After listening to a biography on Robert J. Oppenheimer I started thinking that either you place too much importance on prerequisites or that Oppenheimer really wasn’t such a great scientist. Quotes from American Prometheus (which I listened to ~2.5 years ago):
Oppenheimer’s approach to learning physics was eclectic, even haphazard. He focused on the most interesting, abstract problems in the field, bypassing the dreary basics. Years later, he confessed to feeling insecure about the gaps in his knowledge. “To this day,” he told an interviewer in 1963, “I get panicky when I think about a smoke ring or elastic vibrations. There’s nothing there—just a little skin over a hole. In the same way my mathematical formation was, even for those days, very primitive. . . . I took a course from [J. E.] Littlewood on number theory—well, that was nice, but that wasn’t really how to go about learning mathematics for the professional pursuit of physics.”
Oppenheimer always thought he was deficient in mathematics. “I never did learn very much. I probably learned a good deal by a method that is never given enough credit, that is, by being with people. . . . I should have learned more mathematics. I think I would have enjoyed it, but it was a part of my impatience that I was careless about it.”
Other things that made me skeptical of Oppenheimer’s greatness was his mysticism, irrationality, neuroticism and liking Marxism and Freud. He seemed more like a pretentious academic, rather than a great physicist, in some ways. I may be misremembering what I heard, I mostly listened while driving.
And maybe I shouldn’t hold all those things against him. Maybe there are other great physicists of that time who believed in those types of ideas. There’s Kurt Godel, a mathematician, whom I don’t know much about except his reputation as a mystic. I remember the Los Alamos physicist Ayn Rand talked about who held a four-leaf clover for good luck. I checked and that was Oppenheimer, PWNI:
There was a story in the press that during the first test of an atom bomb in New Mexico, Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Los Alamos group who had produced the bomb, carried a four-leaf clover in his pocket.
Continuing:
More recently, there was the story of Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut who conducted ESP experiments on his way to the moon. There was the story of a space scientist who is a believer in occultism and black magic.
I didn’t research Oppenheimer’s physics achievement. Ayn Rand believed he was a great intellect despite the mysticism. From The Journals of Ayn Rand:
“Oppenheimer set the character of Stadler in my mind, which is the reason for the first name of Robert. It’s the type that Oppenheimer projected-that enormous intelligence, somewhat bitter, but very much the gentleman and scholar, and slightly other-worldly.
Are your claims compatible with Oppenheimer not being so great at the math and physics basics? I may be over reading into Oppenheimer’s lack of skill here. It seems he could follow along with difficult math (same book):
When Alfred North Whitehead arrived on campus, only Robert and one other undergraduate had the courage to sign up for a course with the philosopher and mathematician. They painstakingly worked their way through the three volumes of Principia Mathematica, coauthored by Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. “I had a very exciting time,” Oppenheimer recalled, “reading the Principia with Whitehead, who had forgotten it, so that he was both teacher and student.” Despite this experience, Oppenheimer always thought he was deficient in mathematics.
(The text in the end here is the same as the math quote above.)
Although that could be compatible with:
I’ve been mostly on the side that mastering the prerequisites is what you want if you want mastery at the higher levels, or to be a genius. But I’ve had little doubt about the issue that I never addressed. It feels like I’ve had a justificationist or probabilistic attitude to the issue. If I had brought up this issue earlier I might have been more convinced about prerequisites and been more excited to learn them.
When reading Career, Physics and Goals (was: Artificial General Intelligence Speculations) I wasn’t fully convinced that lmf wasn’t good enough at math for his physics goals. But mostly. Skimming over the thread, I think what you said about standards for understanding was great.