"Resolutions to Enhance Confident Creativity".

The laser and its microwave predecessor, the maser, shouldn't have worked. No less a giant than Niels Bohr (and many other physicists) said so - a beam with such a narrow frequency bandwidth would contravene the uncertainty principle. No less an expert than I. I. Rabi (and many others) said so: the second law of thermodynamics would require the generating molecules to be so hot that they would dissociate. Rabi, then the head of the physics department at Columbia University, tried vigorously to persuade the discoverer of the principle on which masers and lasers are based, a member of his department, to cease work on the subject. As Charles Townes subsequently wrote ("How the Laser Happened"; Oxford University Press, 1999), it was a good thing he had tenure, as well as the licence from his funding sources to pursue his ideas for their own sake rather then for specified outcomes.

Necessity was the mother of Townes' invention: a committee he chaired had failed to make much progress in identifying new ways of generating millimetre radiation, and the need to do better led him to go back to first principles. Despite the subsequent opposition, he went on to validate his convictions that neither the uncertainty principle nor the second law were obstacles to unprecedentedly powerful and finely tuned radiation from a stimulated population of molecules; he constructed the first maser in 1954. The Russian theorist Vitali Ginzberg wondered why it hadn't been invented decades earlier, when all the necessary fundamental physics was already established.

The sort of opposition that Townes encountered is inevitable - there will always be established and influential scientists who resent the incursions of new thinkers on their turf or, even with the best will in the world, are resistant to looking beyond their long-held scientific assumptions. And anyway, critical scrutiny is part of the bedrock of science. Regrettably, not everyone is given a Nobel prize-winning combination of experience, opportunity, insight and persistence in the face of such resistance to originality. Nevertheless, it is worth asking whether one can draw inspiration from such examples in trying to ensure that scientifically creative thinking is actively developed in the young, supported rather than opposed at maturity, and sustained rather than undermined at all stages of a career.

Understanding Creativity:

Psychologists have studied creativity systematically since the 1950s. Some concede that, for all its diversity of approaches, the discipline has delivered few solid new insights (for a comprehensive round-up, see "Handbook of Creativity," ed. R. Sternberg; Cambridge University Press, 1999). Still, Townes' undramatic but compelling account of his varied and war-stimulated career before his discovery and the work he had to do to fulfil it provides an excellent example of the psychologists' standard model of the creative process: a period of (often unwitting) preparation, in which the creator becomes intimately familiar with an intellectual or practical domain; incubation, in which knowledge and ideas simmer, often while the creator's mind is directed elsewhere; inspiration - the forever mysterious moment in which the concept of a creation is sparked; and, finally, implementation - the phase in which, in many cases, scepticism needs to be overcome, persuasiveness in gathering support is vital, and, in all cases, time needs to be available for intense, unremitting effort.

Seeking Problems:

Despite the lack of progress in understanding creativity, there is no reason to doubt that it can be fostered by expecting people to seek problems as well as to solve them, and by making imagination, rather than the products of it, a primary goal in part of their training. Little can be done about inspiration, but there is a worthwhile challenge, rarely confronted in the education and training of scientists, in helping with other aspects of the process for those many individuals who have the capacity to think of productive new associations of ideas, or better ways of doing things, or even fundamentally new concepts. So here are three idealistic resolutions for the year 2000.

Develop an undergraduate option designed to encourage not only the creative answering of questions but also the creative finding of them in the first place. Take a lead from the "General paper" - the most challenging exam for students of some physics courses: it demands solutions to such unexpected challenges as "derive a theory for the fact that an inverted soy-sauce bottle delivers a small quantity of sauce and then stops, and predict the quantity delivered". (For this, and other general problems, see "Thinking Like a Physicist", ed. N. Thompson; Hilger, 1987.) Tackling equivalent teasers in any discipline will at least help develop flexible thinking.

But go further by encouraging students to look for problems. For example, invite students to find everyday phenomena that raise interesting but soluble conundrums. If that opens up avenues for investigation, give the student (whose self-motivation is all-important) a chance to become familiar with the relevant science and its literature, to incubate thoughts, to have ideas and to pursue them. In responding to those ideas, highlight their positive aspects, but also familiarize their originators with the challenge of constructive but tough questioning.

Setting people goals other than the exploration of their own ideas for its own sake limits creativity. Targets of publication output and other productivity measures undermine creativity psychologically as well as inducing a short-term, problem-solving outlook. Strive to reduce rather than increase the burden of such millstones.

Reflect on the fact that if Charles Townes had not had tenure, the development of the laser might well have been delayed yet further. That too many of today's creative scientists lack long-term security is a well-known problem; the corollary is that good but unconventional ideas are probably falling by the wayside. There has been much agonizing over, but little progress in, improving the status of contract researchers. Anyone in a luckier position of influence should take at least one initiative this year to help improve their financial independence or otherwise boost their freedom of creative action.

Editorial, "Medical Feudalism", Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 184, p. 1039 (June 29, 1963).

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