Readers Respond About Arrogance, Confidence, Brilliance, Humility, and Stupidity

I couldn’t disagree more with J. Murray Gibson’s Opinion piece on arrogance. First, I believe that we physicists can be arrogant because we believe we are smarter than people in other professions and not because we are objective. In fact, our belief in our supposed objectivity may be one of our major failings.

Second, the attitude at other laboratories can be far different from that at Bell Labs, as described by Gibson. We at the David Sarnoff RCA Laboratories were blessed by working with Albert Rose, who has been called the father of photoconductivity. Far from being arrogant, he was a brilliant but humble person. His humility permeated the labs; we all looked up to Al as a model of how to behave.

My conclusion is that arrogance in our profession is a one-edged sword aimed at ourselves, not a two-edged sword as Gibson has proposed, and arrogance should always be avoided. Let’s use Albert Einstein as our model of behavior, and not brilliant but arrogant physicists.