# Genius  ## Metadata - Author: [[James Gleick]] - Full Title: Genius - Category: #books ## Highlights - Originality was his obsession. He had to create from first principles—a dangerous virtue that sometimes led to waste and failure. ([Location 204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004LRPQIO&location=204)) - Tags: [[blue]] - There were other kinds of scientific knowledge, but pragmatic knowledge was Feynman’s specialty. For him knowledge did not describe; it acted and accomplished. Unlike many of his colleagues, educated scientists in a cultivated European tradition, Feynman did not look at paintings, did not listen to music, did not read books, even scientific books. He refused to let other scientists explain anything to him in detail, often to their immense frustration. He learned anyway. He pursued knowledge without prejudice. ([Location 273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004LRPQIO&location=273)) - Tags: [[blue]] - EVENTUALLY THE ART went out of radio tinkering. Children forgot the pleasures of opening the cabinets and eviscerating their parents’ old Kadettes and Clubs. Solid electronic blocks replaced the radio set’s messy innards—so where once you could learn by tugging at soldered wires and staring into the orange glow of the vacuum tubes, eventually nothing remained but featureless ready-made chips, the old circuits compressed a thousandfold or more. The transistor, a microscopic quirk in a sliver of silicon, supplanted the reliably breakable tube, and so the world lost a well-used path into science. ([Location 320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004LRPQIO&location=320)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It had already occurred to psychologists that children are innate scientists, probing, puttering, experimenting with the possible and impossible in a confused local universe. Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist. Every child is observer, analyst, and taxonomist, building a mental life through a sequence of intellectual revolutions, constructing theories and promptly shedding them when they no longer fit. The unfamiliar and the strange—these are the domain of all children and scientists. ([Location 364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004LRPQIO&location=364)) - Tags: [[blue]]