Being a genius is different than merely being supersmart. Smart people are a
dime a dozen, and many of them don’t amount to much. What matters is creativity,
the ability to apply imagination to almost any situation.
Take Benjamin Franklin. He lacked the analytic processing power of a Hamilton
and the philosophical depth of a Madison. Yet with little formal education,
Franklin taught himself to become the American Enlightenment’s best inventor,
diplomat, scientist, writer and business strategist. He proved, by flying a
kite, that lightning is electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it. He
devised clean-burning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream, bifocal glasses,
enchanting musical instruments and America’s unique style of homespun humor.
Albert Einstein followed a similar path. He was slow in learning to speak as
a child–so slow that his parents consulted a doctor. The family maid dubbed him
“der Depperte,” the dopey one, and a relative referred to him as “almost
backwards.” He also harbored a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led
one schoolmaster to send him packing and another to amuse history by declaring
that he would never amount to much. These traits made Einstein the patron saint
of distracted schoolkids everywhere.
But Einstein’s contempt for authority also led him to question received
wisdom in ways that well-trained acolytes in the academy never contemplated. And
his slow verbal development allowed him to observe with wonder the everyday
phenomena that others took for granted. “The ordinary adult never bothers his
head about the problems of space and time,” Einstein once explained. “But I
developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was
already grown up.” So it was that in 1905, while he was toiling away as a
third-class examiner in the Swiss patent office after graduating fourth out of
the five students in his class at the Zurich Polytechnic, Einstein
revolutionized our understanding of the universe by coming up with the two
pillars of contemporary physics: relativity theory and quantum theory. And he
did so by rejecting one of the basic assumptions that Isaac Newton made at the
beginning of The Principia, that time marches along, second by second,
irrespective of how we observe it. Today Einstein’s name and likeness–the wild
halo of hair, the piercing eyes–are synonymous with genius.
Then there’s Steve Jobs. Much like Einstein, who would pull out his violin to
play Mozart when he was stymied in pursuit of theories (he said it helped him
reconnect with the harmonies of the cosmos), Jobs believed that beauty mattered,
that the arts, sciences and humanities should all connect. After dropping out of
college, Jobs audited classes on calligraphy and dance before seeking spiritual
enlightenment in India–which meant that every product he made, from the
Macintosh to the iPhone, had a beauty that was almost spiritual in nature,
unlike the products of his competitors.
Benjamin Franklin and his son
William used a key and a kite to prove that lightning was electricity
Hulton
Archive/Getty Images
Studying such people led me to Leonardo da Vinci, who I believe is history’s
greatest creative genius. Again, that doesn’t mean he was the smartest person.
He did not have the superhuman theoretical brainpower of a Newton or an
Einstein, or the math skills of his friend Luca Pacioli.
But he could think like an artist and a scientist, which gave him something
more valuable: the ability to visualize theoretical concepts. Pacioli may have
extended Euclid’s theories to produce influential studies on mathematical
perspective and geometric proportions. But da Vinci’s illustrations–of
rhombicuboctahedrons and dozens of other multifaceted geometric shapes–brought
it to life, which was ultimately more important. Over the years, he did the same
thing for geography (through the aerial three-dimensional maps he drew for
warlord Cesare Borgia), anatomy (through his memorable drawings of Vitruvian Man
and a fetus in the womb) and more–all while creating some of the world’s
greatest works of art.
Like Franklin, da Vinci was largely self-taught. He was born out of wedlock,
which meant that he could not follow in the family tradition of being a notary
and was not eligible to attend one of the “Latin schools” that taught the
classics and humanities to well-groomed young men of the early Renaissance. And
like Einstein, da Vinci had a problem with authority. He often seemed defensive
about being an “unlettered man,” as he dubbed himself with some irony, but had
little patience for the “foolish folk” who thought less of him. “They strut
about puffed up and pompous, decked out and adorned not with their own labors,
but by those of others,” he wrote in one of his notebooks.
Professor Albert Einstein playing
his violin in 1932.
