knowing basic facts) on some of the most obscure corners of algebraic geometry.
Hi Mclaren. It is true that physicists are more mathematically skilled than the general population. However, the amount of mathematics used by a typical physicists is actually less than you might think.
Theoretical physicists, (and even among them, more in some particular fields than in others), sometimes use quite a lot of heavy math. However, most physicists aren’t doing this work (and I don’t think of it as the best work necessarily). If you take a look, for example, at Nobel prizes over the past century, I think you’ll find that most winners were not particularly educated in mathematics past complex variables and partial differential equations. I’m pretty sure they weren’t knowledgeable about algebraic topology.
The “genius” of many of these people, where the word is appropriate, is often their physical insight and intuition - their ability to see connections betwen ideas, to see unusual applications of phenomena to perform new measurements and reveal new aspects of nature. This certainly requires great intelligence, and some of the skills are inate, but intuition can take a lot of hard work and experience to build up.
A good post, that sums up a lot I have felt to be the case over the years. Perhaps the pumping iron approach to smarts improvement should be encouraged; much of the odious behaviour of physicists discussed here and elsewhere in the past could be eliminated if the principal competition they engaged in was with themselves and mother Nature, rather than with their colleagues and, more tellingly, with the rest of the human race.
Up to age 18, it was almost a matter of pride for me to put as little effort as possible into studying: I did just sufficient work to come top of the class. I thought I understood all that was taught in maths and physics, better than the teachers.
At university, I suddenly stopped grasping things on first sight, and I didn’t cope with this very well. It was as if I couldn’t move on until I understood a point, and that could take weeks or months, by which time I was very behind with work. As a trivial example, I remember becoming quite upset that I could no longer explain the buoyancy of warmer air when you look at it discretely rather than in the continuum. Learning to just accept things, and use formulae and recipes, hoping that understanding would follow later would have helped, but I wasn’t used to doing that from schooldays.
I’m not sure the teaching style I experienced at uni helped much either—men with indecipherable writing muttering at a chalk board, or rapidly changing overhead transparencies overloading the audience with information for 90min. No overview, no setting of context, no qualitative treatment, very few pictures or diagrams. It seemed that having to teach undergraduates was an annoyance to the lecturers, and a distraction from research. I often became annoyed with text books that were designed to show off how clever the author was rather that to illuminate the subject in the mind of the reader, and these were the recommended ones!
On reflection, I reckon had I been a less-able student at school, I would have been better prepared for later life—by being happy to learn by rote, accustomed to failure, and by feeling proud of my effort rather than my attainment. It’s no use being wise after the event, though.
mclaren, I don’t think Feynman could do “real” math either.
63 years of hindsight tell me that 99.99% of us are second rate because that is a corollary of the word ‘genius’. So we have second-rate careers (been there, done that) . So what? Accept it. They also serve…. etc.
Also, if someone is in the grip of the cult of genius, to me that person is somewhat immature. Genius for the most part is an after-the-fact assessment. If you end up solving a big problem, you too will be transformed into a “genius” by all the immature minds around you.
I also think that the cult of genius is part of a larger cult of personality and that cult is generally quite destructive, as destructive as introducing God into physics or Intelligent Design into biology. The cultist is unnecessarily introducing a by-definition-not-understandable thing (the genius or personality of the subject of cult) into the mental space.
Young physicist, there is a sea of open questions out there. Can you find one that is both interesting and that you can make headway on? If you find yourself able to do that, then do persevere. Don’t get distracted by the Las Vegas lights of “Smart” and “Genius”.
[…] February 25th, 2007 The Cult of Genius | Cosmic Variance During high school or college, many aspiring physicists latch onto Feynman or Einstein or Hawking as representing all they hope to become. The problem is, the vast majority of us are just not that smart. Oh sure, we’re plenty clever, and are whizzes at figuring out the tip when the check comes due, but we’re not Feynman-Einstein-Hawking smart. We go through a phase where we hope that we are, and then reality sets in, and we either (1) deal, (2) spend the rest of our career trying to hide the fact that we’re not, or (3) drop out. […]
It’s interesting how John Bardeen is not (as far as I know) a cult object. Yet, he was most definitely of Nobel caliber. And two-barrelled…
Great post! The realization happened to me too. Grad theory and math were certainly a slap in the face after (relatively speaking) smooth sailing in undergrad classes. I eventually realized that my fun/work ratio was very low for theory - I liked the answers, but didn’t enjoy the process - and now I’m an experimentalist …
In (particle) experiment, we don’t really have a cult of genius, at least not one whose figures we could all agree on. We respect F-E-H, of course, but they obviously can’t really be role models for us. (If F is replaced by Fermi, perhaps.) We have our heroes too - Ray Davis, for example, who apparently decided that neutrino physics was an obvious thing for a physical chemist to get into - but there’s not much worship.
At any rate conventional “brilliance” tends to have little to do with success in experiment, and this becomes clear pretty quickly after entering the field. Practical qualities are far more important: a willingness to work hard, a knack for time management, a dash of audacity, and a certain ability to feel out the boundaries of what’s currently possible.
Nice post. Completely agreed.
In general i’ve met the gamut in physics. I’ve met really, insanely smart people and just other run of the mill average people who happened to more or less understand what others had done well enough to be able to contribute.
