In 1987, in the sleepy bayou town of Houma, La., Peter Putnam was riding his bike to work at the Department of Transportation, where he was employed as a janitor, when a drunk driver swerved into him, killing him.
There were no obituaries in national newspapers. No mention of Peter Putnam's death on the evening news. Indeed, what interest could the national news media have in reporting the death of a janitor?
Peter Putnam was a physicist who’d palled around with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr — three of the 20th century's most brilliant minds. Bohr's model of the atom was a crucial step in the development of quantum mechanics. Wheeler took that model and developed a revolutionary theory of the mind that Putnam turned into a theory of how humans think.
I don't pretend to understand the quantum theory that suggests "the observer influences observed" phenomena. "Physics seemed to suggest that observers play some role in the nature of reality, yet who or what an observer is remained a stubborn mystery," writes Amanda Gefter in an in-depth article in Nautilus.
What's of greater interest is how this extraordinary man with incredible insights into the way the mind works lived such an obscure life.
"When I asked why, if Putnam was so important, no one has ever heard of him, everyone gave me the same answer: because he didn’t publish his work, and even if he had, no one would have understood it," writes Gefter.
Putnam wouldn't be the first genius to be passed over while alive, only to have their brilliance recognized and feted after they've gone.
Gefter based her article on a treasure trove of Putnam's writing and recordings she discovered after contacting one of the physicist's few friends. Barry Spinello, a filmmaker in Bakersfield, Calif., met Putnam in the 1960s in New York City. Spinello was so impressed with the physicist's insights that he recorded 35 hours of conversations with Putnam.
Another Putnam friend, Coleman Clark, also met Putnam in New York City in the 1960s while Clarke was doing his Ph.D. at Columbia University. "Every talk with him had this level of significance that was just orders of magnitude higher up than a normal conversation with a normal human being."
Clark took Gefter to the mother lode: an old warehouse filled with rows and rows of file cabinets containing unpublished scientific papers and Putnam's personal musings.
Now he dug through drawers, handing me papers and folders until I was holding a stack so large I nearly toppled over. Typed manuscripts at hundreds of pages apiece; binders full of notes and letters; handwritten journals; accordion folders bursting with photos, telegrams, and postcards—we piled as much as we could into the trunk of my rental car and I drove back to my hotel.
It’s one thing to read through curated papers at a place like the American Philosophical Society, with pages gingerly propped on foam wedges under the watchful eyes of librarians. It’s another to flop down on a white bedspread in a Courtyard Marriott and hold a man’s unprocessed life, alone. You turn it over in your hands, still covered in his pencil marks, smudged with his fingerprints; an envelope singed in the spiral shape of his stove ring, yellowed glue clutching his pet bird’s tattered feather, a letter torn apart seemingly in anger and taped back together in remorse. Suddenly you’re implicated. You’ve disturbed a sleeping thing.
Thousands of typed pages lay the groundwork for a revolution in cognitive science. His "Outline of a Functional Model of the Nervous System (1964)," one of his few published papers, "worked out its implications for virtually every branch of human knowledge, from the foundations of mathematics and physics, to psychology, the arts, social science, and the diversity of human cultures, history, religion, and philosophy."
Reading some of his work, one is struck by the almost incomprehensible structure. Robert Works Fuller, a physicist and former president of Oberlin College, believes it's a style Putnam developed because he spent most of his life alone.
“Because of this isolation, he developed a way of expressing himself in which he uses words, phrases, concepts, in weird ways, peculiar to himself," Fuller said. "The thing would be totally incomprehensible to anyone.”
Fuller added, “Putnam really should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Yet he’s completely unknown.”
Putnam had a mind that was far ahead of his time. Copernicus was said to have similar insights. Einstein developed his revolutionary theories of gravity by being granted the ability to look beyond the current realities and grasp concepts almost alien in their origin. His famous "thought experiments" were simple, elegant, and inspired by an incomprehensible genius.
That's pretty good company Putnam is keeping if not in life, then in death.
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