There’s something very reassuring about being “normal.” Normal people wake up at reasonable hours, eat sensible breakfasts, maintain well-behaved hobbies, and rarely insert sharp objects into their own eyes. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that the people who changed our understanding of the world were rarely tidy, predictable, or even remotely conventional. In fact, many of them appeared to be held together by equal parts curiosity, stubbornness, and a quiet disregard for what anyone else thought was sensible.
Take Isaac Newton (my favourite!), brilliant, solitary, and the sort of man who thought nothing of sliding a bodkin, a blunt needle, between his eye and the bone just to see what would happen to the colours dancing behind his vision. He calmly documented the patterns, nearly blinded himself, and carried on with his work. This was the same mind that explained gravity. Normality was far too small for him.
Or consider Henry Cavendish, one of the greatest experimental scientists who ever lived and one of the most socially allergic. Cavendish avoided people with extraordinary dedication. He designed routes through his home so he wouldn’t accidentally meet his servants, communicated through notes, and yet managed to measure the density of the Earth and discover hydrogen. He hid from everyone but revealed the universe.
Then there was J.B.S. Haldane, cheerful, witty, and willing to burst his own eardrums in pressure chambers because he believed a scientist should never recommend to others what he hadn’t endured himself. He inhaled toxic gases, studied pain by inflicting it on himself, and still had the audacity to joke about biology being stranger than imagination itself.
Some eccentricities were quieter. Charles Lyell, for instance, didn’t duel or explode anything, but he stared at rocks with such patient devotion that he stretched humanity’s understanding of time. His ideas shaped Darwin’s thinking. While others rushed through life, Lyell slowed down enough to hear the Earth speak.
At the opposite end of the temperament spectrum stood Richard Owen. He was brilliant, combative, fiercely ambitious, and the man who coined the word “dinosaur.” He quarrelled with Darwin, dazzled the scientific world, and eventually built the Natural History Museum because he believed knowledge deserved a cathedral. Drama aside, his contribution was monumental.
And then, like a lightning bolt in human form, there was Nikola Tesla. He was noted to be sleeping two hours a night, conversing fondly with pigeons, and dreaming up inventions that the world is only now catching up to. To many, he appeared unhinged. To us, he gifted alternating current and the foundations of wireless communication.
Robert Boyle, thoughtful and meticulous, investigated vacuums, air pressure, magnets, and poisons, but he also earnestly explored angelology and universal languages. Paracelsus travelled through Europe with a sword filled with secret formulas, burned medical books in public squares, and replaced superstition with chemistry. Francis Galton, obsessed with measurement, timed chewing durations, mapped beauty across regions, and invented statistical tools still used today.
Tycho Brahe wore a metal nose after losing the original in a duel, kept a tame elk that drank itself to an unfortunate end, and compiled the most accurate astronomical observations of his age. Thomas Young quietly drifted from field to field. He dabbled in optics, Egyptology, linguistics, medicine, solving problems as casually as others tie their shoes. His mind was a library of brilliance, arranged without fuss or fanfare.
Some pushed boundaries with their own bodies. Werner Forssmann threaded a catheter into his own heart and walked to the X-ray room to prove it could be done safely. He was reprimanded, of course and later awarded a Nobel Prize. Stubbins Ffirth, with less rewarding results, attempted to prove yellow fever wasn’t infectious by exposing himself to contaminated blood, vomit, and other fluids, even ingesting some of them. He survived, though his hypothesis did not. John Hunter, the wild and foundational surgeon, collected anatomical specimens by the thousands, performed experiments on himself, and once infected himself while investigating venereal diseases. Messy? Yes. But he helped shape modern surgery.
And then there was Georg Wilhelm Richmann, who attempted to measure lightning during a storm and died when his apparatus exploded. His final recorded word was, fittingly, “Interesting.” Barry Marshall, in more recent decades, drank a culture of Helicobacter pylori and gave himself gastritis to prove that ulcers were caused by bacteria rather than stress or spicy food. His boldness reshaped medicine and earned him a Nobel Prize too.
When you step back and look at them together, something becomes wonderfully clear. These people were not normal, not even slightly. They were strange in the most human, hopeful, magnificent way. They followed curiosities that made no sense to anyone else. And because they did, we know more about light, air, time, electricity, geology, anatomy, disease, and the stars.
Normality may be comfortable, but it has never been what transforms the world.
So be yourself. Let your questions lead you, even the strange ones. Test your limits, explore the edges of your curiosity, and gently or boldly challenge the status quo.