Can science be creative?
This is an enormous subject. Man’s creativity has been discussed for centuries by philosophers, social scientists, historians, novelists and occasionally by natural scientists. An obvious division is into Arts and Sciences, the two cultures of C.P. Snow. We can of course talk of Creativity in both cultures, but there are major differences between them. In the Arts it is less clear what counts as creativity. It largely depends on a few critics whether something is declared a masterpiece or not. The Turner Prize is a good example of how critics might disagree. Money may also be regarded a good measure. The painting that commands a six figure label is immediately declared to be superior to one that you can buy for hundred pounds. And so is in literature and music. The novelist whose books sell in the millions is in higher regard than the one who has difficulties in finding a publisher interested in his/her work. And the same is true in pop music. The media is interested mainly in how many albums have been sold.
None of these measures carry much weight in Science. Science, by which I mean Natural Science, is objective. There is not much hype. Science is cumulative. Democritus might have started the theory of atoms, but a lot of knowledge has been added to the subject since. Anaxagoras stated that the Sun is an incandescent stone, the size of the Peloponnesos. Nowadays we know a lot more about the Sun too. Science accumulates. This progress was perhaps best expressed by Isaac Newton: “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” One may stand on the shoulders of giants in the Arts too but more often than not it is a precarious position to be in. They might fall off at any time. Did Jackson Pollock stand on the shoulders of Henri Mattisse? Or was it Miro? Or did some American painters offered Polllock their broad shoulders to climb on?
Science is cumulative. Art is not. A thousand years made enormous difference in the state of Science. Not in the Arts, not even two thousand years. Are Chaucer’s stories superior to those of Homer? Is Henry Moore superior to Praxiteles? Certainly not.
Definitions
How can one define Creativity, whether in the Arts or in the Sciences? If one looks carefully around, particularly on the internet, one can find hundreds of definitions. Some simple ones are quite effective: “Being creative means being inventive and imaginative”. A bit on the short side, but gives the essence of the thing. Some of the definitions reflect the spirit of our times, claiming that anyone in any subject can be creative. That would very much dilute how most people, who actually do something, look at creativity. The best antidote I have come across is a plea by Glenn Beck: “Please stop teaching my children that everyone gets a trophy for just participating.”
Next, let us see what philosophers say on the subject. To be precise I want to quote only one philosopher of Science, the late Michael Polanyi who went on to become a practising philosopher from a practising scientist. The title of this particular book is Personal Knowledge and the subtitle is Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. I do not profess to be familiar with any tenets of philosophy, post-critical or otherwise, but still believe that whatever Polanyi said about creation in the Sciences sixty years ago is still relevant today.
“Established rules of inference offer public paths for drawing intelligent conclusions from existing knowledge. The pioneer mind which reaches its own distinctive conclusions by crossing a logical gap deviates from the commonly accepted process of reasoning, to achieve surprising results. Such an act is original in the sense of making a new start, and the capacity for initiating it is the gift of originality, a gift possessed by a small minority.”
Clearly, to be able to create is a gift possessed by a small minority. We could add that yes, by a small minority indeed, but only some of the time. The Muse does come into it. She offers inspiration but she does not do it often, and she is quite capricious. She might kiss your forehead one day and completely forgets you the day after. Does it mean that creation is a random process? Yes, it is.
So far I have discussed creativity in some general terms. Now I would like to restrict the discussion to a discipline in which I spent a lifetime, on the borderline between Physics and Engineering. First Engineering.
Historically Engineering started up as all practice, no theory. The Roman Engineers built roads that still stand today. Roman engineers built the sambuca that Marcellus used at the siege of Syracuse. In nineteenth century Britain Brunel used his inventiveness and imagination to design bridges, tunnels, railways and ships but he was not ignorant of the theoretical foundations either. Being a foreigner he failed to get into France’s foremost school, the Ecole Polytechnique, but he spent his apprenticeship with Louis Breguet, the famous French instrument maker. He returned to Britain ready to create.
Can we define now what is an Engineer? One definition states that ‘An Engineer is a person who can produce something for two dollars that every fool can do for three dollars. This is a rather outdated definition that was probably never accurate. A modern definition sounds much better: “Engineers are professionals who invent, design, analyse, build, and test machines, systems, structures and materials to fulfil objectives and requirements while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, regulation, safety, and cost. Yes, money comes into it but in a less direct manner. What this definition misses is utility. The final product must be useful.
Where does the word ‘Engineer’ come from? From ‘engine’, no doubt. Not a good origin. Engines are thought to be dirty, dripping of oil. No gentleman should touch them. In most other European languages it comes from the Latin word ingenium, meaning ingenuity. The difference in etymology might indeed be responsible for the low status of British engineers in the past, apart from Brunel, of course.
Now let’s go back to creativity and consider those who are in constant touch with the Muse, whose forehead is continuously wet from the kisses of the goddess. They are the geniuses. For a description let’s go back to Polanyi.
“Genius makes contact with reality on an exceptionally wide range; seeing problems and reaching out to hidden possibilities for solving them, far beyond the anticipatory power of current conceptions.”
Do geniuses exist? I think there is a consensus that they do exist but their numbers are limited. They are the kind of people whose works are quoted and requoted, whose papers are read and reread, whose wise words are echoed and re-echoed, who make advances still admired a century later. It is difficult to say how many geniuses were around in the last century over the whole world. I don’t know, nobody knows but I would be willing to make a rough guess. I would say several hundred. Maybe four hundred. Obviously, I cannot make a list. When geniuses in Science are mentioned most people think of Albert Einstein with his abundant hair. They don’t know what relativity is but they do know that it is something important, something that must have been quite difficult to conceive. As mentioned before, my interest is in some interface between Physics and Engineering. In what follows I would like to talk about two geniuses working in this field. Let me start with one I have always known of, but never met.
