Are all geniuses obnoxious?

One of the true greats of physics, Murray Gell-Mann, passed away a few days ago. While most of the hard sciences tend towards a brutally pragmatic terminology that reflects only historical or technical aspects of the topic at hand, Gell-Mann is responsible for giving one of the most fundamental science a uniquely whimsical bent. That science is particle physics as captured in the Standard Model, a remarkable theoretical construct that Gell-Mann helped create back to the 1970s and 1980s. The Standard Model as shaped by Gell-Mann is full of little things called “quarks”, which come in three (really six) colors and six flavors, those flavors including “strangeness” and “charm”. Moreover, these quarks are held together by sticky things called “gluons.”

All in all, Gell-Mann helped make fundamental particle physics sound oddly tasty and colorful, like some sort of treat put together for creative children. Moreover, his whimsical names simultaneously hid incredibly profound insights into the nature of matter. For example, his use of everyday primary color terminology for the strong force gives a remarkably solid analogy for getting at least a basic understanding of how the symmetry mathematics called SU(3) operates at a practical level.

In short, Gell-Mann was a true genius. And he could also be obnoxious.

When his former officemate, friend, and arch competitor Richard Feynman died, Gell-Mann refused to follow one of the most prevalent instincts of society by writing a reflection on Feynman that was more about settling the score on offenses, real and imagined, than about praising Feynman for anything he had done or been. It was obnoxious and rude, and yet those who knew Gell-Mann mostly shrugged off.

Why? Because geniuses are supposed to be obnoxious.

That is, there is a widespread presumption in both academic circles and the general population that if you are truly brilliant in some area of learning, you will also be obnoxious. It just comes with the turf.

But is obnoxiousness truly a part of genius?

Prejudices are odd little things. They appeal to our perceptions in ways that are often subtle and intuitive, working their way in gently and usually without much fanfare. A good way to become away of this sneaky process is to take the same assertion and change all the nouns to make an a similar assertion about some different group.

For example, is a group of thirty geniuses asked to talk about their work any more likely to be obnoxious than a group of thirty people selected at random and asked to talk about politics?

Probably not! In other words, the idea that geniuses are more likely to be obnoxious than randomly selected people is an example of selective vision, of us seeing what we want to see simply because someone we respected casually introduced the idea to us. Obnoxiousness is no stranger to the human condition, and in any fair accounting of it, the rarest among us is is someone who is never obnoxious about anything.

However, in the case of geniuses there is another intriguing aspect to this question that is worth exploring. If someone is a genius, will they be unavoidably “obnoxious” about their area of special insight? Does that very insight ensure they will be especially annoying to those around them?

This depends in part on what we mean by “expertise” in some topic, and how that affects their conversations with others on that topic. A medical doctor who understands his area well is going to say things in the fashion and with an adamancy that others will not understand, simply because they do not know the details behind the seeming rigidity of the doctor’s views on certain medical issues. This is not a problem conversationally as long as those around the doctor acknowledge that the he has a right to say things that they will not immediately understand. If however the others do not respect the opinions of that doctor, the result will be conversations in which both sides can become very adamant, and thus obnoxious, about their perspectives.

This kind of adamancy can be complicated. While often extremely useful for speeding up selection of whom to listen to, the imprimatur of respectability can also be artificial, incomplete, or simply false. Should George Washington have argued against his doctors about using so many leeches on him after he became ill? He did not because he accepted their imprimatur of respectability. He probably would have lived a lot longer, though, if he called them all quacks and thrown them out of his house.

True geniuses — and to be honest I don’t even know what that really means in any definitive way, since one could argue that everyone has some area of their life in which they are are more of a “genius” than anyone else — are an even odder case, since pretty much by definition the only person who can give them an imprimatur the respectability is themselves.

Thus as with a trained medical doctor, a true genius will see things in ways that others do not. Furthermore, since they are geniuses it is pretty much a given that they cannot point to someone else as their defining authority. After all, they are called geniuses because they are defying that previous authority!

Further compounding the conversational complexity of talking with such people is that for most of the sciences the ratio of crackpots to geniuses is always a rather large number. Why this is is worth a brief examination.

So why are crackpots so common in some disciplines, at least when compared to the number of geniuses? Well, one deep reason is that our educational system does very poorly at teaching people that certainty is an emotion rather than a logical proof of truth. Without this clearly in mind, it is too easy for people to develop absolute certainty about issues for which they have no particular logical argument. As long as they recognize that certainty is only an emotion and not a proof, the emotion of certainty can turn into a useful search heuristic for trying to find a real proof. But in most cases, the defining characteristic of a crackpot is that they have no internal ability to differentiate between the feeling of certainty and the actual proof of certainty. The latter is typically many order of magnitude harder to achieve.

