The Genius Gap

Kate was scheduled to argue a case Friday morning in Federal court in Manhattan, so we decided to make a weekend of it. I drove down after class on Friday, and we went to dinner with Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden on Friday night, and spent Saturday at the Met, getting some culture.

Kate’s a big fan of stained glass, so whenever we’re there, we make it a point to check out the Tiffany windows they have on display. This trip, there was the added bonus of a special exhibition of items from Louis Comfort Tiffany’s country estate, which showed the extravagent results you get when an artist is also absurdly wealthy.

As always when looking at Tiffany windows, I was struck by the gap between Louis Comfort Tiffant and, well, everybody else. The man did absolutely amazing things with stained glass, and nothing else I’ve seen comes close.

Which makes me wonder: What’s the field with the biggest gap between the geniuses and the rest of the pack?

I don’t know if I can come up with an example of a bigger gap than that between Tiffany and his competition. My knowledge of art is not all that extensive, but it seems to me that when I wander through the painting galleries, even the most highly praised masterpieces don’t jump out in quite the same way. Or, rather, while it’s true that someone like Monet did some spectacular painting, there are equally impressive paintings by other people from around the same time. It’s rare to find galleries where the difference between “Wow!” and “Enh, it’s nice…” is as extreme as you see with stained glass.

Of course, to some degree, this is a matter of numbers. There are relatively few people making museum-quality stained glass windows, so it’s not surprising that the field has produced a small absolute number of geniuses.

There’s also a question of time. Three hundred years ago, the gap between Isaac Newton and the rest of the field of natural philosophy would’ve been absolutely brethtaking. These days, it’s a little harder to see, because Newton’s accomplishments, towering as they were in his own day, are way down at the bottom of the edifice of modern physics.

(And, of course, there’s the whole question of Leibnitz, who was pretty close to Newton’s level, in terms of math if not physics…)

In modern physics, you could probably make a case for Einstein’s General Relativity as being the biggest gap between an individual and the rest of the field. It’s really not my field, but my impression is that GR is very much a thing unto itself, and really hasn’t been significantly modified since Einstein first put it out there. People have worked through the implications of the theory in much more detail than he was able to do, but nobody has significantly modfied the basic structure in eighty or ninety years. We know that it doesn’t play well together with quantum theory, but if anything, it works a little too well in most situations.

This shouldn’t be restricted to physics, though, or even science. I’d like to hear examples of the fields with the biggest gap between the person who is the very best, and the next best person. I’m sure there are examples from other areas of art, music, sports (Wayne Gretzky? Jim Brown?), whatever. So what are they?