Question: Somebody on PBS the other night was talking about how, for some years after >Einstein, it was said that there were only five or ten (or some small number >of) people in the world who understood what he was saying, and now we teach >those same ideas to high school students. Some of it is a timing thing: >difficult concepts can become common wisdom, but not at the pace preferred >by those who originate the concepts. It’s like, “I thought of this, and I >understand it perfectly — why don’t you?”
I don’t know much about brainstorming, but I get the impression that it is >intended to maximize the free flow of ideas by reducing criticism (at least >non-self-oriented criticism). I would be interested in learning whether >some of those who seem less creative, perhaps less able to follow the wild >flights of truth and nonsense in the babblings of geniuses, and less likely >to initiate random chatter about subjects of their own choosing, are perhaps >more inhibited rather than less intelligent.
>Certainly there are pedants out there who aren’t smart; they’re just >knowledgeable about certain things and are eager to pepper their >conversations with abstruse references that, they hope, will entitle them to >wax wistful about the nonexistent companion who would be willing to admire >their brilliance in perpetuity.
Answer: One could certainly discuss this at great length. Suffice it to say that while there are formal definitions that equate genius with IQ (e.g., a genius is someone with an IQ above 150–and I daresay there are a few people here who qualify), creative genius requires something besides fluid intelligence–though you would be hard pressed to find a creative genius who does *not* have a genius IQ.
It’s a bit like being an NBA All-Star–it isn’t gonna happen if you’re 5′ tall, but being 7′ doesn’t guarantee that it will happen either; one needs plenty of ambition and training.
But the notion that genius is somehow given to “wild flights of nonsense” is, well, a fairly wild flight of nonsense. People with high IQ’s are like people with low IQ’s, only smarter. And creative geniuses, while they may not fit the standard mold, are hardly the tousle-haired incompetents that Hollywood pretends they are. Authors write that nonsense because it goes well with their audiences, who want, desperately, to believe that what they can’t understand carries with it some kind of idiocy.
The actual story about Einstein, BTW, is that someone–Eddington, I think–said that only two people in the world understood General Relativity, Einstein and himself. If that wasn’t an exaggeration when he said it, it was soon after; the math, while likely unfamiliar, was within the grasp of any working physicist who cared enough to learn it (amazingly enough, when I was in school GR was so unfashionable that I had professors tell me they didn’t know it.).
I doubt, though, that there are very many high school students who understand General Relativity; they were probably referring to the much simpler Special Relativity, which can be taught to anyone with basic algebra, or to the fact that with improved texts GR is now easily accessible to undergraduate physics majors.
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