Progress unfortunately in physics these days is hard work, depending on your field. In some areas (like high energy physics) so much is already ironclad and thought about, it becomes an order of magnitude harder to actually write something novel. Whereas in other fields, there is still a lot of grunt work remaining to be done.
Mark said,
This is a great observation. It is true not only in physics but in all fields of study. I also am sympathetic with Arun’s remarks on “cult of genius”, it is a cultural phenomena .
What does ‘smart’ really mean?
‘t Hooft should have a cult.
Another great post and comments!
As someone who wanted to be a physicist and settled for being an engineer, I don’t have much to add, except that I wish that there were a way to foster more of a team mentality rather than an individual achievement mentality in science education.
What? Whenever I go out with my physicist and mathematician friends, splitting the check and tip is a complete disaster. Complex analysis and differential geometry are fine, but addition and multiplication of actual numbers? We’re horrible, horrible.
Seriously, I’m right at the weeding out process of graduate school and starting researcher now, and this was an interesting and hearting post. Thanks.
Chad — Link is fixed now. Thanks for the catch.
John — thanks for pointing out Watson. I knew one of them was on record as proudly having a very very average IQ.
Mark (#4) — I suspected that computer science had this problem too.
For those wondering if Feynman really was that smart, there’s a feature article in the Feb 2007 Physics Today (subscription only, unfortunately) that suggests he really was different from the rest of us.
And to those of you who are struggling with this issue right now, chin up. Start working on all those other skills, and you’ll pull through. Pretty much everyone who makes it to physics grad school is “smart enough”, and the other personality traits become the primary differential. So, be mindful of the many other skills you’ll need besides brains alone.
And for rapid tip calculation, divide by ten and then double it (or add half if you’re displeased!).
[…] A very interesting post on intelligence and perception over at ComsicVariance [one of my new favorite blogs]. The discussions revolve around “real” genius’ but in my experience it equally applies to software development and probably every other field as well. There are those who are seen as the top of the pyramid in terms of smarts and everyone else is either aspiring to climb higher or treading water and hoping not to slip farther down the slope. […]
Great post. Some of the smartest people I know are also deeply insecure, because they believe they have to project an aura of understanding everything instantly and without effort. They are made more insecure by all the posturing. If we teach the kids that being smart is not innate, but requires effort, and accomplishment requires willingness to risk looking stupid by asking questions and admitting you do not understand, they will do great things.
It is also important to emphasize that while some great accomplishments were easily identified as due to the efforts of a few individuals, others resulted from the cumulative, painstaking work of a great many, or even from results that were stumbled across. The Standard Model of particle physics comes to mind as containing many examples of the latter.
mclaren,
I think the first time I “perceived” that I wasn’t going to make it as a top notch mathematician, was during my freshman year of undergrad when I didn’t make it onto the Putnam exam team. In hindsight, this exaggerated “perception” was more of a reflection of my teenage ego than my actual ability.
When I was in graduate school, I found out the hard way that a lot of “advanced” math (ie. grad school level real analysis, category theory, etc …) wasn’t really all that useful for doing most particle/gravity/string theory stuff. (That is, outside of some highly specialized mathematical physics areas). In the end, one still has to perform long messy calculations in order to get a final expression. It took me a long time to get over the “Bourbaki” type mindset.
It took me even longer to eventually get over the mindset that string theory was the “be all and end all” of particle/gravity theory.
I’ve always liked what Edwin Hubble said about his decision to switch to astronomy: “I chucked the law for astronomy and I knew that, even if I were second rate or third rate, it was astronomy that mattered”. Of course Hubble turned out rather to be in the F-E-H league…
mclaren ,
You may not be good at math, but you are damn good at squeezing as much name dropping of math topics into a post as possible.
I keenly remember sitting in my abstract algebra class one afternoon, looking about at my fellow students and realizing we formed a rather nice bell curve. While the class screw-up was missing that day, I could see the two who were smarties, while the rest of bunched up in different clumps of mediocrity. (I was pretty near the middle.) This was at Caltech in the 70s and our teacher was Michael Aschbacher, a hot-shot group theorist. In many other contexts we would all have been smarties, but there I had to learn to deal with being average. Sigh.
By the way, as much as I admire Feynman and his astonishing genius, I don’t feel obligated to agree with everything he said. Feynman’s comments on how to learn algebra, for one, strike me as wrong-headed.
Zeno,
Over the years I knew many “intellectually arrogant” folks who found out the hard way that they were just “average”, when it came to the undergraduate abstract algebra and/or real analysis courses. Quite a number of these folks changed their majors to something else like physics, engineering, etc … afterwards. A few changed from the “pure math” major to one of the “applied math” majors, which didn’t require as many mandatory theorem/proof-type courses. (The abstract algebra and real analysis courses they already took, were the only mandatory theorem/proof-type courses required for many of the “applied math” degrees. I’ve noticed these days that some “applied math” degrees at many universities, don’t even require abstract algebra and real analysis courses anymore).
Apparently these folks couldn’t take the blow to their fragile teenage egos, that they were no longer considered “math whiz-kids”.
