Creativity in Physics

A little while ago I bumped into this article on Scientific American: How to Unleash Your Creativity. It’s a discussion between creativity researchers about just that, creativity. Towards the end, they seem to fall into the trap of directly associating the idea of creativity with the idea of artistry. One reader’s comment at the end of the article pointed out this flaw. While art may be a great example of creativity, science (and many other professions) can also be very creative fields. Since then, I’ve been thinking about the idea of creativity in physics and, from my experience as an aspiring physicist, I can tell you that there are an overwhelming number of outlets for one’s creativity in physics. I feel as though many aspects of scientific creativity are overlooked by a large portion of the population. I began to wonder why that is.

Art seems to be an obvious outlet for creativity. I think this is because it is, for the most part, manifestly accessible to anybody. Art communicates ideas and emotions using media that the vast majority of the population can interpret. If you can read, you can read a poem. If you can see, you can gaze at a painting. If you can hear (or apparently even when you can’t!) you can enjoy music. Artists use the tools (pen and paper, paint and canvas, instruments) to manipulate the media (words, colors and shapes, sound) which are specific to their discipline in order to cause our minds to react in a way that they normally would not. It is not the paint on the canvas that is beautiful, beauty comes from the idea that each of our minds creates upon looking at it. The development of new ways of using the medium (and hence new ways for our minds to react) is creativity. Physics, on the other hand, mainly uses mathematics to manipulate thought patterns. The mathematical expressions and symbols we create and use become, in a sense, metaphors for phenomena we observe in nature. The drawback is that mathematics, at the level needed to understand most physics, is largely inaccessible to the public.

That’s all well and good, but I think that’s only part of the reason people don’t generally associate physics strongly with creativity. Another big reason has to do with education. Language, for example, has a reputation for being fluid, creative, and aesthetic, while math has a reputation for being systematic, cut and dry, black and white. One can be used to formulate an aesthetically pleasing poem, the other can help you do your taxes. I contend that math is a language like any other (albeit robustly formulated and self consistent) and, for those who know how to interpret it, math can create emotional responses very similar to those created by, say, poetry.

Fortunately, I have a small anecdote to illustrate this. Back while I was doing my B.Sc., the professor teaching our quantum mechanics class went off on a small tangent to explain a mathematical trick that would help us. In quantum mechanics we commonly encountered, what appeared to us to be, complicated expressions that would require a laborious systematic approach to evaluate them by hand (integrals of Gaussian functions multiplied by powers of the integration variable). Our teacher introduced us to a trick that allowed us to evaluate such expressions seamlessly (equations 19-22 for those interested). After he finished it took a few seconds to get over the shock of what he had shown us, but when we did, the entire class burst out laughing. The idea was so simple and clever that it took us by surprise in the same way a particularly clever punchline of a joke might.

At the risk of flying off on tangential thought, let me just say this: language and math have many common aspects. They both require knowledge of a basic vocabulary, they both abide by rules one must learn to use them and they both can be applied to convey ideas. This brings me back to education. Whereas when learning language students are encouraged to engage in creative writing, when learning math (for one reason or another) there is no analogous exercise. Math at the high-school level, at least in my experience, is taught as a series of systematic processes which can be memorized (without real thought) by the students in order to pass the class. I think that goes for high-school physics and perhaps even higher level physics education also. It is no surprise then that people have very few (if any) personal experiences of creativity in math and physics. (On the other hand, I was lucky enough to have a wonderful high-school physics teacher that fostered this kind of creative thinking). My absolute favorite TED talk is given by Ken Robinson who makes the argument that schools kill creativity and I encourage you all to watch it. It’s brilliantly delivered. I think what I’m talking about here is just one manifestation of what he is talking about. I have a lot more to say on the subject of physics education, but I’d rather leave that to a future post.

I think another thing that many people overlook is that physicists and artists alike do what they do for the pleasure of construction. In art this means creating poems, paintings, compositions, etc. In physics it means creating new ideas. In physics these ideas are created to explain phenomena of nature and as a result, they happen to have “practical” applications. These applications are then interpreted by many as the only purpose for studying physics, but as Richard Feynman used to say: Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it. And if you’re in the mood for a small youtube excursion, you can watch an interview with the master himself entitled: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

It would be wrong of me to end here without giving you at least a few direct examples of creativity in physics. The principals of known physics can be used in cute ways to determine information in circumstances we would never encounter in everyday life. I have two examples of this for you. The first comes from the blog Built on Facts, which is really outstanding for this kind of post. He takes a little question, in this case, what would happen if you shot a gun on the moon, applies basic physics and comes up with a rough picture of the event. The second example comes about when a physics student watches Lord of the Rings; specifically the scene when Gandalf battles the Balrog during free-fall. The original question posed was: how far did they fall during this scene? The question turns out to be unimportant, the real joy comes from playing around with the physics of this idea. Eventually so much physics is taken into account that it fills up three posts (One, two, three)!

Additionally, physics theories need clever ways of being tested. Here’s a cute example of such a process on the fantastic blog Dot Physics. Rhett Allain formulates cute experiments to test the physics of a flash videogame called Fantastic Contraption (One, Two).

Finally, physics theories need to come from somewhere. When phenomena can’t be explained it’s because the ideas that have worked in the past just aren’t working. It takes creativity to develop new ways of thinking, new tricks, new interpretations. A while ago over at Cosmic Variance, Sean posted his experience of how theoretical physics is done in three installments (One, two, three). He goes over the entire creative process of writing a physics paper in a nicely written narrative of how one of his own papers came into existence.

I have a feeling that I’ll have more to say about this in the future, but I think this post is long enough as it is. Can any one else think of examples of creativity in physics? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.