The reality of the genius famine

In 1998, a mysterious stranger with no name (though there are some who call him Tim) told Whitley Strieber that the man who “would have unlocked the secret of gravity” was never born because the couple who would have been his parents were murdered by the Nazis. I posted about this three years ago on my Strieber blog. Just yesterday, a_probst left a comment on that old post saying this hypothetical never-born genius “might have been a boomer,” which “would rankle with a certain subsequent generation.”

This observation stopped me dead in my tracks with the realization that neither the Boomers nor any subsequent generation has produced a single world-historical scientist. Not one.

The greatest living scientist is unquestionably James Watson. Runners-up might include Roger Penrose, Alan Guth and, using “scientist” in a broader sense, Rupert Sheldrake and Noam Chomsky. If we include the recently deceased, we can throw in Stephen Hawking and Francis Crick. All were born before the postwar baby boom. Online top-tens of the Greatest Living Scientists pad out the list with the likes of Tim Berners-Lee (a Boomer), Jane Goodall (pre-boom), and a bunch of people who changed the world so much that I’d literally never heard of them.

During the War, on the other hand, we had Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Fermi, Feynman, Salk, Turing, Tesla, Fleming, von Neumann, and — lest we forget — George Washington Carver. I could easily make the list longer.

That’s not a gradual petering-out of genius. It’s a sudden cataclysmic extinction.

I’m not sure how best to explain this fact, but one hypothesis that springs readily to mind is that the wrath of God rests upon us.