“Yes, you have to be clever, but if you have good taste in problems, an ability to forge intellectual connections, an eye for untapped opportunities, drive, and yes, a willingness to work hard, you can have major impacts on the field.”
Amen to that. I really do think people could be a lot more successful in science then they give themselves credit for. Telling people their brain like a muscle can be strengthened is a good thing.
Secondly, why would admissions committees be look down on a person who has a reputation for being a hard worker?
Lastly, what is the best measure for how smart someone is? Everyone claims Feynman was a genius yet his IQ was 125, far from genius. I think the true genius is one who at the end of the day produces results, regardless of his/her IQ.
Zeno:
It’s worth noting that Aschbacher got a C when he took undergraduate abstract algebra (in his senior year). (Ref: Gallian, Contemporary Abstract Algebra.)
This article needs to be trumpeted from rooftops. Myself, the main thing I learned in K-12 was arrogance and laziness, from which I still haven’t recovered. I work in mathematics now, and my being reluctant to work and easily discouraged have been far bigger hurdles than my lack of natural smarts.
It’s amazing to read some of these comments. I was raised to think that I wasn’t particularly smart. And I really believed it. If I was lazy, it was because I was terrified of doing better than just coming first in the class - even as an undergrad. Yeah, there weren’t many girls doing physics back then.
We live in a nation, and time-period, that celebrates the genius of the math/science aspects of the human brain more than the other functions (we celebrate our amazement at various incredible athletes but don’t often honor that as genius either). For those of us from the other side of campus(s), our listings, of those for whom (and for whose intellects) we have profound respect and admiration, are, of course, quite different. Most of the population in the US (perhaps around the other industrialized countries as well) would know something about the genius of Newton, and F-E-H, but would they know names such as (thinking of the relatively loose use of the term “cult” here) William James, Joachim Wach, Claude Levi-Strauss? Are Foucault, Derrida, Davidson, Minsky, Chomsky, Rorty any lesser for not being physicists and mathematicians???? Do we overlook Spinoza and Leibnitz in our rush to celebrate Newton’s contributions?? Is how we learn to think, use language, construct contextual orientations, not also the domain of genius intellects delving into the profound?? The efforts of Husserl, Wittgenstein, Eliade, and Marty, may be obscure for the majority but are extremely important to discussions of human behaviors. And so it goes.
This has been a humbling post to read. I’ll be starting graduate school in the fall, and though I know it’s going to be hard, this makes me think it’s going to be even harder than I think….
Where do creativity fit into this? Are those students and faculty members with prodigious levels of brainpower usually overflowing with new and interesting ideas, thoughts about philosophy, and untested, arcane theories about the universe? Or are they just good at classwork and statistics?
Mclaren, I’m curious as to where you ended up finally? I suffered an identical reaction when I encountered high-brow phys-math concoctions..
Indeed, it took me some time, but the summer of 2005 gave me the courage (and wisdom!) to break away (from theory). Once you act on that realisation, there’s no looking back! It’s very liberating. … and the world has got the need for the lion.. and the ant
Since then I’ve tried experimental.. figured the eccentricities of apparatus and machinery aren’t the stuff my dreams are made of.. so am bailing out of physics completely!!
Thanks for the thought-provoking post, Julianne.
I am having trouble deciding if my recent switch out of physics has to do with this. Though I doubt it, even though physics is getting increasingly harder and more stressful (I am just a second year undergrad), I am still stoked for my introduction to quantum physics next quarter, I’m just alot happier now that its a course I am taking for my own investigative and curious reasons, rather than taking it because I have too.
I think one realization I personally am having is my need to fix more immediate problem. We already have so much scientific knowledge that could so easily fix all kinds of problems like hunger and sustainability and disease, now we just need to get society behind it, we need cultural and political change. I am making my own major by mixing business, political science, and international studies with hopes of working for Non-profits to change the world (big idealist here). No diss to science, it is the coolest crap around – I am still minoring in physics because, well heck, even a glimpse at the ideas that govern the fundamentals of how our universe works is pretty freaking awesome. And it always must be furthered, our quest for answers must never stop, some of us just aren’t geared for that quest.
I think another part of this is (speaking from experience) that whether or not you want to do physics or math, or even investigative science in general, when your good at math or science in high school every one puts a huge amount of expectations on you to follow through with that. When I wanted to do photography people –without even trying really- made me feel guilty, as if I where squandering my skills. When I wanted to go into philosophy, same thing. Now with my goal to work in non-profit sectors, people cant really guilt me out of helping people who need it, but they certainly are making efforts. With that in mind, it may also be apart of the physics drop out at higher levels, because people who already didn’t really want to do it, now have the excuse that “they aren’t as smart as everyone hoped†– which is sad that that has to be an excuse someone would use just to try and do what they really want to do in life, which might be a lot less mathematically challenging. Again no attack on science or physists, I whish there where a lot more of it and of you. Just some alternate thoughts
One of the most perceptive descriptions of “giftedness” I’ve read is that a gifted child is a gifted learner, while a gifted adult is a gifted doer. Being one does not automatically guarantee the other. Many grown gifted children feel that they never lived up to their potential, which I think reflects not making the transition into becoming a gifted doer. For me, one of the most important experiences I had was working in industry for a year before starting grad school. I learned that the point was not to think deep thoughts or to be smart, but to get shit done. I was much more entreprenurial after that, and it’s served me well ever since.
