Carolyn Jack
Editor and CEO, Geniocity.comA project of The Genius Group LLC
Creative Nerve
The creative dimension
Albert Einstein understood time and space.
No duh, you say. But I’m not talking about theoretical physics, at which Einstein was probably our most celebrated genius. I’m talking about another kind of genius he had: the twin gifts of understanding that time and space are valuable and of making sure he had plenty.
I’ve been reading the Walter Isaacson biography of Einstein, who was (I think few would argue) one of the most creative humans the planet has ever produced. What impresses me the most so far is that Einstein instinctively knew how to get what he needed and what he needed was opportunities to think.
How many do you have? Likely not enough.
Me, either. Our culture isn’t conducive to it, which means our culture isn’t conducive to creativity. We’re all frantically sending and answering e-mails and texts, updating our statuses (stati?), cruising the Web, downloading stuff, watching stuff, reading stuff, working, driving, dealing with each other. We really don’t have time to absorb information, slowly process it, experiment with it and invent big ideas from it.
Instead, most of us produce what feels like the mental equivalent of carbonation – a lot of little fizzy notions bubbling out of the turmoil in our heads, as if our skulls were constantly shaken cans of Coke. Those ideas seldom last long.
Einstein’s, on the other hand, seem likely to last eons. They were the result of years of concentrated thought, thought that was remarkably impervious to distractions from daily work, children, spouses and the state of the world, but that also demanded a great deal of time alone. He eventually arranged his life so that thinking was what he was paid to do, and the privacy to do it in was insured by indulgent universities and his motherly second wife, who had a separate bedroom and took care of all the day-to-day household business so his thoughts didn’t have to include laundry.
Most of us will never have gigs like that and are maybe even glad of it. The truth is, Isaacson explains, that Einstein was a person who never allowed his emotions to get too deeply embroiled in relationships or events; he cared, yes, but there was a kind of inner fence around his feelings, protecting him from investing too much psychic energy in things that didn’t ultimately matter to him as much as science. Probably most of us wouldn’t want to be like that, at least with our families and friends.
I wouldn’t. But I still envy him the long, uncluttered hours he had in which to create and I worry that my e-mail will become such a time pit that I’ll end up never getting to eat, shower or sleep, much less think. Maybe the hardest part of being creative, in the end, isn’t pushing our intellects to the limit, but finding the willpower to shut out the din of a world too in love with its own noise.
‘Angels’ and CERN scientists: Creativity smackdown
Ever read the book Angels & Demons ? It’s author Dan Brown’s first thriller featuring the character of Robert Langdon, the religion scholar who solves the mystery in Brown’s more famous later work, The Da Vinci Code.
Angels & Demons has all of Da Vinci Code’s vast conspiracies, arcane lore, lurid and/or mind-blowing secrets, high-level criminal creeps and full-out-flashy, H-bomb-explosion-sized climaxes – only more so. The end of the story is so grossly and hilariously over the top that I could hardly make myself turn the pages: Brown writes it as if he were the kid in Dr. Seuss’s And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, heaping up ever-wilder and more ridiculous fantasies until you just want to throw the book out the window or smack him or both.
A&D has been made into a movie – like Da Vinci, starring Tom Hanks as Langdon – that opens Friday and I can’t wait to see if it makes all of Brown’s literary hyperventilating more believable, or even less so. But, to get to the point, the film release got me thinking about CERN, the particle-physics laboratory that figures in the A&D plot.
It sounds like SMERSH or THRUSH or some other James Bond-type evil organization. In fact, it’s a world-renowned scientific organization started in the mid-1950s by many European nations that still collaborate on the running of CERN and its enormous facility on the Franco-Swiss border, where some of the world’s best minds study the nature of subatomic particles and forces with the help of the newly repaired and gargantuan Large Hadron Collider.
What those minds do there may not read quite as melodramatically as Brown’s novel, but is a creative adventure of far greater significance: They are literally trying to figure out how the Universe works. In the process, they’ve come up with other things, too – for instance, the World Wide Web was invented there, as a means for scientists to share information.
The CERN site contains as many pages and layers of fascinating information as Angels & Demons has plot twists. One of the things I like best about it is the quote from Albert Einstein that amounts to their company motto: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
I guess Dan Brown took that to heart.
