Geniuses Are Different

I ESPECIALLY ENJOYED “Holography: The Whole Picture,” by Tim Palucka, in the Winter 2003 issue. I knew most of the people involved, and I can relate a tale about Dennis Gabor’s naiveté concerning social issues. In the early 1970s he told me that money would someday be replaced by electronic transactions. Almost the case. He also said this would mean an end to crime. No comment.

The day after Gabor’s Nobel Prize was announced I was at MIT having lunch with several theoreticalphysics types, who were distressed that the prize had gone to him and not to someone working in elementary particles. But none of them had ever seen the two short papers that established not only holography but so much of modern optics. I was able to tell them what was in the papers, and the issue of who should have been awarded the prize was quickly forgotten in a flurry of questions about the applications of Fourier optics. They moved to a chalkboard and re-created for themselves, from the little I could tell them, much of what Gabor had done. Some things make clear the difference between geniuses and the rest of us.