Scientific genius—or not?
How do we as a society figure out if scientific genius is the real thing? What role should science writers play in celebrating or critiquing apparent scientific brilliance? What happens if we get it wrong?
One of the most celebrated polymath geniuses of 20th-century America was the cosmologist/physicist/environmentalist/architect Buckminster Fuller. Yet doubts remain whether Fuller was the real thing. This month, we provided feedback on a project investigating how Fuller the scientific genius might also have been Fuller ... the fraud?
Along with this draft text, we read a short cautionary tale from a classic piece of narrative science writing about seeming genius gone wrong—a brief dramatic scene from Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion by the writer Gary Taubes, whose criticisms of science have sometimes made him a controversial figure as well. At the time, a review in Nature of Taubes's book by the science editor of The New York Times began:
The scientific method is a device to compel objectivity and restrain the natural urge of experimenters to believe in their own ideas. One of the more surprising lessons of the cold fusion episode is how many researchers pay scientific method scant attention when it gets in their way. Bad Science relates how not only the protagonists of cold fusion but many scientists who claimed confirmatory results were willing to neglect such basic cautions as running controls, understanding their experimental apparatus and checking their results before publication.
The review concluded:
Bad Science furnishes many serious lessons for the historian. Just as physiologists learn about the body's normal functions from its pathology, young researchers might usefully study this book, since it bears compelling witness to the human mind's irrepressible propensity for self-delusion.
Resources & references
The following came up in our discussion or were relevant to the workshop texts or theme:
- Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee. HarperCollins, 2022.
- Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion by Gary Taubes. 1993.
- "The Good, Bad and Ugly" (book review of Bad Science) by Nicholas Wade. Nature, 5 August 1993.
- "The Dropout: The story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos is an unbelievable tale of ambition and fame gone terribly wrong." ABC Audio (podcast), 2019.
- "What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure" by Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort. Nature, 25 April 2023.
- Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan by Robert A. Rosenstone. Harvard University Press, 1991. From the publisher's blurb: "Through the use of the techniques of modernist writing, the book provides a multi-voiced narrative in which the words of the present and the past interact to present a fresh view of historical reality."
Image: Cover of TIME magazine, 10 January 1964, depicting Buckminster Fuller, by artist Boris Artzybasheff.