Because of our biography of Madame Currie, I’ve been told I was a bit harsh on her, that the most brilliant woman on earth experienced a few moments of stupid that ended up killing her and her daughter, not to mention perhaps 1000 others?
Back in the day, deaths weren’t really tracked by cause, though statistics were in use for things like longevity. We’ve seen some of these stat and we’ve seen the conclusions; one being: that modern medicine has extended human longevity. There is some truth to this, though modern medicine is often given more credit that it deserves.
The statistics don’t always support the “modern medicine” theory of advances in longevity.
Take the burst in longevity following the civil war. Most of medicine at that time ignored hygiene. And yet, it was hygiene at the foundation of this spurt in longevity:
- washing clothes and diapers regularly
- separating sewage from drinking water
- cleaning streets
- improving ventilation
- reducing crowding
- disinfecting homes
- boiling water
- safer food handling
These things, these changes drove our first major rise in longevity, here in the US.
Science
Science has its limitations, while stupidity doesn’t. As Isaac Asimov told us:
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
Carl Sagan takes that “rate” problem, and makes it more about structure, alarmingly so: “We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces.”
For Asimov, we’re outpacing our own wisdom. For Sagan, we’ve put the steering wheel in the hands of people who can’t drive.
So if you have difficulty grasping the concept of an infinite universe, you might want to see it in terms of stupidity. Or as Elbert Hubbard put it,
“Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.”
We are here to discuss the limitations of genius.
I’m supposed to know something about genius because at one time in my life I took a test that said I was one. And then years later, a resident of the nut ward at the VA, I took a test that said I was slightly below average, but I could still run for president, apparently.
School wasn’t designed for me. For one thing, I was doing great till Catholic guilt forced me to demand parochial school where a nun humiliated me and terrorized me. Her life ended in a convent; a vow of silence hoisted upon her for bashing in some poor kid’s head.
I did pretty well after leaving that behind. I was in the “advanced” math and science classes, but then came high school and my family wanted the prestige of a Catholic Military Academy, a prep school. I rebelled. Graduated with a 1.7 GPA.
The next test I was to take was administered by the Department of the Army. It was a flight aptitude test.
I maxed it . . . which meant that I had:
- fast pattern recognition
- strong spatial reasoning
- working memory under load
- calm decision‑making
- the ability to track multiple variables at once
George W Bush, I’m sure some of you remember him, scored in the 25 percentile, the lowest score and still get into flight school.
And yet one day I’d wind up in a ward, taking tests in which I’d score lower than George. I guess that’s PTSD for you.
Aristotle felt that, “There is no great genius without some touch of madness.”
I’d agree. Been there. Done that. Got the safety sox.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, a fellow Minnesotan, wrote:
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
Nietzsche lets us in on something he’s noticed: “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
What interests me most about geniuses is this: are their mistakes as great as their discoveries?
Is there a balance?
Einstein always struck me as the kind of man who could step out into a snowy Berlin morning, feel the wind bite his ears, and mutter, O mein Gott. I forgot mein hat, before shuffling back inside. Those were his tiny, human mistakes, the ones anyone might make once or twice. But the error that gnawed at him for years was of an entirely different order: the cosmological constant, the term he added to his equations and later dismissed as his “greatest blunder.” It bothered him for the rest of his life … until the universe revealed, long after he was gone, that it hadn’t been a mistake at all but a breakthrough waiting for its moment. In the end, the only thing Einstein was wrong about was being wrong.
Da Vinci … What a character. I quit drawing and painting because, sure, I might be genius, I’m just not Da Vinci genius. However, scholars have found a geometric error in one of his illustrations, mistakes in mechanical analyses, handing of forces and behaviors, math errors, If you were to stop by I have hundreds of Chargers and he drew out a lot more inventions than he could ever physically build, so what? So he was stumbling toward the light.
Everyone makes mistakes; just a part of being human.
So let’s go back and take another look at Madame Curie.
Her discovery became one of the foundations of quantum physics … or led to quantum physics.
I have constantly wondered why she didn’t put a small, very small amount of radium in with fruit flies and study the result, but then I just found out that two revolutions were taking place in science at the same time: in the quantum universe and in the genetic universe.
It seems the fruit flies busy with their own projects.
And get this: Marie Curie was a physicist first, a chemist second. First she discovered radioactivity and then she isolated pure radium. All of which would later kill her and her daughter.
Marie Curie lived in a world lit by a new and dangerous brilliance. She was the first to coax that strange light out of matter, to hold it in her hands and study its behavior long before anyone understood what it could do. In the glow of radium she saw the hidden structure of the universe begin to reveal itself, and in that sense she was illuminated — a pioneer walking ahead of the lantern. But the same light that guided her also unmade her. It seeped into her bones, clouded her blood, and eventually claimed both her life and, years later, her daughter’s. Curie’s story is the purest expression of scientific courage: a woman who stepped into the dark, found a new kind of fire, and paid the price for bringing it back to us.
I’d love to digress into the tale of Prometheus, a Greek equivalent to the “bringer of fire,” not to mention the Tree of the Fruit of Knowledge of Good and Evil, except because of Curie’s genius, hundreds died, perhaps thousands. We didn’t keep track. We know at least a hundred women were injured painting radium on the dials of watches. They’d lick the brush to get a nice point. They lost their tongues.
Dentists held in x-ray glass plates to get images … and lost their thumbs.
Curie burned her hands while carrying her samples. To her it was “like a sunburn.”
Why did she not test her discovery for danger to life?
There, I said it. And the answer is quite simple. She was a physicist and chemist, not a biologist. Biology back then hadn’t even discovered DNA. So how could they measure its destruction?
She saw everything from a physicist’s and chemist’s perspectives.
Was that a mistake. Was it a huge mistake. Do we measure our mistakes by the number of people they kill? Were that true, then all our wars have been mistakes. We do not know how many people were harmed by Curie’s discovery, but her discoveries did what they had to do in physics and chemistry. And people died.
