The Aha! Moment: A Scientist's Take on Creativity

Preface: Creativity in My Career

ix Preface Creativity in My Career H aving ideas! This book is a report from the front. I am a scientist, and I tell many scientific stories; but my notions of creativity include practitioners of the arts—writers, poets, composers, and other celebrated creators. I was also the crazy scientist Daedalus in New Scientist, and then in Nature and in the Guardian newspaper. An ideal Daedalus column started with something everyone knew and finished with something nobody could believe. Where had the argument gone wrong? Daedalus became one of the longest-running jokes in science—I wrote nearly nineteen hundred weekly columns. In parallel with this crazy output, I did proper scientific research. My publications include serious scientific papers, as well as two books expanding and illustrating Daedalian schemes. Some of these actually came true; indeed, you cannot judge in advance whether a new idea will work out, though few of them do. Thus one Daedalian idea won a Nobel Prize for the people who finally made it work, and another was incorporated into President Ronald Reagan’s proposed Star Wars project, which was a factor in ending the Cold War. Another career I got into was making objects and experiments for TV and for science museums. Together with the Daedalus column, this steady novel practicality made me ceaselessly creative. I evolved a theory of creativity , based on my own challenges and successes. There may be other ways, but this is mine. I expound on it in chapters 1 to 4. Chapters 5 to 12 give examples of my public projects, some of the problems I encountered, and some of the feelings I had while trying out my experiments. Creativity can often surprise its owner. At its best, a wild aha! moment suddenly gives you a new idea. I reckon it comes from a creative x Preface part of the unconscious mind, which I call the Random-Ideas Generator, or RIG (I think of it by its initials, because creativity certainly cannot be rigged, as this book will show!). Jokes and new ideas seem to use the same area of the mind; so my Daedalian jokiness—which also flows in this book—helped my creativity. You can’t make contact with the RIG, or at least I never made contact with mine. And, most of its ideas are wrong. All creative people have to live with lots of failure.Worse, coming up with an idea is only a tiny part of the whole creative process. It may take years of hard work to get an RIG idea into practice. There’s a special feel to being creative. Creativity is the essential cutting edge. But ultimately, your work has to form a product of some kind. For a writer or an artist, the result has to be printed, exhibited, or otherwise put before a public. A museum curator or TV producer knows that his ideas must go in front of an audience of one sort or another. And a research scientist knows that his results will appear as a scientific paper in an academic journal. Scientific papers are detailed, formal—and boring. In chapter 5, I describe some of mine—and reveal the exciting emotions that always drive research, though papers never hint at them. The last section of the book looks around a bit. Chapter 13 discusses some of my private creative projects, and chapter 14 tells of my life-long accumulation of facts and notions, which I now feel aided my creativity. That chapter also spells out my fascination with literary styles. Chapter 15 is a challenge to creative inventors: it recounts some inventions we need. Chapter 16 airs some of my current (quite possibly silly) questions —always a valuable stimulus to creativity. Chapter 17 condenses some of my advice on being creative. That mixed-up career of mine, part media freak and part serious scientist , has sparked this book. Daedalus might be deliberately silly, but my serious science often failed too. And my wild media-freakery often helped my serious science, prompting, for example, my discovery of arsenic in Napoleon’s wallpaper (see chapter 16) and my studies of chemistry in space (chapter 5). I tell lots of stories. They are not in any textbook; indeed, I dispute many textbook claims. Daedalus has leaked into many of the stories, as he also leaked into real life. I often stick my neck out and risk its being chopped off. [3.133.144.217] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 15...