The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

Side note about Newton and occult.

Newton was not just a physicist who dabbled with occult. He turned occult into physics.

Before Newton scientists and natural philosophers like Descartes believed that movements were caused by physical contact.

Newton started traditionally and proposed the existence of ether that transmits forces. When he became interested in alchemy, he replaced ether with occult forces that repel and attract each other. Newton received criticism for his theory that gravity was worked through "action at a distance", because that is occult quality. His theory was not seen as physical theory at first, because 'physical theories' at the time were physical in the intuitive common sense meaning. Action at a distance, across a vacuum, was occultism.

Keynes called Newton the last magician. He was able to make similar leap as Einstein did.

This is exactly right. I've come across this theory of obsession on my own and I've been helping my wife find what she's obsessed with. She watches things on YouTube like makeup tutorials that are things I would have never thought she was obsessed with.

Just to point out, we not only find stuff where our obsession lies, we can sometimes create complexity and interesting stuff where it lies, out of the thin air.

I'm obsessed about audio/music tech. Some part of this area is immensely complex due to people's obsession with good sound, or new interesting sounds, or new ways of altering it. They don't discover these things, they create it. Time stretch or pitch shift algorithms, for example, were created (I suppose) by obsessed people who like to create complexity and by extension, useful stuff.

So no, Darwin's invention model is not the only possible one.

I can't imagine how you can create useful complexity by collecting bus tickets, but who knows, maybe some key to inventing more efficient public transport lies there. Or at least more efficient bus ticket printing. Can be anything!

There's a much more obvious difference between now and 100 years ago: 100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific research was largely a closed shop for European-descended upper middle class men. There are certainly many geniuses obsessively researching into areas that stimulate their intellectual interest today that wouldn't have had the opportunity to do so back then.

I'm not sure being a scientist was that unfashionable 100 years ago anyway: research labs were a thing, academic work was arguably more prestigious than it is today, fortunes were being made from inventions especially in fields where there were low hanging fruit, competitions and societies and exhibitions to celebrate scientific achievement had come into existence and the idea of inventiveness was even tied up in popular contemporaneous notions of national and racial superiority. There might be more subfields and more research to build on nowadays, but the stereotype of scientists being underpaid eccentrics certainly hasn't gone away and nor has the fact a mathematics prodigy can make a lot more money working in financial services than academic research.

I'm also unconvinced scientific progress has slowed because today's geniuses are working on interpreting our genetic code, modelling solutions to climate change and solving scaling problems in computation rather than drawing taxonomy diagrams, inventing new types of consumer electronics and breaking the land speed record.

> 100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific invention was largely a closed shop for European-descended upper middle class men.

i.e. exactly the people who were, by far, most likely to be living a comfortable, stress-free life back then. We should not underestimate the sheer amount of material progress and economic growth that has occurred since then. A lot more people can have the luxury of getting playfully obsessed about something than could back then.