Aestu wrote:
Joklem wrote:
Usdk wrote:
so she's a genius?
A genius would know that he isn't a genius by how stupid they feel when they're working on something they don't understand.
No one is born with an intuition of physical laws (or anything). They study to learn as much as they can, and they feel stupid most of the time spent past the basics. Anyone can do it, it's hard work and some other factors. Some make great discoveries, and some don't.
Genius is just a label given to those that do. Self-labeling is either humorous, misinterpreted from IQ (understandable) or a product of self-importance or authority taken from a number value.
Richard Feynman's IQ was tested as 124. Here's what he has to say about "honours", "labels" and such:
In conclusion, do what you like as best as you can, and don't worry about that stuff.
Anyone has the raw organic potential to be
successful, provided they have the will (which is not guaranteed). Genius, however, requires something more - it requires not only basic ability and willpower but something more, the ability to see beyond the normal human experience. This is why most geniuses have unorthodox lives and beliefs. True genius cannot be acquired by any means besides chance.
Mozart and Salieri is an excellent case study - no matter what Salieri does or how hard he labors, he can never have that quality that elevates his rival above the level of mortal men.
As you pointed out, Feynman is unquestionably a genius, but an IQ of 124 is generally considered sub-clinical genius level.
It doesn't stop at that ability, which many people (if not most) have. Looks like we agree but I'll elaborate -- I grew up imagining myself as the bee I was following, asking myself what it sees, if it can see colour, if it can see the flowers as beauty like I could, what makes nature tell that bee that there's something it wants or needs in that, what the hell those things are that I can't see, where do those things come from and how do they form and hold together (not much in the department of knowledge as a yougin)
So it comes as no surprise to me that when I study physics at the minuscule or large scale, I can adjust to proportions in perspective and basically imagine myself as the size of what I'm studying. It just makes it easier to visualize what the mathematics say. The best part is when you dream in those perspectives, imagine dreaming that you're a galaxy drifting away to and from and around others. Big or small numbers make more sense when you can proportionate between that small word, our world, and that huge world.
That's no superpower. It's no secret that everyone visualizes things differently, in terms of "brain imagery". It's like different frameworks. It's hard to explain and it's the reason why there's a universal language for it: mathematics. However well you word a concept, I can translate it to French and make it nonsensical to someone who doesn't understand that language.
But there's more to acclaimed geniuses than that, you have to imagine what you would see, that you don't know, while your perspective is adjusted to that scale, and you have to be right about it and turn it into an equation that can test against experiments at the scale we live in. And that's beyond me and I can't understand them. Maybe that's what mastery of your field leads to.
They're the guys who came up with the stuff that gives us headaches in school. That's what we're dealing with here.
I'm usually not one to discuss semantics, but this is a term that shouldn't be used lightly as a confidence boost in children.
