Quirky
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He came to his insight by casting off Newtonian misconceptions that had held back his contemporaries such as Lorentz or Poincaré, who had come close to the realization made by Einstein but never made the full leap.19 In other words, his insight was made possible precisely because he was able to disregard accepted wisdom. Einstein believed in the existence of simple, harmonious, universal principles. He thus preferred a theory that could sweep away the clutter of fuzzy and thus-far-unverified assumptions such as the existence of ether. Einstein also worked in isolation, away from other scholars and university libraries, so there is some speculation that he may not have even been aware of all of the work of Lorentz and Poincaré. Perhaps more importantly, his rebellious nature and his fundamental belief that deference to authority was a corruption of the human spirit meant that for Einstein, pursuing the discovery of truth was far more important than showing deference to other physicists by adhering to old principles. Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson described the situation as follows:
The essential difference between Poincaré and Einstein was that Poincaré was by temperament conservative and Einstein was by temperament revolutionary. When Poincaré looked for a new theory of electromagnetism, he tried to preserve as much as he could of the old.… Einstein, on the other hand, saw the old framework as cumbersome and unnecessary and was delighted to be rid of it. His version of the theory was simpler and more elegant. There was no absolute space and time and there was no ether. All the complicated explanations of electric and magnetic forces and elastic stressed in the ether could be swept into the dustbin of history, together with the famous old professors who believed in them.20
As one of his biographers put it, “His early suspicion of authority, which never wholly left him, was to prove of decisive importance, for without it he would not have been able to develop the powerful independence of mind that gave him the courage to challenge established scientific beliefs, and thereby revolutionize physics.”21
Einstein published his special theory of relativity in June 1905. Then, in a state of exhaustion, he took to his bed for two weeks. (In September he would write a three-page paper with one more consequence that occurred to him from his special theory of relativity—namely, that mass m was a measure of the energy E contained within it, and the relationship between speed and mass was E=mc2, with c referring to the speed of light.)
Throughout his life, Einstein possessed a child’s gift of awe at the wonders of the universe, and he had the ability to “hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell an underlying unity.”22 Einstein was driven to find unifying theories—he believed that a harmonious reality was the basis of the laws of the universe and that science’s goal was to discover it.23 He could often sense when there was a simpler, unified answer to problems that were assumed to be separate. For example, he intuitively understood that gravitational force and inertial force must be definable by a single explanation. It should not be surprising that after completing his special theory of relativity, he immediately began to work on generalizing it so that it could handle changes in velocity or direction.
Despite his astonishing productivity (he published sixteen papers during 1906 and 1907) and the irrefutable impact he was having on physics, he still had difficulty attaining an academic post. He had not made many friends while at Zurich Polytechnic, and his teaching—demonstrated when he lectured as a privatdozent at the University of Bern—left much room for improvement. These personal deficiencies, combined with the anti-Semitism pervasive in European society at the time, created an uphill battle for Einstein. Finally, in 1909, with the support of his former professor Alfred Kleiner, the faculty of Zurich Polytechnic voted to award Einstein a professorship. He would go on to become one of the most famous scientists of all time. He would also leverage his fame to promote pacifism, disarmament, and the abolition of compulsory military service. He was a worldwide celebrity, revered both for his profound intellectual contributions to science and his effort in working toward a kinder, gentler world, even though in many ways he was a detached observer of it. As described by his friend Thomas Bucky, “He had a shy attitude toward everybody. He was gentle, considerate of others, and the opposite of pompous. But I never heard even a close friend call him by his first name. When someone did treat him with undue familiarity, he would shrink back.”24 As we shall see later in the chapter, this detachment is likely to have played multiple roles in helping Einstein to develop his breakthrough ideas.
MARIE CURIE, WHOSE STORY is told in Chapter 6, is also a poignant example of separateness and isolation. She discovered radium and polonium, and she identified radioactivity as an atomic property. She was the first woman to earn a Nobel Prize, she was the first person ever to win Nobel Prizes in two different fields, and she is likely the most famous female scientist of all time.
To say that Curie was an exceptional student is to understate it—she learned to read so early that it stunned family and friends, and she was the top student of her class all through school despite also usually being the youngest. However, women could not attend university in Poland. Thus, after graduating from the gymnasium she began to focus on self-education, reading science, politics, literature, poetry, and more, while developing a plan to further her educational career. She took a job as a governess in Szczuki, a rural town roughly fifty miles north of Warsaw, hoping to raise enough money to eventually help both her and her sister go to France to attend the Sorbonne. In the meantime she diligently pursued an educational curriculum of her own design, as she described in a letter to her cousin Henrietta:
At nine in the evening I take my books and go to work, if something unexpected does not prevent it.… I have even acquired the habit of getting up at six so that I work more.… At the moment I am reading:
1. Daniel’s Physics, of which I have finished the first volume,
2. Spencer’s Sociology, in French;
3. Paul Bers’ Lessons on Anatomy and Physiology, in Russian.
I read several things at a time: the consecutive study of a single subject would wear out my poor little head which is already much overworked. When I feel myself quite unable to read with profit, I work problems of algebra or trigonometry, which allow no lapses of attention and get me back into the right road.25
She also wrote that she had “acquired the habit of independent work,”26 a habit that would enable her to challenge accepted practices and paradigms and would help develop her ability to make her profound discoveries later in life.