Ann said:
Yes, this. It also makes it all the worse for everyone else, because while they’re busy projecting that aura, everyone else is feeling all the more inadequate because, well, that person over there seems to get it, so I must be a dolt. The posturing has always driven me batshit crazy, ever since undergrad. I think the same attitude diminishes our teaching ability as well — many get too stuck on seeming impressive to consider lowering themselves by making things clear. My guess is that they fear that by making something appear simple, it devalues the merit of what they’ve done. Culturally, it would be great if this changed. We’d all learn a lot more if people felt comfortable asking for clarification, from undergrad on up.
Joshua R said: working for Non-profits to change the world (big idealist here)
Not the only one around.. Join the club.. I’m switching from physics to working for NGOs too! I think you’re correct in assessing the positive impact of science to “real world” issues, versus other fields.
Theorists suffer nearly as much ego-angst as Actors. In his excellent autobiography, Simon Callow said he could make any actor nervous during rehearsals by sidling up to them and whispering “have they rumbled you yet ?”
Experimentalists know you need persistence, judgement, luck, and political skill, with a modicum of smarts. Theorists are exposed because smarts is all they put on the market. String theorists are not only exposed but naked because they don’t even have the sanity check of comparison with experiment.
Joshua, just a word of caution (at the risk of drifting away too much from the main focus of the thread! My apologies..) : A lot of non-profits these days have questionable ways of service. So one needs to be sure there in no clash of principles before one joins such an agency. A recent realisation.
One of the things that has always made an impression on me is how different the minds of some of the greatest mathematicians and scientists are. Two of my great mathematical heros are Michael Atiyah and Raoul Bott. Atiyah has an incredibly quick mind, immediately grasping whatever you try and explain to him, and coming forth with a quick flood of ideas about it. Bott was quite the opposite: you had to explain things to him slowly and carefully. He did not understand new things quickly, but whatever he understood, he understood very deeply. Both of them, working at quite different intellectual speeds, came up with truly amazing things, some of the high points of modern mathematics.
I was interested to see Ann Nelson’s comment about the intellectual insecurity of some very smart people. When I was a student, more than once I remember seeing a Nobel-prize winning physicist acting out their insecurities, clearly worried that some undergraduate or graduate student might think they didn’t know something or other. The one response you would never get from them if you asked them a question was “I don’t know” (even when it was the correct answer). I’ve encountered less of this among mathematicians, but never been quite sure why. Perhaps it has something to do with the way in which mathematicians are much more careful about knowing the difference between what they really understand and what they don’t.
Julianne,
Many “smart” folks seem to be very proud of their “Rube Goldberg” style creations and contraptions. It gives than an “aura” of *genius* like Wile E. Coyote!
In my experience, profs in any field who readily answer questions by saying “I don’t know” have the biggest egoes of ‘em all. It’s not a big group though.
I’ve always liked what John Huchra said. He broke up the attributes of a successful astronomer into 7 categories and described each by a “unit vector”, an astronomer without equal in that category at the time (1974). According to him, being nearly a “unit vector” in any one of these would assure a tenured position, in two would give a National Academy membership and three would put you in contention for a Nobel Prize. The 7 categories, and his 1974 unit vectors are:
Raw Intelligence - S. Chandrasekhar
Knowledge - A. Sandage
Public Relations - C. Sagan
Creativity - J. Ostriker
Taste - W. Sargent
Effectiveness - J. Gunn
Competence - M. Schmidt
If only this was better known by students. By the way, it would be interesting to figure out the 2007 unit vectors.
This has terrific implications for the nature/nuture debate and the still-smoldering idea that some racial groups just don’t have what it takes. We should start teaching students that intelligence, in effect (not just particular subjects) can be taught and built by excercise.
Very few students actually believe that their physics professors are towering geniuses. Discouragement sets in when the going gets rough, not because the work requires effort to which bright students are unaccustomed, but because the effort required is deemed by many of them as unworthy of the meager reward it might yield.
A person attracted to physics by the delightful intellectual play of physical ideas soon realizes that that is but a tiny fraction of the life of an academic physicist. As in many jobs, the bulk of the physicist’s time is consumed by drudgery (tedious calculation, teaching, paper writing, proposal writing, refereeing, and miscellaneous administrative duties). I would guess that many of the dropouts are those who do not find such a life intrinsically appealing at the modest salaries available. They will likely have judged that investing in other areas the effort required to climb the academic ladder will lead to greater wealth, leisure, fulfillment, and happiness.
[…] The Cult of Genius […]
I dropped out in graduate school after passing my oral and written comprehensive examinations. I did not compare myself to the towering geniuses of Einstein, Dirac and Feynman: that would be silly. But I did compare myself to a typical tenured professor, and concluded that I simply wasn’t smart enough. Passing exams is one thing, doing good science is quite another. What a previous poster, Belizean, mentioned — the “drudgery” that makes up the bulk of a typical physicist’s life — also turned me away. We all have different reasons for dropping out of grad school; I don’t think you can fit many of us into the same shoe.
