Exceptional intellectual and creative power is developed over time by minds that are focused on paying attention to an opportunity waiting to be explained.
In the nineteen-sixties, the sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote a famous essay on scientific discovery in which he raised the question of what the existence of multiples tells us about genius. No one is a partner to more multiples, he pointed out, than a genius, and he came to the conclusion that our romantic notion of the genius must be wrong. A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The genius is not a unique source of insight; he or she is merely an efficient source of insight.
Ideas aren't precious. They are everywhere, which suggests that maybe the extraordinary process that we thought was necessary for invention---genius, obsession, serendipity, epiphany---isn't necessary at all.
It should be pointed out that Merton's observation about scientific geniuses is clearly not true of artistic geniuses. You can't put together a committee of really talented art students and get Matisse's "La Danse." A work of artistic genius is singular. This is a confusing distinction, because we use the same words to describe both kinds of inventors, and the brilliant scientist is every bit as dazzling in person as the brilliant playwright or painter. Our persistent inability to come to terms with the existence of multiples in scientific discovery is the result of our misplaced desire to impose the paradigm of artistic invention on a world where it doesn't belong.
In the scientific world, we are reluctant to believe that great discoveries are in the air. The sheer number of multiples can mean only one thing: scientific discoveries must, in some sense, be inevitable. They must be in the air, products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place. It should not surprise us, then, that calculus was invented by two people at the same moment in history. Pascal and Descartes had already laid the foundations. The Englishman John Wallis had pushed the state of knowledge still further. Newton's teacher was Isaac Barrow, who had studied in Italy, and knew the critical work of Torricelli and Cavalieri. Leibniz knew Pascal's and Descartes' work from his time in Paris. He was close to a German Named Henry Oldenburg, who, now living in London, had taken it upon himself to catalogue the latest findings of the English mathematicians. Leibniz and Newton may never have actually sat down together and shared their work in detail. But they occupied a common intellectual milieu. "All the basic work was done--someone just needed to take the next step and put it together," Jason Bardi writes in "The Calculus Wars," a history of the idea's development. "If Newton and Leibniz had not discovered it, someone else would have."
Calculus was in the air.
Source: "Annals of Innovation--In the Air" by Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, May 12, 2008
Metaphysical Footnote: Genius taps into the Superconscious
According to Edgar Cayce, spirit is the life force, the élan vital that animates life. He said, “Spirit is the spark, or portion of the Divine that is in every entity.” But spirit is not just a force. It is a consciousness with individualness, though not nearly as individual as we are in our physical condition.
That “spark” Cayce spoke of is the light and life of mind, or consciousness. Within the one, universal, collective mind of God are infinite points of consciousness, spirits like the Great Spirit. The consciousness of our spirit is the superconscious, a level of consciousness that is nearly indistinguishable from God’s consciousness.
One summer day in 1874, Alexander Graham Bell, a 27-year-old speech therapist in Boston who was spending the summer with his parents in Brantford, Ontario, Canada, went for a walk on a bluff overlooking the Grand River, near his parents' house. He had come to Brantford with an actual human ear, taken from a cadaver and preserved, to which he attached a pen, so that he could record the vibration of the ear's bones when he spoke into it.
Slouched on a wicker chair, his hands in his pockets, he stared unseeing at the swiftly flowing river below him....mulling over everything he had discovered about sound. In that moment, Bell knew the answer to the puzzle of the 'harmonic telegraph' (his term for what was to become known as the telephone): electric currents could convey sound along a wire if they undulated in accordance with the sound waves.
"Nothing happens unless first a dream." Carl Sandburg
