genius

How does science get new ideas? One way is to hold a contest. When the rest of us (who aren’t geniuses) want to know something, we usually look it up on the internet. Now Google has released the top 10 searchers on their site for 2008. Alas they show a lack of imagination: Sarah Palin, Facebook and Barack Obama. No wonder most of us will never win the X Prize!

In LiveScience.com, Michael Schirber quotes Sarah Evans, the head of the X Prize Foundation, as saying, “We recognized that we don’t have all of the answers, and wanted to reach out to the people that a prize in energy and the environment would affect and find out their ideas for what we should be focusing on.
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On this website, we’ve tried to describe what it feels like to be a genius. But geniuses such as Einstein and Richard Feynman also liked to have fun, just like the rest of us. Many of Benjamin Franklin’s best inventions were created to enhance his leisure activities.

Robin Lloyd writes in LiveScience.com that sex led many of them astray, just like it does the rest of us. Albert Einstein liked to date other women, besides his wife. His second wife was his first cousin, with whom he lived for five years before he divorced his first wife. Despite being in a wheelchair, Stephen Hawking had an affair with his nurse that led to a divorce from his first wife. Richard Feynman liked to visit strip clubs, where he said he got some of his best ideas.
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