The genius, the explorer and the emperor

Speaking Volumes

Reading The Natural History of the Rich a few weeks ago, I was struck by the number of rich, successful men "" and they were almost always men "" who felt the need to adopt peacock's feathers.

They hopped into hot-air balloons; they built fantastical Disneyland palaces; they took part in dangerous boat races. In Richard Conniff's terms, they were posturing in the same fashion as a male gorilla does ("look at me!") or the bower bird does ("look at all the things I've got!").

There were some very bright men in that group, even some nice men. And there wasn't a single one who was truly interesting. If you wrote a collective biography, it would focus either on their struggle to get to the top, which is an elemental but old story of rapidly waning interest, or of their boardroom battles, absorbing but far less interesting than, say, the deployment of strategy and shifting alliances in the Iliad.

Or it would focus on these external attributes, like our tales of the maharajas. This one shot many tigers, that one bought up a jewellery showroom; this man took over so many companies, that man bought up seven French vineyards because he felt like it.

None of them exert the kind of grip on my imagination that three men do "" one celebrated, one a footnote to history and one who may be a genius or may be deluded.

They were written about at different times and by very different authors, and if you haven't already made their acquaintance, you should.

To understand the mind of John Nash, you need to be able to think in his language, which is the language of mathematics.

To understand why he has a beautiful mind, all you need to do is read Sylvia Nasar's book. Banish from thought the film version, which sanitised Nash's complex life into the All-American hero struggling bravely with madness, and used the pathetic, limping device of an "imaginary friend" to demonstrate that madness.

With the real Nash, it could be difficult to tell when his faith in rationality and "the power of pure thought" merely led him to logical conclusions or interesting hypotheses, and when it tilted over into a schizophrenia that lasted for thirty years-and then lifted, inexplicably.

"He was beguiled by the idea of alien races of hyper-rational beings who had taught themselves to disregard all emotion," writes Nasar. "Compulsively rational, he wished to turn life's decisions... into calculations of advantage and disadvantage, algorithms or mathematical rules divorced from emotion, convention, and tradition.

Even the small act of saying an automatic hello to Nash in a hallway could elicit a furious, "Why are you saying hello to me?" Nash won his Nobel for game theory, and the account of how the prize of prizes was finally given to a genius who had emerged from clinical madness is perhaps the second most moving passage in A Beautiful Mind.

The most moving passage is the one where Nash explains why he trusted the delusions and the voices that he heard in his head "" because they came from the same place that his ideas did.

Nash's recovery demonstrated his faith in reason and rationality far better than any polemic could: it wasn't that the delusions and hallucinations had stopped.

He had learned to "intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking" "" to apply rationality and reason, his twin gods, to the fluctuating disorder of his own brain and so to bring order out of chaos. No medieval hero was ever called upon to perform such a feat.

If Alfred Wallace was a genius, it was of a very different order from John Nash. Wallace's name should be just as well known as that of Charles Darwin "" they worked in the same field-but he remains a scientist's scientist. When David Quammen wrote about Wallace in The Song of the Dodo, he saw Wallace's life as the logical starting point for a book on islands and how they help us to understand the processes of evolution and extinction.

Wallace's story fascinates me because it is in two parts, and each might have made him famous: he was an explorer who survived grievous injuries to his feet, adjusted to strange diets (farinha and fish), who stayed with the legendary Raja Brooke of Sarawak.

And he was a scientist who almost beat Darwin to the theory of evolution: indeed, he mailed his theories on the idea of the survival of the fittest to Darwin.

Wallace's theories went by mail boat, and much hinges on whether the boat arrived in ten weeks, or twelve, or fourteen. If it was fourteen, then the romantic version of this story is true "" Darwin and Wallace happened to come up with the same theory simultaneously.

If it was ten, however, then Darwin is exposed to the charge that he either suppressed Wallace's manuscript or even used the man's ideas without attribution.

From Nash's story, we learn that even the greatest scientists may have their genius recognised years after they come up with the big idea.

From Wallace's story, we learn that scientists are no more immune to petty jealousies or politicking than the rest of us. And a question emerges: what if we had a similar story today?

Chandler Burr thinks he found that story on a London train. That's where Burr met Luca Turin and stumbled upon a tale that mingled perfumes and scientific intrigue. Turin offers nothing less than a brand new theory of the sense we understand the least "" the sense of smell.

Turin thinks that conventional wisdom about smell is dead wrong. He challenges the theory that smell is subjective: like sight, it doesn't matter what the individual really smells so long as we can arrive at a consensus.

If people can agree on the colour red, they can agree on the scent of, say, vanilla. But it's Turin's new theory of smell that leads us into the esoteric world of the Shapists and the Vibrationists.

It could win him a Nobel if he's right; it's been derided by many of his peers, either out of jealously, or ignorance "" or perhaps because it's just not true. We don't know, at this point.

Luca Turin is an abrasive but likeable man, possessed of determination and a talent for describing smells and scents that first showed up in his famous Perfume Guide.

Tresor is "the olfactory Arthur Miller arm in arm with Marilyn Monroe"; but it is hard to imagine Jovan White Musk being "worn by anyone much above voting age". But after reading Burr's account, lucid but fiercely partisan, you're left wondering where the truth lies.

There is no distance between our time and Turin's (The Emperor of Scent has just been released), no way of knowing whether the man you're reading about is a misunderstood genius or a confused zealot.

For a brief moment, reading about Burr transports you back in time, where you can imagine yourself into the position of those who first heard about this strange theory "" that man is descended from the apes, that the earth goes around the sun, whatever it may have been.

"May you live in interesting times" is a well-known ancient Chinese curse. Perhaps it should have carried a soothing corollary: "That's where the most interesting books come from."

nilroy@lycos.com