One thing to keep in mind is that you learn faster by being wrong about something than you do by being right. I vividly remember completely flubbing a talk on density functional theory in a graduate quantum course, for example, but since I’m interested in photovoltaics and photosynthesis I keep slowly plugging away at it…slowly being the key word.
I think one of the great problems in academics today is the limited scope of scientific inquiry due to the erosion of independent scientific institutes. For example, I know of several physics professors who would love to work on solar photovoltaics research, but since so little funding is available they make a living doing fiber optics and light-emitting diode research - and these are prominent, top-of-their-field physicists.
Undergraduates and beginning graduate students often don’t understand just how constrained and limited the opportunities really are. The problem is acute in chemistry - a motivated grad student comes into a lab full of ideas about interesting science, only to find that she will be working as a technician on a pharmaceutical company research project for the next five years (at rather low pay, too). Then you’ve got the proprietary research, the culture of secrecy, and so on.
Similarly, I think the single most depressing thing I ever heard in grad school is that “science is politics” - or rather, academics is politics. One of the best Feynman stories is how he resigned from the National Academy of Sciences, after discovering that most of the activity revolved around deciding who else to admit. Likewise, I can’t imagine Einstein or Hawking being concerned about departmental politics. Their concern was/is with doing quality science, period - and that is something worth admiring.
great post! the earlier one learned that many of the deities of sciences of the sort mentioned here are partially artificial, the better.
in my experience, many genuinely smart kids do get screened out/weeded out through all stages of school, while many more calculating types with less intellectual resources to start with did succeed. maybe stamina and effort is the explanation.
i believe i am of the later category, and it’s disconcerting for me personally to see in sciences many people who are even less gifted resort to worse tools such as dishonestess and pretentiousness to stay around, including some tenured faculty members.
in whichever profession, pursuing success to the extent of losing one’s integrity is the biggest tragedy that can ever happen.
Fascinating. Interestingly, I can never recall being told by my parents that I was “smart” as a child, and instead was always berated for not working harder and the like. The first time I remember ever being called “smart” was in 8th grade while being berated by a teacher, which I remember clearly because I’d never even thought about it and it shocked me.
In hindsight, this was a very good thing!
I will also mention though that I’ve also noticed how many of my fellow students drop out of the field once they discover that they won’t “be the next Einstein” or “win the Nobel Prize someday.” I always thought this was a very silly reason to be in physics in the first place, as the number of physicists who win the Prize are statistically insignificant; the fraction of people who are Einstein would be thrown out due to experimental error.
The most helpful advice I’ve ever heard about physics was from one of the supplemental Feynman lectures though: no matter how things work out, 50% of the people are going to be in the bottom half of the class because it’s got to be that way. I remind myself of this whenever the going gets tough, and think professors would do well to remind their students of this on occasion.
With regard to Belizean’s comments above, I completely concur that there are many other excellent reasons to choose not to pursue an academic career in physics. The issue I’m raising, however, is not one of those excellent reasons.
sorry for the side tangents, but anon2, if there is anyway we can get in contact, i would love some advice and info on how you are doing what your doing
joshua.mr[at]gmail.com is my contact
And to stay on topic
yvette: “50% of the people are going to be in the bottom half of the class because it’s got to be that way.”
Thats something i think people in all fields need to remind them selfs all the time. We can all be the best but we damn sure can work our butts off. I know i personally suffered from this cult problem and as i move to my next field i can still feel it rearing its ugly head. I want to be at the top, a history making kind of guy, and its a hard fact to swallow that i probably wont be, but i need to stick with it anyway.
Ooooh… very interesting studies! It’s really cool how much you can affect people’s test scores by priming them with attitudes about learning. Cool and scary.
What are you talking about? Kelvin’s guess at the age of the Earth was groundbreaking for his time, and the best that he could have done without knowing about radioactivity! If I recall correctly, Kelvin even wrote in a little caveat about his calculating being correct only in the absence of some mysterious, unknown heat source. Maybe he was just being sarcastic, but these days it makes him sound practically psychic.
Me neither… but Newton did seem to spend a lot of time accusing Leibniz of plagiarism.
Another factor should perhaps be mentioned: I think some (many?) people are discouraged by what is essentially an economic assessment. They say, “yeah, this is interesting, and I could stick with it, but why should anybody give me the time, when these other people seem to pick it up just like that?” or “what would people make of my sense of priorities, if I were to spend a lot more time on this?”
I think that attitude is prevalent in the U.S., and leads to “some kids just have it, and the rest don’t” in technically demanding fields (or the arts and athletics too, for that matter). The subtext is, “well, okay, maybe a lot of people could learn [X], but why encourage them, we’re just going to skim the cream anyway”. It affects the kids identified as smart even more, perhaps, because they think they know in which areas they’ll be part of the cream, and they’re afraid to stray out of that apparently safe territory.
Perhaps the only sure antidote against this is a certain stubborn disregard for such economic judgments, which are often shortsighted anyway.
— Helen Keller (as quoted by Donna Shirley)
I used to get seething mad in grad school at people who would raise their hands to ask the prof a obscure question, just to show off their knowledge of the subject matter.
Probably it angered me because that was the sort of thing I did myself all through elementary and high school. If you were in my class, I formally apologize for being such a shit.
