What Makes an Expert?

British polymath Thomas Young, who died in 1829, is immortalized as “The Last Man Who Knew Everything,” in his biography of the same name by Andrew Robinson. Young was a professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, where he gave lectures mostly on physics. He was also a physician at St. George’s Hospital, superintendent of the HM Nautical Almanac Office, fellow of the Royal Society, and researcher into such diverse fields as the functions of the heart and arteries, the grammar and vocabulary of over 400 languages (including some of the most significant work into the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics), tuning musical instruments, the mechanics of elasticity, and the wave theory of light, among others. Robinson’s title seems fitting.

Prior to Young’s life, the “gentleman scientist” was a fixture of Enlightenment Europe. America’s statesman/scientist Benjamin Franklin famously dabbled in everything from electrocuting turkeys (and almost himself) to running the US Post Office. But in the time since Young’s death in the early nineteenth century, the frontiers of human knowledge have expanded so far that it’s become functionally impossible for anyone to “know everything.” While there have been no shortage of people who make contributions to multiple fields of endeavor, there really hasn’t been anyone who pushed the boundaries of what we collectively know in the same way Young or the many multidisciplinary thinkers before him did.

By the dawn of the twentieth century, expertise had become categorized, though not yet as specialized as it is today. No doctor was also a renowned hieroglyphics researcher like Thomas Young, but your average town physician was still doing everything from setting broken bones to delivering babies, and likely prescribing opium for the pain of either procedure. It was the last (and only) time that one person was awarded a Nobel Prize in both Physics and Chemistry: Marie Curie in 1903 and 1911, respectively. And engineers were designing all manner of new and exciting machines, though the most advanced flying machines of the day were designed and built by a pair of bicycle repairman brothers from Ohio named Orville and Wilbur Wright.

Even the nascent professional sports of the early 20th century had a remarkable capacity for people to achieve elite status in multiple fields. Jim Thorpe, the first Native American to win gold at the Olympics, was also arguably “The Last Athlete Who Played Everything.” He won gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon in 1912, played for 6 different American football teams (after being a two-time All-American in college), spent 6 years playing in Major League baseball, and played professional basketball in an American Indian league. Even those athletes who only competed in one sport were much less specialized than their modern counterparts. Home run king Babe Ruth, don’t forget, was also a pitcher.

And expertise has only gotten more specialized since then. The science courses you took in middle or high school (Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Geology) are home to literally hundreds of specialized disciplines that have their own highly specialized knowledge base that is mostly incomprehensible even to scientists in related fields. Having an advanced degree in one specialized field in no way corresponds to any kind of specialist knowledge in another. My Master’s degree says “Geological Sciences,” but I’m nowhere close to an expert on earthquakes or volcanoes. I know about moment tensor solutions and Bowen’s reaction series, but those are the kind of thing that get covered in undergraduate seismology and vulcanology. The people with PhDs in those fields are doing science that’s far beyond anything I learned as a college student.

An analogy I’ve heard often is to think of the knowledge you gain as you go through your elementary and secondary schooling as a circle, expanding outward in every direction: you learn about reading, writing, science, math, art, music, history, civics, and the whole host of human experience, but only to a superficial level. The frontiers of human understanding and achievement in each of those fields are far from the boundaries of your own personal knowledge circle when you graduate high school. If you go to college and pick a major: philosophy, economics, premed, journalism, etc, then your circle of knowledge expands on one particular side, bulging outwards in one area over four years until it’s more egg-shaped. If you then get a graduate degree, then it’s like you’ve put a toothpick on top of that egg, spiking a very small portion of the totality of your knowledge out so far that it nearly touches the edge of human understanding. And if you’re quite lucky, the research you conduct as you pursue your thesis pushes that very edge ever so slightly outwards, expanding the totality of humankind’s understanding of the universe just a little bit.

So when you hear someone mention that there’s a scientist somewhere who doesn’t believe in climate change, or a doctor who doesn’t think wearing masks helps stop the spread of COVID-19, ask them about the expertise of that scientist or doctor. There are likely plenty of nutritionists who may doubt climate change, or podiatrists who think that people shouldn’t be wearing masks. But their uninformed opinions shouldn’t outweigh the expertise of the climatologists and epidemiologists whose own knowledge on these subjects outpaces theirs by almost as much as they do the average layman’s. To go back to my circle analogy: a scientist or doctor who professes an opinion on something outside their own field is speaking from the summit of their egg, while the actual experts in that field are looking down on them from the edges of human understanding.

Perhaps the greatest advantage to a world where expertise has become so specialized is the tremendous number of opportunities it provides for achieving greatness. And never has greatness been easier for people of any background to achieve, in any chosen field. Thomas Young was born in 1773 to a Quaker family where he learned Greek and Latin by age 14, an education all but impossible for most of his contemporaries to attain. Our modern attempt to institute compulsory schooling for all children wouldn’t begin until over a century later. And for all its faults (we still grossly underserve children of color, teenage girls, those with learning disabilities, and children whose first language isn’t English, for example), there is no year in history you could time travel to where the American educating system was putting more of its kids through high school or sending more of its scholars on to college.

For those students (and their parents) who may be reading this, if genuine expertise and success is your ultimate goal, I have one piece of advice. Find a small niche that suits you and specialize yourself early. If you want to go to college on a music scholarship, you’ll find no shortage of competing students hoping for the same thing while playing the piano, trumpet, or violin. Try learning the bassoon. If you want to go to college on an athletic scholarship, you’ll find no shortage of competing students hoping for the same thing while playing quarterback or starting pitcher. College teams also need long-snappers and switch-hitting, base-stealing right fielders. And if you want to differentiate yourself from the innumerable other applicants hoping to major in chemistry or history, consider cultivating an active interest in Walden inversions during the nucleophilic attack of S_N2 reactions, or Minamoto no Yoritomo’s rise to power in the Kamakura period.

The world is full of experts who have made entire careers out of such highly-specialized knowledge and abilities. If you can find a niche that excites you, a small slice of human knowledge that you’re really passionate about, you can be one of them.