During this period Curie also began to gain more awareness of her own sense of disconnect from the social expectations of young women. She was shy and uncomfortable when meeting new people. She disdained small talk and refused to go to the dances that other young women her age were attending. Separateness would become a defining characteristic of her nature, even after she managed to get to the Sorbonne, where she lived (according to her daughter Eve) “a Spartan existence, strange and inhuman.”27 She avoided friendly meetings and other human contact, and similarly rejected material wealth, thinking it of no importance. For fifteen or twenty francs per month, she rented a small attic without heat, lighting, or water. She would subsist for weeks at a time on only buttered bread and tea. Her entire life was organized around her work at the Sorbonne, and on more than one occasion she fainted at her lab table and had to be reminded to rest and eat.
Even after falling in love and marrying Pierre Curie, she lived a socially isolated life. She had found her match: he was not only brilliant, but he also shared her lack of interest in the social world. As Pierre once wrote, “We dreamed of living in the world quite removed from human beings.” Their daughter Eve wrote about her parents, “United by their tenderness, united by their intellectual passions, they had, in a wooden shack, the ‘anti-natural’ existence for which they had both been made, she as well as he.”28 In her obsession with her work, Marie chose to relinquish much of her child-care duties to Pierre’s
father, a cheerful and loving man without whom the daughters would have led bleak lives.29 Although her daughters expressed great adoration and respect for their mother, they also suffered from her insensitivity and neglect. Marie carefully monitored their education and development but gave them scant time and even less overt affection. In a biography that Eve would later write about her mother, she describes her as a person who was fragile yet determined, generous yet austere, lonely yet always painfully distant: “Marie had no time to give to friendship or to love. She loved mathematics and physics.” However, Eve appears to justify her mother’s behavior when she notes that “In all ages women who burn to become great painters or great musicians have disdained the norm, love and motherhood.”30
Like Einstein, Curie was aware of her unconventionality and self-imposed isolation. She also knew that the way she had lived her life was not for everyone, telling Eve, “It isn’t necessary to lead such an anti-natural existence as mine.… I have given a great deal of my time to science because I wanted to, because I loved research.”31
As later chapters will indicate, all the breakthrough innovators I studied (with the notable exception of Benjamin Franklin) exhibited this marked sense of separateness as an integral part of their nature. This is not to be confused with the personality trait that psychologists call “introversion.” Introverts are said to be reflective, reserved, and predominantly interested in ideas and their own mental self than action. Extroverts, on the other hand, are said to be sociable, energetic, and often assertive and outspoken.32 None of the innovators studied here fit neatly into these categories, and certainly many of them would be characterized as assertive or outspoken—sometimes even domineering. The sense of separateness exhibited by the innovators is not reserve; rather, it reflects the degree to which they felt they did not belong to, or were not a part of, the social world around them.
Steve Jobs perceived himself as different from his peers and family, in part because of the angst he suffered from the knowledge that his birth parents gave him up, in part because he realized at a young age that he was more intelligent than his parents, and probably in part because his strong-willed and somewhat abrasive personality made it difficult for him to sustain intimate friendships. Chrisann Brennan, his first girlfriend and the mother of his first child, notes how even in high school Jobs was “disconnected and awkward” and that he had “a mix of genius, authenticity, and emotional woodenness.”33 Thomas Edison was born with an “abnormally large though well-shaped head,” and doctors feared he might have some type of problem with his brain. Because of his presumed delicacy, he was sent to school for only three months of his life. While other boys were playing sports, Edison spent nearly every free moment in a laboratory he had set up in the cellar of his parents’ home. Later in life he would be described by more than one biographer as “jocular,” and he was a known lover of pranks. He also spent most of his life in his laboratory, where he was surrounded by his large team of employees. However, he also became mostly deaf, and this condition made him uncomfortable in social situations (although he saw it as a great boon to his ability to focus). He later married and had children but was chronically preoccupied with work and spent most nights in its laboratory, neglecting his family.34 As his second wife, Mina, wrote of him, “Mr. Edison has few friends. Because of his work he has had to live a great deal by himself and in himself—shut out from the social contacts open to most men.”35
Nikola Tesla, whose life is discussed at length in Chapter 3, similarly worked alone and obsessively, mostly at night, with little social interaction and few friends. In a statement that is remarkably similar to remarks made by Einstein, he told his father, “It is not humans that I love, but humanity.” Although he had the ability to be a charismatic storyteller, he was also noted for having poor social skills and being extremely unconventional. For example, he wrote at length about his love for a pigeon that he believed to be his soul mate. In 1895 a New York Times article described him: “He seems to be a man who dwells apart. He has no kith or kin in this country, and only a few friends who share his confidences. Even in moments of closest social intercourse he will become abstracted, and there is never a time when he would not prefer his laboratory to any other spot on earth.”36
Even Elon Musk, the boy wonder behind SpaceX and Tesla Motors, exhibits this sense of separateness. According to his mother, as a child Musk was the smallest in his class, was a “super nerd,” and was often bullied. He is repeatedly described as “bookish.” His family had also moved frequently (Musk went to seven different schools growing up), making it even more difficult for him to build strong social connections. Musk notes that he “never truly had a chance to make friends.”37 He responded to this sense of separation by escaping into books (Jules Verne and J. R. Tolkien were favorites) and computer programming, ultimately writing and selling his first video game at the age of twelve.