[…] Imagine the smile that crept across my face as I read this post on Cosmic Variance about the Cult of Genius: Yes, you have to be clever, but if you have good taste in problems, an ability to forge intellectual connections, an eye for untapped opportunities, drive, and yes, a willingness to work hard, you can have major impacts on the field. […]
I suppose part of the matter is honest assessment as well as the priming discussed in the linked-to study. I don’t see how you can separate them, and I don’t think that kids that age are capable of the necessary level of self-assessment, relative to living and working and playing in the adult world. Sometimes there is no substitute for having lived long enough. In my case, when I came to grad school, I knew it would be tough. Going from a third tier state school to an elite research institution was insane, but the real revelation came when I began pondering the people I would have to compete with for jobs and grants. Comparing against their rate of their output, their training, the quality of their work, the questions they ask, their processes for answering them — this comparison has convinced me that I could at best end up tenured at a middling-level state school, if I didn’t burn out again first AND if I had an unholy amount of good luck. Honest self-assessment has led me to conclude that I’ve reached the level where working as hard as the next guy isn’t enough if you’re both working insanely hard and he or she is doing better science than you are. It doesn’t seem to be the wisest way to spend the next decade of my life.
So in the meantime I work on finishing enough material for 2-3 manuscripts and a dissertation+defense before year’s end. Not because I absolutely love the topic, which started out as a rewrite of someone else’s topic, making his code run without infinite loops and such. I’m doing this because funding realities virtually guarantee if I don’t it will never be done, here or anywhere else. After that, who knows? It’s all part of the adventure, right?
As to how that’s topical, well, obviously you should compare against the best young researchers in your field, right? I could rattle off a list of people in their late 20s to early 30s who can outcompete me, sort of the current list of candidates for the “Cult of Genius” people in my field. Nice to know I can still rattle off this whole somewhat-off-topic comment thing with the best of them
I can’t imagine Einstein or Hawking being concerned about departmental politics.
You might be surprised.
We had a talk last year from a historian of science about the Peter Debye thing, and Einstein said some remarkably catty things about Debye to the FBI at one point.
Ike, there are things you can do. Don’t choose your grad school and supervisor for prestige or smarts, be careful, not to get sucked into technical details and ask the big questions every now and then, particularly to your Profs. Don’t bow down to their experience, if they are worth a damn they will respect your independence (at least in England undergrad studies do not seem to educate you twoards independence nearly as much as they do in Germany for example so this is twice as important).
The most important lesson I learned about how to approach physics was in my undergrad 1st (early 2nd?) year Analysis course. The Prof was really clever and intelligent, we were doing wave propagation, and somebody remarked that the amplitude fell of as 1/r and wouldn’t that violate conversation of Energy. Without batting an eyelid the Prof turned around and said that was due to the model being unphysical anyways. Bullshit. The Energy is amplitude squared of course and so does fall off with 1/r^2.
Most valueable physics lesson I’ve ever had.
I guess my point is, creative freedom will always exist more on the fringes, in the idiosyncratic niches, off the beaten track.
But if the intelligent and smart grad students will start chosing the Profs who value independence and creativity over those who are particularly “clever” in a technical way, we can change the field. It’s as simple as that.
You kill your chance at a career on the mind numbing side of physics but improve your chances for a career on the exciting side, so even if your overall chances are lower, the quality of your chances will improve.
also, I posted a comment yesterday night which apparently didn’t make it through?
I wish someone had made these points to my high school self; I was one of those who, having been told I was smart in general, assumed that therefore if I didn’t grasp something right off the bat, I wasn’t going to be any good at it. I’ve since learned differently, but not in time to salvage my high school physics class.
Ironically, I just had an experience yesterday that illustrated your points beautifully. A teenaged girl in my dojo (junior in high school) has participated in a couple of the “physics of martial arts” demos I’ve conducted in NYC over the last year. It piqued her interest in the subject sufficiently that she was planning on signing up for physics class her senior year. Her mother told me this, then chucked conspiratorially and said, “Of course, we discouraged her. I told her REAL physics isn’t any fun at all, she won’t like it, and she’s really not good in math, so she should take something easy that won’t ruin her GPA….”
A. is very bright, shy and awkward, but inwardly fierce, so I’m confident that if she really wants something — physics, a better college, a hot fudge sundae — she’ll be able to fight past the naysayers and get it. She’s absorbed the lesson that innate ability isn’t the be all and end all. But it depressed the hell out of me to think that she had to waste energy fighting that kind of nonsense — from her parents, no less — when she could be using it to learn physics and all kinds of other neat things about the world.
It was all the more depressing because a good friend of A’s was also present; same age, high school junior, but her father is a physics teacher at a local high school, and has clearly gone out of his way to dispel any fear of the subject in his children. THIS girl confidently chatted with me about her science classes, about how she was good at math, and might take physics or she might take something else, depending on her career goals… the point being, her decision will be based on practicality and not on fear of failure.
To borrow an analogy from physics, I think that fear of failure in physics is local, not global. The previous comment illustrates this point. I think that the “cult” of genius actually encourages people to go into the field. After all to use another analogy. If you were a young musician in 1963, you would want to be like the Beatles. I was at Caltech (1969-1971) when Feynmann was teaching and the “cult” has grown significantly since then in part by his popular books on the subject and his participation on the congressional committee investigating the O-rings. (and not due to any significant scientifc discovery) I also got to see a lecture by Hawking in Chicago in 1999 and think the “rock star” analogy is highly appropriate.
