Saturday, January 11, 2025

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.

3 comments:

NLR said...

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.

Francis Berger said...

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.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

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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