ScienceWeek

ON THE MYTH OF THE MIRACLE OF GENIUS

Try to answer these questions: What five-letter word do all college graduates spell wrong? How is it possible that our basketball team won a game last week by the score of 73-49, and yet no one man on the team scored as much as a single point? How can it be that a man in a certain town in the United States married 20 women from the town, yet he broke no law, he is not a Mormon, and they are all still alive?

If you answered W-R-O-N-G for the first question, that the basketball team was an all-woman's team for the second question, or that the man is a minister for the third question, you likely experienced what is called the "aha" reaction of insight into problem solving. This is one theory of genius -- the answer inexplicably pops into the ingenious mind from on high, a mental miracle from the muses. Einstein stumbles onto relativity theory while dreaming of riding on a beam of light. Kekule discovers the structure of the benzene ring by dreaming of a snake biting its tail. Darwin suddenly becomes an evolutionist while visiting the Galapagos Islands. Wallace discovers natural selection while in a feverish fit of malaria in the Malay Archipelago. Evarist Galois, out of fear of a foreshortened life, pens the entirety of his mathematical group theory the night before he was killed in a duel over a woman. Newton flashes into universal gravitation when beamed by an apple. Coleridge creates his brilliant poem "Kubla Khan" one afternoon during an opium-induced altered state of consciousness. And, perhaps best known of all, Mozart composes perfect symphonies on first draft -- no corrections, additions, or deletions needed -- a miraculous masterpiece.

The only problem with this scenario of the development of genius is that none of these stories are true.

Adapted from: Michael Shermer: The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense. Oxford University Press 2001, p.262. More information: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195143264/scienceweek