Back to my original point. I think it is parents, friends, teachers, (and self examination) that the student who is directly exposed to, that provide “discouragment” not the cult heroes. I think they are for better or worse an encourging factor.
Elliot
TrackBack hasn’t worked for me in ages, so here’s a manual ping of sorts: The Cult of Theory, a post in which I get a little annoyed at the hierarchical view of physics implicit in mclaren’s original comment. Or, if you’d prefer the teaser line version:
“Too many people approach physics as if there’s some sort of Great Chain of Being, with the most abstract theoretical particle physics at the very top and low-energy experimentalists down at the bottom, just above biologists and rude beasts incapable of speech.”
Thanks Chad — except I’m Julianne, not Joanne. As I mentioned on another thread, no one gets my name right…
And I completely agree with your post, by the way.
“Too many people approach physics as if there’s some sort of Great Chain of Being, with the most abstract theoretical particle physics at the very top and low-energy experimentalists down at the bottom, just above biologists and rude beasts incapable of speech.â€
What do you mean? You say that as if there would be anything wrong with that? I don’t understand….
I think one can change the word Genius to “aha?”
And it is those insightful moments which tend to propel those who find value in what did not make sense before, now all of sudden does. I think some of us are definitely at a disadvantage, and it may be in our wiring? Not that it is incapable for us to understand and learn those insights. Maybe not as easily for sure.
That one may grasp on to a “different kind of real estate” may be like adapting to Poincaré’s conjecture or learning more about the Hodge conjecture? A mathematical puzzle?
So one can look to art of the “wunderkammern in glass cases.” Those of science who would like to progress the “understanding of symmetry,” while there are those who are less then happy with it?
I also read the original article, and I was more interested in how it might change the way I interact with my children: particularly my older boy, who is 5 and in kindergarten, although this will apply to the younger one as well in good time.
For whatever reason, my son sails through his kindergarten syllabus, particularly in math. And for that reason he is certainly told that he is smart on a fairly regular basis. However, I have tried to banish this language from my vocabulary (as has his mother, who pointed the article out to me in the first place) and instead praise his effort.
A corollary of this is that I want to make sure he sees problems that stretch him a little, so he does actually have to work (since praising someone for hard work when it really wasn’t that hard may be a little illogical).
I had not thought the implications of this through for my own work until I saw Julianne’s article, but it is certainly true that I never had to work hard during my school or even undergraduate years. However, during my PhD work it became very apparent to me that this was no longer going to be enough, and I found myself spending more and more time at my desk, and actually *working*
Thinking about all three of Einstein, Hawking and Feynmann it is clear that all of them work very hard indeed. Special relativity came quickly to Einstein (and after all, it is a very simple idea, so once you *have* it, working out its consequences is relatively easy, if you’ll pardon the pun), but he worked for years on GR, and for decades on his unified field theory.
Chad, that’s a good point. While it’s impossible to tell exactly what Einstein thought about departmental politics (the Debye thing did have some other historical overtones regarding the ugly stories of German scientific institutions in the 30’s), we can be sure that natural systems don’t care at all about departmental politics!
In fact, one could argue that the divisions between biology, chemistry and physics are more or less arbitrary and have more to do with the historical development of scientific institutions than with any fundamental divisions in nature. One of the more dramatic examples is how stellar evolution (a very phyics-based topic) created the heavier elements that are critical to the evolution of living creatures (a very biological topic). Another evolutionary concept is that over-specialization can lead to extinction - something that applies back to to scientific institutions and research careers.
I should expand a bit on the Wunderkammern or “Wonder-Chambersâ€: Forerunners of Modern-Day Museums. And by implicating such “geometric models in glass cases” it served us to remember how such abstract models could have been used to understand this relation to cosmology or physics?
So what took place in years mentioned by above poster is simple a reminder of Riemann, Gauss’s, or Dirac’s work here to see in ways that we are not accustom?
As a layman I puzzle how ingenuity might see how “symmetry” can diverge to all the other shapes within it’s context?
I admire Feynman’s contributions to physics, naturally, but not the man. I should think a man of his intellectual stature would know better than to use LSD, nail the wives of his grad students, or hold his office in a strip bar.
First of all, even Hawking is not Feynman-Einstein-Hawking smart. Feynman-Einstein-Witten smart (FEW) would be better.
Second, it is not true that we physicists as a whole secretly think mathematicians are smarter (speak for yourself!). In fact I’ve seen empirical evidence to the contrary. Experimental physicsts, one could argue are less smart than mathematicians, but not theorists.
What offal! Everyone knows mathematicians occupy the uppermost tier!
Better yet: Archimedes-Newton-Gauss smart.
This article really hit home for me. I too sailed through much of school with very little effort. I found that I would tend to measure my grasp of the material by how well I did on the exams, and if I did fairly well on the exams just from attending class, that’s about all I would do.