Charles Townes.
He received the Nobel Prize in 1961 for his work on masers, something no layman has ever heard of. But he did not stop there. He went on to invent the laser a few years later, for which he should have got a second Nobel Prize but somehow the Nobel Committee thought one Nobel Prize should be enough for anybody. He died in 2015 at the age of 99. During his lifetime he was showered with medals and prizes. He had very prestigious jobs including Vice President and Director of Research for the Institute for Defense Analysis in Washington.
He graduated at the age of 19 obtaining a BA in Modern languages and a BSc in physics at the same time. During the war he worked on microwave radar. Microwaves have frequencies in the Gigahertz range. 1 Gigahertz = 1 billion Hertz. 1 Hertz means one oscillation per second. By the time the war ended there were several devices which could provide oscillation at Gigahertz frequencies. What could the maser do? Provide microwave radiation at the same frequencies but at much lower intensity. So it was useless. That’s what Townes colleagues at Columbia University told him: “Look it is very difficult to accomplish what you plan to do. The likelihood is that you will not succeed. But even if you succeed you would produce a device that is not useful. It will be able do something that existing devices can do much better.”
So what are masers? They provide coherent microwave radiation. Was it possible at the time to produce coherent microwave radiation by other means? Yes, it was, as mentioned ample times by Townes’ colleagues. So why was the maser so much acclaimed when Townes managed to produce a working model? Why did the Nobel Committee think that Townes’ work deserved the Prize? Admittedly the maser could do no more than existing devices but its operation was based on a different principle. Is that good? It is good because the existing devices had limitations, of which the maser was free. It was extremely difficult to increase the maximum available frequency by traditional devices. An increase of 10% in frequency was already celebrated as success. The frequency achievable on the maser principle, as Townes realised a little later, was capable of increasing the frequency by a factor of one thousand. That’s how the laser was born. He wrote the first paper on the laser. He owned the first patent on the laser. Nowadays everyone knows what a laser is.
Miklos Uzsoky
Uzsoky was a Hungarian engineer who knew as much mathematics as any mathematician, and as much physics as any physicist. Townes had bachelor degrees in physics and modern languages, a Master degree and a Ph.D. Uzsoky had no degrees whatsoever. True, he got as far as passing all his exams at the Technical University of Budapest. But for obtaining a degree, he would have needed to write a brief thesis, maybe ten pages on some trivial engineering topic. He never managed to do it because when reaching the ninth page he suddenly got the idea of how he could write a better thesis. He never got beyond page 9. He never submitted the thesis. He never got a degree.
So why do I write about Uzsoky? Because he was a genius, a type of which he might have been the only representative. So I am doing something very unscientific: I generalise from one single example. I believe there are geniuses in science of which we do not know who have never produced anything significant-nothing that can outlast the ravages of time. What are the characteristics of these geniuses? They are arrogant, conceited, condescending, irascible, petulant, cantankerous and take offense at the slightest provocation. They are workaholics. They work simultaneously on lots of interesting and hard-to-solve problems but never finish anything. They do not care about the opinion of their peers. In fact, they do not give a damn about anything. They live in their own closed word that we could call ivory towers would that phrase not be used so often in some trivial context. No Pantheon holds their ashes.
So how can you recognise them? I do not know. I met only one. All I can do is to give a few instances why I regarded him a genius. I was in my early twenties, and so were many of my contemporaries eager to obtain a Ph.D. Uzsoky was in his late twenties. We knew he was a genius. We would have loved to receive his advice. A direct approach to him was always rebuffed. The best thing was to meet him by chance on the street. A typical conversation between Uzsoky and a hopeful doctoral student went like that: “What is the title of your doctoral thesis?” Having received the title he would explain in five or six minutes how the problems can be solved. You don’t understand a thing but commit to memory what he said. We work and work, and a year later Illumination comes. Yes, this is the way to solve the problems. Yes this is what Uzsoky recommended. Asking further advice from him is useless. It is in vain to write to him. He does not reply. It is in vain to ‘phone him. He slams down the receiver. The gates of the ivory tower are firmly shut.
What kind of work did Uzsoky produce? Most of his life, he died at the age of 70, he was consultant to a number of research institutions and dropped recommendations here and there. He worked on his own terms. Nobody was to tell him what to do.
There was one exception. Since about a third of the Hungarian Electronic Engineers left Hungary (illegally of course) in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1956, the remaining Engineers were commanded to fill the gaps and ensure that technical development went on. He was catapulted into the position of Chief Development Engineer at a company that produced electronic devices. He was there when a Russian order came. The Russians wanted to have microwave links to be built along the railway line between Moscow and Vladivostok. Anyone looking at the map would realise that the two cities are far from each other. With a tower separation of 20 miles r it needed a lot of towers, each of them packed with microwave equipment. There was panic in the factory and in the offices. How on earth can we deliver such a product in such numbers? “Never mind,” said Uzsoky, “I shall do the design.” Such design would have been difficult under any circumstances but times were not normal. Hungary, being a satellite of the Soviet Union, had no access to Western Technology. Western Technical journals were not available. Every single device at every stage of development had to be invented or re-invented. Uzsoky did the lot. He designed everything from the antenna to the last digital circuit. These microwave links at one time represented about one third in value of Hungary’s total export..
His colleagues begged him to lend his name to publications. He always refused. Had everything been written up he initiated, it would have come to several thousand papers in learned journals. As it happened, no more than three papers were ever published bearing his name. He was a genius who never was. Are there others in that class? There might be.
