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.
3 comments:
As much as I admire their accomplishments, I sometimes think it would have been better if the scientific geniuses had been scattered throughout the prehistoric era, without too many in one place and without too much knowledge to build on. Or if the genius famine had occurred in 1845 rather than roughly around 1945.
Whatever the ultimate metaphysical meaning of what they unleashed, clearly it was too much for humans as they are to handle. And it was co-opted so quickly as well. For that matter, what the 20th century scientists unleashed destroyed the world that they grew up in, the world that allowed them to make their discoveries.
I agree with your assessment of the famine, but I suspect some would define guys like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates as geniuses. I wouldn't but some do.
My focus here is on scientists, which those two clearly were not, Gates’s presumption to speak for The Science notwithstanding.
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