This first came to bite me when I started taking physics at the community college I went to right out of high school. I had really enjoyed physics in high school (aced all of the exams, but got poor grades due to lack of homework), and had gotten the highest score on the AP Calculus BC exam. So I decided to take the third semester of calculus along with the physics course that went along with that, which was electricity and magnetism. Well, I found out really fast that there was no way for me to do well on the exams without putting in the course work. From then on, I did every piece of homework for all of my physics and math courses at the community college.
But then, the university hit. I transfered to UC Davis a couple of years after starting at the community college, and though it’s not a bad school, I found I could slack off again, and still do very well on the exams. So I did. Two years as an undergraduate had really sapped all of my will to do homework.
Thus, when I returned to Davis as a graduate student, I had to learn how to work all over again. And it’s still something I struggle with.
Anyway, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that it can be very damaging to go for the “easy A” courses. They tend to be exceedingly boring, and thus breed laziness and dislike of learning. I’ve always found that I’ve done much better when challenged, and thus I think that it is in every student’s best interests to take as challenging of courses as they can handle.
Jason Dick,
When I was an undergrad, I ended up taking mostly classes which I thought I could get an “easy A” or at least a “moderately easy A”.
When I first took the “honors” level real analysis and abstract algebra math courses in freshman year (each course lasted two-semesters), that’s when I came to a “perceived” shocking realization that I wasn’t going to be a top notch mathematician. (I finished all the freshman/sophomore university math courses like calculus, linear algebra, ordinary differential equations, etc … back when I was in high school). This was first time I found out there were other folks who were better at abstract math and who got higher grades than me. Also during the first semester of my freshman year, I didn’t make it onto the Putnum math exam team, which further confirmed my “perception” that I wasn’t going to be a top notch mathematician.
In hindsight, this “perceived” realization that I wasn’t going to be a top notch mathematician was largely the result of my own teenage ego at the time. Many years later I came to the realization that many of my math major friends were not much smarter than I was. They just happened to have worked a lot harder than me in those real analysis and abstract algebra courses we took that year. In those days, I had the mentality that I could still do everything by “winging it”.
After my freshman year, I changed my major to engineering physics but still took some further math courses which were not as “demanding” (such as differential geometry, more differential equations, etc …), and which I felt I could still get a “moderately easy A”. For the more “abstract” math stuff like topology, Galois theory, measure theory, functional analysis, etc …, I just bought some of the textbooks and studied the subjects on my own. At the time, I still haven’t gotten over the “humiliation” of finding out that I wasn’t the math “whiz-kid” anymore. In my own mind in those days, I didn’t want to feel “humiliated” even more from taking courses like general topology, measure theory, Galois theory, etc … and not doing well in them.
In physics, the first time I came to the realization that I could no longer do things by “winging it”, was in graduate school after I passed all the “weedout” exams (ie. prelims, comps, etc …). I found out the hard way that my sheer audacity in “winging it”, was no longer a useful skill when it came to doing real research in particle/gravity/string theory. Even by the time I finished my thesis, I still hadn’t completely gotten over it yet. It was many years later after I left the field, that I finally got over it and accepted the fact that I was never going to be a genius like Ed Witten.
Do I get some kind of prize for being really smart and knowing, since ~ age 16, that being smart don’t mean sh*t unless you also accomplish something?
My experience has taught me that given the same education/preparation as someone else, I will master the concept/knowledge/technique just as well or better. This could make me arrogant, but in a way it also tempers it, because we do not all have the same preparation, and we do not all work as hard.
I agree that physicists, particularly theoretical physicists, are caught in a death spiral of one-dimensional intellectual elitism. See Kuas’ (insert-negative-adjective) comment above.
The cult of genius, IMHO, isn’t as present in other sciences as it is as it is in physics. The cult of genius, is seems to me, partly originates from the culture of mathematics, which is even more in love with genius than physics is. Physics is also the degree of separation from experiment and theory not present in other sciences. There is also the “Great Chain of Science”, where more fundamental sciences are consider harder, “better” and more important.
lol Julianne,
We usually leave 10-15% Tip.
But they love good tippers at my fave restaurant. You I’m sure will be most welcome with your 20%.
Who knows, when they find out you’ve discovered a ‘celestial body’ they may well treat you to a free meal. Aaah! the trappings of fame.
In a very “sordid” way, it actually felt very liberating when one day I came to a “sudden” realization and accepted the fact that I was never going to be a *genius* like an Einstein, Feynman, or Witten, etc …
It was as if I “woke up” one day and saw the “cult of genius” for what it really was.
From stories I’ve read over the years about people who joined and have left destructive and/or religious “cults”, it sounds very similar emotionally to what I went through when I was younger. Over the years I’ve met folks who joined various cults in the past (ie. mostly religious ones, etc …), where we chatted about our life experiences over beer or coffee. After awhile, I got the impression their stories and emotional experiences in various cults were very similar to my emotional experiences in university. Their stories of their changes of heart and subsequently leaving a cult, were very similar to my experiences of accepting the fact that I was never going to be an Einstein-like genius.
What is it with blithely assuming that we measure intelligence like we can the length of the table? Who has actually observed intelligence in the world? What evidence do we have that intelligence is actually a thing instead of an idea? And if intelligence is an idea instead of a thing doesn’t one make the fallacy of reificiation by thinking it