Real Genius

Genius is a term we hear quite often, it's thrown around to justify people's shitty taste in music, or to ass kiss. We hear actors say that such and such a director is a genius, or Eminem is a genius. Neither is the case. They may be talented, they may be artists, but genius is not a label I would apply to anyone who has made vast sums of wealth. The label is simply the justification of itself for acquiring a fortune. How gauche!

I also don't think an IQ, or intelligence quotient test of any kind, is apt for measuring the intelligence of a genius.

David Hahn is a genius. Do you know why? Here are my reasons:

1. What normally would take up an entire building, he built a working nuclear reactor in a small shed.

Think about it, some of the greatest minds, most of which were nuclear scientists, of the 20th century, could not make a small functioning reactor like David.

2. He learned from a few outdated text books something that took a whole country tons of money and spies to acquire. I mean The Soviet Union.

David is an Autodidact, and like most geniuses he not only displays a deep knowledge of a formal system (in this case nuclear science) but also can explain it in a tangible way because he "sees" it. A genius, can take any formal system and intuitively understand it using not intelligence, but imagination. In other words his fantasies are tangible in everyday life. And we see this in David's explanations.

This is not the case with any of the media-purported and media-darlings lauded as being geniuses.

As Einstein said, "It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid."

David Hahn's brief documentary:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8HTm_qhSBo

Story:
http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Genius
• geniuses
• Jacob
• Barnett
• Marla
• Olmstead
• David
• david
• hahn
• daniel
• tammet
• Intelligence
• IQ
• Quota
• Quotient

[ABombs1]

Made me laugh reading about Michio Kaku who, for a high school science fair went off and built his own atom smasher in his garage which consumed the entire power supply of his house.

The Niels Bohr barometer legend is a pretty awesome read too.

[TheFaustianMan]

@ABombs1 hahaha! I never heard of that story about Michio, I'll have to check it out. Sounds hilarious! Science is a cruel mistress.

[MagiMysteryTour]

I find David Hahn a bit disturbing, reckless, and a little lacking in concern about the consequences of his activities.

In fact, I disagree with your definition of genius as someone with a narrow scope of abilities. The people with true genius are the ones who can see the broader connections between things that most people fail to see. People like Leonardo Da Vinci, and Thomas Edison. The ones with a heightened but very limited range of abilities are like the other end of the telescope.

[TheFaustianMan]

@MagiMysteryTour Well, you are certainly free to think what you wish.

We know little about the "real" Leonoardo. And in context, to be fair, Leonardo was certainly reckless for the time, in his dealing with corpses which would compromise the dead in their afterlife, and placing a giant stone ball on top of a building- that may have crashed down upon a town if his math was wrong.

[TheFaustianMan]

@MagiMysteryTour Edison, was a brute, (google: Edison & elephant) who formed his own mafia to enforce his copyright. Ever wonder why Hollywood is way out west? While the motion picture camera was invented in New Jersey? It's because Edison stated that since he owned the copyright to the camera, it should stand that Edison should own everything the camera makes. And if you disagreed with him, he would send his mafia out to burn everything you owned or worse.

[TheFaustianMan]

@MagiMysteryTour My point is, science moves forward by taking chances and by risk. There was also a very real possibility that the first atomic bomb would ignite the hydrogen in the atmosphere and set the entire planet's atmosphere on fire.

A genius of the time, no matter how mundane we may view his life in hindsight, is always crucified by society, so to speak during his life. James Joyce was kicked out of Ireland only to be lauded by Ireland after his death.

Thank you for your comments.

[ABombs1]

There's a constant undulation of super kids and kids of the future etc, ebbing around the media. It's really kinda meaningless, for... oh well you just said basically what I was getting at. 

[MargaritaShamrakov]

Also in that book that I talked abt in my previous post, the book says there are no geniuses, geniuses are basically people that are hard workers and work on their art craft at least 3-4 hours a day.

[MargaritaShamrakov]

I agree about science, and people like me talk about science, even though I do not really understand it the way real scientists do.

About geniuses, I read a book called Talent is overrated. It talks about Tiger Woods, who started training with his father really young. Mozart's father started teaching piano since the day he was born, and Mozart's first creations were written by his father, and now people think he def helped him.