It is difficult to know to what degree these individuals experienced a sense of suffering or regret from their separateness—what people feel may not be what they convey publicly. For example, Eve Curie’s description of her mother paints a picture of a terribly sad and lonely woman, but Marie Curie’s own writings indicated that she experienced a sense of bliss in her self-imposed isolation and immersion in work—at least until Pierre’s death. Of the innovators studied here, only Einstein extensively reflects on his separateness in a written form to which we have access, and although his expressions include a discernible twinge of melancholy, for the most part he confidently extols the importance of such independence. Einstein is famously quoted as having said “It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely.” Yet in writing about his detachment he noted that it was extremely important for his ability to think independently: “The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the State but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.”38
By nurturing the independent thinking of the breakthrough innovators, separateness helped them to generate and pursue big and unusual ideas. By not belonging, they were buffered from the norms that help to bring groups of people to consensus and foster cooperation. When separateness is a result of, or results in, social isolation, individuals are less exposed to conventional wisdom; their ideas can develop less contaminated by those shared by the crowd. Furthermore, perceiving oneself as separate can also make an individual more prone to resisting conventional wisdom even if amply exposed to it. When an individual is not well integrated into the social fabric, there is less to lose by being unconventional. In fact, being unconventional or iconoclastic can become an important part of an individual’s identity. These dynamics are vividly illustrated by the lives of serial breakthrough innovators: Einstein was initially shunned by academia and was subsequently able to reject established ideas about ether and absolute time that held back Lorentz and Poincaré; Edison was kept out of grammar school and learned to trust only those things he could prove himself; Curie intensely pursued self-education because women were not allowed in universities in Poland, and she consequently acquired the independent thinking and resolve that were the wellsprings of her success; Jobs felt “abandoned, but special”39 because he knew that he’d been put up for adoption and that he was smarter than his adoptive parents, and he consequently decided that the rules other people lived by did not apply to him. Rejecting the constraints of what other people deemed impossible was fundamental to his inspiration to build computers in a garage and to his commitment to put “1,000 songs in your pocket.”40
Many things can give rise to a sense of separateness. An individual might be physically or socially isolated because of circumstances in childhood. Tesla was emotionally abandoned by his parents for a while after his brother’s death, and he was later confined to bed for nine months with cholera. Separateness can also have a physical origin, such as physical disabilities or mental disorders. Edison’s
hearing impairment made him not only uncomfortable in social gatherings but also extremely reluctant to speak in public.41 Charles Darwin appears to have suffered from extreme anthrophobia (fear of social contact) that made him avoid contact even with his close family members.42 Economic, cultural, and language barriers can also create a sense of separateness, offering a partial explanation for why immigrant communities are so often identified as a source of innovation and entrepreneurship: if the “typical” route to prosperity is not available to an individual or a group, they may be more likely to pursue “atypical” routes. Many studies show that immigrants start up new companies at twice the rate of natives, in part because traditional employment opportunities are often not available to them and in part because of different attitudes about risk that are both cause and consequence of leaving the home country and starting over in a new one. Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, emigrated to the United States with his family at the age of six—Russian Jews were among the few who were allowed to leave the Soviet Union. As he describes it, “The US was very good to us. It was a great place, but we started with nothing. We were poor.… When we first moved to the States we rented a little house, and my parents didn’t have a proper room to sleep in. They had to wall off the kitchen. It was a very humble beginning.… We learned to get by. I think being scrappy and getting by is important.… The most important thing in the background [of being Jewish]—of just having gone through hardship and being able to survive and thrive. I think that’s at the core of the Jewish experience.”43