Link back to course Welcome

Some Creativity Anecdotes

1. I call your attention to the section on the composer Igor Stravinsky in Creating Minds, and particularly to the section on page 190 in which the sound of cupping the right hand under the left armpit and squeezing the left arm produces a noise that "sounded (euphemistically) like wet resounding kisses." Does everybody understand exactly what is being described here? In how many textbooks will you read something like this?
2. Still in the Stravinsky section, Gardner describes the opening night of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring). It was chaos, pandemonium. I remember the record notes on the first recording of this that I bought (the fact (a) that I was a young male at the time, and (b) the record cover featured one of the first "respectable" displays of partial nudity were, I assure you, entirely unrelated). The record notes quoted from a newspaper review of the first performance. The reviewer said that towards the end of the piece he came to his senses and realized that he was keeping time to the music by pounding on the head of the person in front of him with his closed fists! And the poundee was likewise so absorbed in the music that he paid no attention! The ability of these major works of Creativity to astound the viewer, reader or listener  can scarcely be appreciated at this time, so much after their premier.
3. Regarding Einstein, I was an undergraduate Physics major during the late 1950's and early '60's, over 50 years after Einstein's publication of the theory of special relativity. At the time that I was a Physics major, the education practice was to follow the historical development of Physics, so we spent several years studying the earlier "classical" Physics of Newton, up to the end of the 1800's. Relative motion was well understood at the time. In contemporary terms, imagine a policeman standing at the corner of Woodward and 6 Mile, holding a "radar gun" and clocking two cars speeding North. One, a police car, is travelling North at 60 miles an hour, and in the second, a criminal is driving North at 70 miles an hour. The criminal is travelling ten miles an hour faster than the police car. Now, if the policeman in the police car also has a radar gun, what speed would that radar gun in the car show for the criminal's car? Classically, the answer is clear; ten miles an hour, since that is the relative speed of the two cars.
   
   Well, starting in the late 1800's, there were many measurements of the speed of light, approximately 186,000 miles per second. This relative speed thing was tried with light beams, and the results were very confusing and contradictory. Nothing seemed to work the way it was expected to, like the two travelling cars above. At first, the experimenters were criticized, but the best experimenters of the time got into this, and again there were criticisms, but eventually all of the criticisms were answered, but still nothing seemed to work. The results had to be taken seriously.
   
   In the two-cars situation, the policeman on the ground measures the criminal's speed as seventy miles per hour, and the policeman in the car measures the criminal's speed at ten miles per hour. No problem, since the policeman in the car is travelling at sixty miles per hour. The two numerical values of the speed are different, but the situation is exactly what would be expected. If the criminal were travelling at the speed of light, however, the two policemen would measure exactly the same numerical same value for the speed; 186,000 miles per second, even after being as careful as they could and resolving all of the experimental problems. Many theoretical physicists tried to "bend" or adapt the classical relativity, that predicted different numerical values for the two policemen's measurements. But none of these attempts were successful.
   
   So, one day in our Physics classes, our teachers started explaining what Einstein proposed in the Special Theory of Relativity. Classically, speed was measured by taking a ruler and measuring the distance traveled between two times, and dividing the distance by the time to travel that distance. Einstein proposed that the measurements of distance and time were mixed up in a specific way. This resolved the problem with the speed of light, but I still remember my own feeling of puzzlement and anger. It made no sense! What could Einstein have been thinking? It was just weird. It couldn't be right. But it was right. Again, the reaction was similar to that of the reviewer of Le Sacre du Printemps. And in my case, the outrage was fifty years after Einstein first made his proposal.
   
   Well, Einstein was right and I was wrong. And scarcely a year or two later, as a Physics graduate student, I was using Einstein's equations on a regular basis. They were no longer outrageous or weird to me. They were simply a tool that we used day in and day out to make further discoveries.

The changes that the creative individuals made, that are described in Creating Minds, were truly revolutionary. It is hard to grasp today how fundamentally they challenged the culture of the time. I hope that these anecdotes (well, maybe not #1!) have helped.