Being a genius doesn't stop you looking directly at an eclipse or letting a trivial row prevent you finding a planet, says Katie Spalding in her new book.
The Limits of Genius
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| Benjamin Franklin knocked himself unconscious electrocuting turkeys in front of dinner guests Pictures from history/Getty Images |
The Limits of Genius
Katie Spalding (Hachette)
HOW is Donald Trump like Isaac Newton?
Mathematician and science writer Katie Spalding says that both were stupid enough to stare directly at the sun. The former US president and self-described “very stable genius” may have ignored an aide shouting “Don’t look!” during a 2017 eclipse, but the man who discovered the inverse-square law spent much of 1666 “doing just about anything to blind himself”, she writes.
In The Limits of Genius, Spalding describes how Newton investigated afterimages – images of something that remain visible after the original stimulus is gone – by poking himself in the eye with a huge needle and then looking repeatedly at the sun and into a dark corner, until he had to shut himself in his chamber for three days to recover the use of his eyes. It is no surprise that he had trouble for months afterwards, she writes, since the only thing more stupid than “staring directly at the Sun is to dilate your pupils first”.
In The Limits of Genius, Spalding creates 30 brief portraits of the great and the good, focusing on their “weird little adventures” and leaving their achievements mostly to one side. We hear how Pythagoras may or may not have been killed by an angry mob when he refused to run through a field of beans, and how Benjamin Franklin liked electrical pranks so much that he knocked himself out electrocuting a turkey in front of his dinner guests.
We discover that mathematician John Couch Adams was so annoyed with the UK’s Astronomer Royal, George Biddell Airy, that the pair missed out on the discovery of Neptune, and how Albert Einstein was “known across the Eastern Seaboard for his nautical mishaps” even though he couldn’t swim.
Spalding casts her net wide for people smart enough to be noteworthy, but not smart enough to avoid doing really stupid things, putting Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s fondness for a “poop joke” alongside Karl Marx’s liking for a big night out.
She also relishes the silly footnote, writing that rabbits are a successful species because they are “really good at one very important thing: hiding”, adding quickly, “OK, two things”. She has a keen eye for detail, such as the fact that those who want to view Marie Curie’s personal possessions must “wear protective clothing and sign a liability waiver”.
The format weakens with figures such as writer Maya Angelou or philosopher émilie du Châtelet. With little evidence of stupidity, Spalding is reduced to colourful anecdotes. It sags further as the detail and context available for modern figures makes it harder to poke fun, and crumbles when she chooses NASA as her 30th genius in order to joke about astronauts peeing their pants and engineers confusing imperial and metric units.
Spalding has a good sense of perspective, pointing out that Newton’s eye studies made a lot more sense with science in its infancy, and that Thomas Edison’s “spirit phone” didn’t sound so wild in an era when people had been bombarded with new inventions.
Among the gags, she puts the conventional notion of genius to the test. Are Leonardo da Vinci’s secret notebooks a testament to his intelligence or short-sightedness? Does meteorologist James Glaisher’s ballooning career show that revolutionary scientists sometimes need to be really bad at learning from their mistakes?
Spalding may not be completely serious when she declares that her subjects are “a bunch of idiots” like the rest of us, who happen to be “good enough at some hyper-specific talent” to get lucky. I couldn’t say – I’m no genius.
Richard Lea is a writer and editor based in London.