A pleasant and quite intelligent person I once knew had difficulty with this distinction on one very narrow topic, which was (of course) physics. When he found out that I knew some physics, he made several attempts to explain his theory of space to me. He was absolutely certain that vacuum of space is composed of little hexagons of heavy, highly radioactive particles that decay in microseconds. No amount of gentle persuasion about how such a space would collapse instantly or blow up or both made any difference. Any physics picture he saw with a little hexagons in it became supporting evidence for the absolute certainty he felt about this idea. It was purely an emotion, not a logical conclusion, but for him it was an emotion so powerful that was not subject to ordinary conversational persuasion.

The widespread addition of some folks to the delightful feeling of certainty makes being a “real” genius even harder, since by definition an outsider is not going to be able to tell the difference without a lot of work that they may not have the time to do. The genius who is adamant because they have truly worked out some new truth is, too often, going to look to others almost exactly like the person with no idea what they are talking about, but who is very certain they are correct. This too can make it more likely for geniuses to come over as overbearing and obnoxious, since they may have found through the school of hard knocks that if they do not argue adamantly and in detail for their positions, they will be assumed to be crackpots worthy of immediate dismissal.

So, bottom line: Are geniuses really harder to get along with than regular folks?

I rather doubt it. My suspicion is that the polite geniuses simply don’t get noticed as much, whereas ones like Wolfgang Pauli and and Ernst Mach who made it a point of pride to grind down hard on other people’s ideas and even self-respect tend to get remembered more. Pauli destroyed the career of the man who gave Pauli the idea for which he later got a Nobel prize. Mach drove Ludwig Boltzmann, arguably a gentle genius of the first order, to suicide. Ironically, Mach despised Boltzmann because his deeply insightful thermodynamic definition of time relied on atoms, which Mach, almost uniquely for a physicist of that time, did not believe in.

Once again, it is a matter of perception: We tend to see geniuses as obnoxious in no small part because historically, a certain number of geniuses used their fame to promote a sort of “my way or the highway” approach to their topics as the only way to proceed down the course of changing the world.

The world is more complex than that. A discerning and more detailed look at who was right and who was wrong — e.g. Boltzmann the quiet but correct genius versus Mach the brilliant but profoundly wrong one — shows us that as with many sides of ordinary life, there are many routes to expressing genius. Some of the paths that we choose are obnoxious and some are not, just as people are people whether they are geniuses or not.

The Cosmological Implications of Metallic Aluminum in Meteorites

This is a paper I would like to work on, but at present it’s pretty far down on my priority list. This abstract summarizes the main points. Anyone interested in the topic might want to consider the testable implications of the cosmic electrolysis hypothesis.

Abstract: The findings of a remarkable Siberian expedition organized by cosmologist Paul Steinhardt helped establish beyond reasonable doubt the existence of metallic aluminum and aluminum alloys in some meteorites. However, aluminum minerals pose a profound chemical mystery: How can oxygen-greedy metallic aluminum exist naturally when the only environments energetic enough to make it are necessarily also hot enough for the aluminum to steal oxygen from nearly any type of oxide, via a generalized version of the thermite reaction? Since aluminum is roughly as reactive as sodium metal, synthetic aluminum remains stable in open environments only because its surface forms a protective and self-healing sapphire layer. Commercial electrolysis methods synthesize aluminum at low enough temperatures for sapphire coatings to protect the resulting metallic aluminum. In this paper the author proposes that meteoric aluminum results from a natural process that parallels commercial aluminum production methods, specifically by the induction of substantial direct electrical currents in relatively cool aluminum-bearing asteroids. The author further proposes that these currents are induced when asteroids pass through the powerful electrical fields found in the polar jets of a neutron star. Such events would be most likely to occur after the star of the system in which the asteroids formed went supernova, leaving behind both asteroid debris and a neutron star to which the debris is bound by gravity. This cosmic electrolysis hypothesis leads to testable predictions that include: (a) the presence in aluminum-bearing meteorites of grains that are older than our solar system, specifically dating to the era when supernovas created the local bubble of relatively empty space in which our solar system now resides; (b) association of metallic aluminum with minerals such as cryolite that support aluminum electrolysis; and (c) the presence of other minerals and structural signatures characteristic of prolonged exposure to substantial direct electrical currents, with such characterizations made by subjecting warm asteroid-like mineral mixes to strong direct currents.