The myth of the myth of the lone genius

Science can't always be a team sport

One Thanksgiving morning in 2004, a postdoc at Caltech, Frans Pretorius was trying to get some code working. The code was supposed to simulate something that, at the time, had never been detected before, the collision and merger of two black holes.

Up until that time, it had proved exceptionally difficult to solve Einstein’s field equations, which govern the rippling and curving of space time as two black holes orbit into one another at a third the speed of light, without the code crashing. Einstein’s equations, while usually written in a compact form, actually involve 10 separate equations, often with thousands of terms. As the computer crunches through the numbers for thousands of points in space and time, each number accumulates errors. These errors come from the limited precision of numbers as they are represented in 1’s and 0’s. These precision errors sometimes cancel one another out but often they are cumulative so that eventually fundamental constraints like the conservation of energy are violated.

If you imagine trying to simulate something very simple, like a ball rolling on a pool table, this would be like having the ball sudden leap into the air or sink into the table. It means that the code has gotten so far away from allowed physics that it has to crash and start over again.

For decades, attempts had been made to simulate black hole mergers with little success. Only partial orbits had been obtainable. Pretorius was trying a new approach that he hoped would avoid all the issues.

The fundamental problem is that Einstein’s equations as they are written and passed down are unfriendly to computers. This had been known since the 1970s and many alternative ways of writing them had been developed.

Pretorius had been struggling to get his code working and had nearly given up when a visiting researcher, the night before, gave him a few suggested tweaks. He decided to try to run his code using a single black hole over the holiday, giving him time to enjoy a festive meal while Lonestar, the supercomputer at the University of Texas at Austin, ran through the hours of calculations on its 5200 processors.

By Sunday morning he knew his code would work and proceeded, over the next six months, to simulate two inspiralling black holes leading to a paper in Physical Review Letters. It was a new era for gravitational physics, and, while other researchers duplicated and expanded on his work, he had largely succeeded alone.

Whether Pretorius is a genius is beside the point, numerous successes in the sciences have come from people who worked almost entirely by themselves.

Some of them were real loners such as Sir Isaac Newton or Henry Cavendish, discoverer of hydrogen.

This is not to say that those scientists who make these contributions do so in a vacuum. Newton said that he stood on the shoulders of giants. Pretorius got help from a visiting scientist. Einstein had a friend do calculations for him. Likewise, no scientist could make their contributions without the tireless efforts of others.

But that is not what the so-called myth of the lone genius says. Rather, it suggests that scientific breakthroughs by a single person are just that: a myth.

Webster’s defines a myth as “a popular belief or tradition that has grown up around something or someone” or “an unfounded or false notion”.

These are two separate definitions and the first is more applicable here. It is true that the idea that lone geniuses are responsible for the forward motion of science and technology is a popular belief, and it is indeed false. Yet, the converse is also false, i.e., it is not the case that lone geniuses to do not move science and technology forward.

There are lone geniuses like Newton, Einstein, and Cavendish, and there are teams of scientists like the ATLAS experiment at CERN or the team responsible for the detection of gravitational waves at LIGO. Often, theoreticians work in small groups and experimentalists in large, and they all tend to build on each other’s work. Yet, once in a while a great leap forward occurs because of the work of one person on the right track.

Both myths, I think, can be attributed to Price’s law which states that the total number of papers published in an area come from authors equaling the square root of that number. This law is born out in a number of studies and has been applied to the sciences as well as business.

Inverting Price’s law, we can infer that the vast majority of the breakthroughs in science come from about the square root of the total number of scientists. Back when there were relatively few scientists, a lot of big breakthroughs came from people working alone. Now they tend to come from people working in teams, but many of the members of those teams are not making major contributions. They are making minor ones.

This also means that we can count on loners to continue making major breakthroughs because the effectiveness of large teams decreases with the number of members.

Another consideration is why people make breakthroughs in the first place. Often it is a because they are taking a lot of risk. And risk is not always something that people want to share. A number of Nobel Prize winners, including the winners of the 2022 prize in physics, indeed, won their prizes for pursuing research trajectories that their peers told them were career killers. How many people can you talk into a career killing path? It is hard to get a lot of people to share in a singular vision when there isn’t money or prestige in it. This explains why it is so easy to get scientists to jump on a popular bandwagon but almost impossible to convince one to go down a lonely road with you.

Whether someone becomes a contributor to a team or a loner blazing their own trail has a lot to do with their personality. In particular, I think that it is a question of conviction and a desire for purity. A person who is highly convicted of something, resolved to see it through, and wants to keep their ideas pure to an ideal, will tend to go their own way. A person who works in a team, unless they are a singular leader like a Steve Jobs for example, has to be willing to compromise. To compromise is the opposite of maintaining purity of vision.

Neither is necessarily a bad role and both contribute to science in different ways. The evil twins to these roles, however, explain why both myths, for and against lone geniuses, are actually harmful. These roles are the autocrat and the reluctant.

The autocrat is someone who believes themselves to be the lone genius but stands at the top of an organization or team. They believe that all good ideas are their ideas and all bad ideas are somebody else’s. Autocrats are often narcissists too, but what they most want is for all decisions and new ideas to emanate from themselves. Autocratic decision making can have disastrous consequences like the nationalization programs of Hugo Chavez that led to so much suffering for the Venezuelan people. Organizations run by autocrats tend to fail a lot but the autocrat always blames someone else for it. Autocrats need large groups of people to support them, especially people who are gullible and/or corrupt. Without their support base, they lose power.

The reluctant is the opposite of the autocrat. This is someone who has good ideas but doesn’t offer them, who never wants to take a risk, and who would rather hide within an organization. While it might seem that autocrats are much worse, a good idea lost is probably worse than a bad idea tried. Reluctants are not good team players either because ultimately they are not convicted of their team’s mission. They are just trying to disappear. Reluctants may suffer from impostor syndrome. They may also lack confidence. A reluctant is someone who could be great but is afraid to try. A reluctant needs encouragement and support, often from a mentor or someone they trust, to get them to follow a dream or conviction.

I outline these two because one, the autocrat, is a false lone genius, a wannabe, while the reluctant is a false team player, someone who should strike out on their own but doesn’t because of fear, yet their team efforts are half-hearted and wasted.

While the autocrat benefits from the myth of the lone genius, the reluctant benefits from the opposite myth. “Who, after all, am I?” says the reluctant. “I’m nobody special.”

But the truth is that they are, but they may never know it if they don’t take the risk.