Bettmann
Archive/Getty Images
So it was that da Vinci learned to challenge conventional wisdom, ignoring
the dusty scholasticism and medieval dogmas that had accumulated in the
millennia since the decline of classical science. He was, by his own words, a
disciple of experience and experiment–“Leonardo da Vinci, disscepolo della
sperientia,” he once signed himself. That approach to problem-solving was
nothing short of revolutionary, foreshadowing the scientific method developed
more than a century later by Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei. And it elevated
da Vinci beyond even the smartest of his peers. “Talent hits a target that no
one else can hit,” wrote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “Genius
hits a target no one else can see.”
Like Einstein, da Vinci’s most inspiring trait was his curiosity. The
thousands of pages of his notebooks that survive sparkle with questions he
listed to pursue. He wanted to know what caused people to yawn, how they walked
on ice in Flanders, methods for squaring a circle, what makes the aortic valve
close, how light was processed in the eye and what that meant for the
perspective in a painting. He instructed himself to learn about the placenta of
a calf, the jaw of a crocodile, the muscles of a face, the light of the moon and
the edges of shadows. “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker,” he wrote in one
of my favorite entries. Da Vinci’s grand and noble ambition was to know
everything there was to know about everything that could possibly be
known–including our cosmos, and how we fit in.
Much of his curiosity was applied to topics that most of us have outgrown
even noticing. Take the blue sky, for example. We see it almost every day, but
not since childhood have most of us stopped to wonder why it is that color. Da
Vinci did. He wrote page after page in his notebook exploring how the scattering
of light by water vapor creates various misty or vibrant shades of blue.
Einstein puzzled over that question too: building on Lord Rayleigh’s work, he
worked out the mathematical formula for light-spectrum scattering.
Da Vinci never stopped observing. When he visited the moats surrounding
Milan’s castle, he looked at the four-wing dragonflies and noticed how the wing
pairs alternated in motion. When he walked around town, he tracked how the
facial ｅxpressions of people talking related to their emotions. When he saw
birds, he noted which ones moved their wings faster on the upswing than on the
downswing, and which ones did the opposite. When he poured water into a bowl, he
watched how the eddies swirled.
Steve Jobs with Apple II
computer, with chess game displayed on screen.
Ralph Morse—The
LIFE Images Collection/Getty
Much like Franklin–who sailed for England as a teenage runaway and later
measured the temperature of the ocean currents, thereby becoming the first
person to chart the Gulf Stream accurately–da Vinci could not resist chasing and
studying whirlwinds of air when he was out on a ride.
Those observations led him to create some of his most brilliant strokes of
art, from the ripples of the River Jordan around the ankles of Jesus in the
Baptism of Christ to the disturbingly powerful Deluge drawings. He was also the
first person to explain how the eddies of blood from the heart cause the aortic
valve to close. And his drawing of Vitruvian Man–a work of anatomical exactitude
combined with stunning beauty–became the preeminent icon of the connection of
art and science.
Some people are geniuses in a particular field, like Leonhard Euler in math
or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in music. But to me the most interesting geniuses are
those who see patterns across nature’s infinite beauties. Da Vinci’s brilliance
spanned multiple disciplines. He peeled flesh off the faces of cadavers,
delineated the muscles that move the lips and then painted the world’s most
memorable smile. He studied human skulls, made layered drawings of the bones and
teeth and conveyed the skeletal agony of St. Jerome in St. Jerome in the
Wilderness. He explored the mathematics of optics, showed how light rays strike
the cornea and produced magical illusions of changing visual perspectives in The
Last Supper.
Leonardo da Vinci started
painting his famous Last Supper mural in Milan in 1495
Universal History
Archive/Getty Images
There have been, of course, many other insatiable polymaths, and the
Renaissance produced other Renaissance men. But none painted the Mona Lisa, much
less did so at the same time as producing unsurpassed anatomy drawings based on
multiple dissections, coming up with schemes to divert rivers, explaining the
reflection of light from the earth to the moon, opening the still-beating heart
of a butchered pig to show how ventricles work, designing musical instruments,
choreographing pageants, using fossils to dispute the biblical account of the
Deluge and then drawing a deluge. Da Vinci was a genius, but not simply because
he was smart. He was, more important, the epitome of the universal mind, the
person most curious about more things than anyone else in history.
TIME,
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기