they have him master a ludicrous breadth and variety of fields with little effort.

I have a hard time evaluating the general competence and learning rate of scientists and engineers on TV, because they invent whole fields while I'm still trying to figure out how compile - i.e., it goes from realism to fantasy pretty quickly for me, and I tune it out and concentrate on intuition and strategy. (Carson Beckett, I think, does even more amazing stuff than Rodney.) So I may not give Rodney's brain as much respect as I should!