Reading a biography of physicist Luis Alvarez (1911–1988), Collisions: A Physicist’s Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs, by Alec Nevala-Lee, got me mulling whether cantankerousness has a particular relation to genius. Alvarez was a top experimenter and inventor, who won the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his decisive contributions to elementary particle physics, in particular the discovery of a large number of resonance states, made possible through his development of the technique of using hydrogen bubble chamber and data analysis.”
He also was a difficult individual, who could be harsh with his students and colleagues, and canny at bureaucratic maneuvering. His testimony at hearings about J. Robert Oppenheimer helped get the Manhattan Project leader’s security clearance removed. He served on President Nixon’s Scientific Advisory Committee, and was glad it was eliminated as the Watergate scandal would’ve made it “very embarrassing at the present time to be part of the administration.” He liked to brag about high-level connections, which raised alarms that he may have been careless about protecting secrets.
Alvarez was involved in development of radar and the atomic bomb during World War II, analyzing the ballistics of JFK’s shooting (he thought Oswald acted alone), assessing UFO claims (not finding evidence of aliens), and using particle detectors to search Egyptian pyramids for hidden chambers (also not found). With his geologist son Walter, he put forward the Alvarez hypothesis, that the global mass extinction that killed the non-avian dinosaurs and many other species 66 million years ago resulted from an asteroid strike. Key evidence was a layer of iridium, uncommon on Earth. This would become a widely-accepted view but put him in conflict with scientists propounding other scenarios, such as that volcanoes caused a gradual mass extinction. “Do you plan to publicly oppose our asteroid?” he pressed one paleontologist, adding, “You’ve been warned.”
I was reminded of some encounters with brilliant individuals. In the mid-1990s, I attended a book reading by physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019), who won the Nobel a year after Alvarez, at Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side. Gell-Mann had been written up in The New York Times Magazine as “The Man Who Knows Everything.” He was a rival of 1965 Nobelist Richard Feynman, whose book of autobiographical essays “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” Gell-Mann called “Dick’s Joke Book.” Gell-Mann had trouble writing his own book, The Quark and the Jaguar, published after delays. At the signing, a guy next to me, whose name the polyglot scientist relished pronouncing in its original language, asked about “those determinists” who disagreed with Gell-Mann’s interpretation of quantum mechanics. “Well, they’re wrong,” Gell-Mann said.
Around that time, I was on a libertarian email list that included a prolific, argumentative guy named Banfield, who, I realized later, was almost certainly Edward C. Banfield (1916–1999), Harvard political scientist whose work I’d learned of when reading and writing about Francis Fukuyama’s book Trust. In a Southern Italian village in the 1950s, Banfield observed that the residents distrusted anyone outside their own families, a zero-sum attitude that constituted, as he titled a book, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. An aspect of this was that low-trust societies left common problems to distant government bureaucrats, rather than voluntary local organizations. Banfield had advised Republican presidents. I don’t remember anything specific from his emails, just the truculent tone.
Today, angry people are ubiquitous, in social media and comments sections, as well as in traffic, but the brilliant-and-combative intellectual seems to me a phenomenon that peaked in the mid-to-late 20th-century, then faded into obscurity. Insofar as such people still exist, they have a harder time standing out in the “attention economy” or amid political polarization where factions filter out information that doesn’t serve their cause.
In Collisions, Nevala-Lee recounts an early experience that may have factored in Alvarez’s particular combo of wide-ranging intellect and hard-driving personality. In 1921, psychologist Lewis Terman started a study aimed at finding geniuses in California and tracking their development. Alvarez, in sixth grade in San Francisco, was nominated, because he’d been skipped ahead and was youngest in his class. But he was quickly eliminated in testing, doing well in math but not verbal, with his IQ scored at 121, below the study’s 135 cutoff. In later years, Alvarez noted he was one of two future Nobelists who’d failed to get into the California study (the other was William Shockley), and that such disappointments were more common in adulthood, saying he’d seen “tears shed by grown men and women” at finding others more academically talented.
Nevala-Lee draws an intriguing conclusion: “Alvarez was fortunate that this rude awakening occurred when he was still a child. Instead of coasting on his gifts, he looked for other traits that would enable him to excel. It led him to internalize the value of hard work and persistence—qualities that the Terman study itself would ultimately identify as more crucial to success than raw intelligence. As an adult, Alvarez would rarely encounter a challenge that he was unable to overcome, and this may have been because he was forced as a boy to consider what it really meant to be a genius.”
—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky
Author's Note: Someone who knew Edward Banfield has written to me (and may well be correct): "So far as we know, Ed did not use email. In the 90s he was retired from Harvard and in declining health. Much of his time was spent at his Internet-free house in Montpelier, Vermont. So, more than likely the person using the moniker “Banfield” was someone else, perhaps a reader of his The Unheavenly City."