True Genius The Life and Science of John Bardeen: The Only Winner of Two Nobel Prizes in Physics (2002) / Chapter Skim
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17 Epilogue: True Genius and How to Cultivate It
17 Epilogue: True Genius and How to Cultivate It
Pages 314-330
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From page 314... ...
First, there is a real and substantial distinction between a "true genius" who makes lasting contributions to culture and the fictional archetype of a genius, amply represented in popular culture by such figures as Dr. Frankenstein or Will Hunting.
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From page 315... ...
Terman built on Galton's work, designing more sophisticated quantitative tests for studying creativity. An outgrowth of his famous tests conducted at Stanford University in the early 1920s was the extensive study conducted by Terman's student Catherine Cox on the future success of three hundred gifted children having superior IQ scores.
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From page 316... ...
a methodological dimension, which includes the variety of problem-solving approaches such people employ in their domain; and /,3) a contextual dimension, which includes environmental factors, such as family and education.
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From page 317... ...
From the fact that motivation can be cultivated through positive reinforcement, it follows that talent can too. Although this argument opposes genetic determinism, it floes not rule out the possibility that a genetic component figures importantly in an incliviclual's potential abilities.
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From page 318... ...
Bardeen's rapport with children may well have been related to his ability to attach his intense childlike focus to physics problems. Some research suggests that childhood traumas, even such drastic ones as the death of a parent, can actually benefit creativity.
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From page 319... ...
His bold and controversial theory of charge density waves might have earned him a third Nobel Prize had it hit pay dirt. Despite his inability to convince his colleagues of the merits of his work on charge density waves, he remained confident that his theory was correct.
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From page 320... ...
Bardeen's scientific notes include many lists of "subproblems," smaller problems to be solved along the way to solving larger problems. The subproblems he laid out in his study of superconductivity in 1951 included deriving the London equations for a multiply connected body and proving the current and effective mass theories for one-electron wave functions.
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From page 321... ...
Guilford, then president of the American Psychological Association, called for a scientific study of divergent thinking. He encouraged psychologists to work on identifying cognitive operations involved in creative problem solving.
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While the fervor of the divergent thinking movement of the fifties and sixties has long since died down, we can recognize in the work of Bardeen and other creative people a tendency to engage in a kind of brainstorming reminiscent of de Bono and Osborn at moments in their research when they feel "stuck." Consider the variety of approaches Bardeen and Brattain used twelve days before their great discovery of the transistor. They had achieved a structure that yielded some current amplification, but they did not understand why.
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From page 323... ...
For example, the first observation of a transistor effect in December 1947 was the result of accidental electrical shorting owing to the fact that a germanium oxide they thought was present had actually washed off. Germanium's material property of not sustaining such an oxide changed the structure of the experiment in an unexpected way allowing holes to enter the inversion layer on the germanium slab.
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From page 324... ...
For example, when Bardeen suggested that Gerald Pearson conduct a low-temperature experiment in which the electrons would be "frozen" into the surface states, he meant that the electrons act as though the crystal were frozen
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From page 325... ...
In later years Bardeen consciously built such interdisciplinary collaboration into his problem-solving methodology, for instance, adding Cooper to the superconductivity team to gain access to his expertise in quantum field theory. Bardeen's network of colIaboration also extended outwards from his immediate team into the larger physics community.
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From page 326... ...
In the area of the history of science, this program of research is well underway in the research of scholars such as Nancy Nersessian, Ryan Tweney, Frank Sulloway, Howard Gruber, Arthur I Miller, Gerald Holton, Keith Simonton, Dedre Gentner, and Pat Langley.
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From page 327... ...
Charles credited Uni High with nurturing lohn's mathematical talent. As Charles explained to his father, the Wisconsin Uni students were "allowed to go ahead in any line they take up as fast as they show ability and the hard and fast grade system does not exist." The "graduate student's paradise" that Bardeen had encountered at Princeton, the stimulating contexts of the Harvard Society of Fellows, the semiconductor subgroup at Bell Labs in 1945-1947, and the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois all resembled Uni High in supporting Bardeen's creative work in physics.
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From page 328... ...
It appears that creative people actively seek or create the environments that support their intensely dedicated work in an area. They create their "historical junctures" by placing themselves in the "right place at the right time" and among the "right associates, " whom they are able to recognize because of their own experiences, interests, and passions.
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From page 329... ...
Creative people never record every step of their work and human memory distorts the path of discovery. Frans de Waal aptly wrote of scientific research, "In hindsight, the path taken may look straight, running from ignorance to profound insight, but only because our memory for dead ends is so much worse than that of a rat in a maze." Most of the legendary stories about individual acts of creativity such as Fredrich August von Kekule's famous dream of the snake biting its tail, which is said to have led to his discovery of the benzene ring, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge's account of conceiving his poem Kubla Khan in an opium dream have been disproved.
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