On creativity and new ideas
In his 1959 essay, On Creativity, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov asked how exactly “do people get new ideas?” Asimov looked in the first instance at the similarities between Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace — two naturalists who arrived independently at the theory of evolution at around the same time.
Indeed, both Darwin and Wallace had voyaged to exotic lands to study the strange and bewildering variations of life. Darwin looked at finches on the Galapagos while Wallace studied frogs from the Malay Archipelago.
More curiously, both men were influenced by economist Thomas Malthus’ essay on The Principle of Population. (Malthus argued that without social reform, runaway population growth and the ceaseless contest for scarce resources might lead humankind someday to poverty and ruin.)
This idea from economics germinated in Darwin and Wallace’s mind. They began to draw parallels to nature, culminating eventually in Darwin’s magnum opus: “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”; and Alfred’s lesser known: “On The Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type”.
Cross-connecting and continual-shuffling
Now, many people have read Malthus’ essay. And many people have studied nature. But fewer have read Malthus and studied nature together. From this vantage point, the creative genius of Darwin and Wallace was in being the first to make such a wondrous “cross connection”.
“The creative person”, Asimov says, “[is] continually working at it” — “shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it”. Combinations can manifest in the most surprising ways. Take August Kekulé, for example, who discovered the structure of benzene rings “after dreaming of a snake eating its own tail”.
This may explain Asimov’s own genius too. His Foundation Trilogy did not materialize out of thin air. He was a chemist and professor by trade, lived through the Second World War, and was inspired by the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. As a science fiction writer, he made the connections that nobody before him had.
“There seem to be a lot of unrelated concepts; but with a more profound understanding of the various principles, there appear deep interconnections between the concepts, each one implying others in some way.”
Richard Feynman. (1964). The Character of Physical Law.
Daring, independent and eccentric
To make cross-connections, “a certain daring” is necessary, Asimov writes. “To fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance.” Such a person may “seem eccentric” and “unconventional in [their] habits” to ordinary mortals.
Asimov adds “that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required”. “Creation”, after all, “is embarrassing”. “For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display”. In his view, the judgment and “presence of others can only inhibit [the creative] process”.
That’s not to say, however, that creatives are recluses. Since no one can know everything, finding the right people to cultivate ideas with is worthwhile. But “the optimum number of the group”, Asimov argues, should be “no more than five”. It is also for this reason that he recommends dinner or coffee over the meeting room. Formality inhibits creativity.
“Probably more inhibiting than anything else is a feeling of responsibility. The great ideas of the ages have come from people who weren’t paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks or petty officials, or were not paid at all. The great ideas came as side issues. To feel guilty because one has not earned one’s salary because one has not had a great idea is the surest way, it seems to me, of making it certain that no great idea will come in the next time either.”
Isaac Asimov. (1959). On Creativity.
Experience, intelligence, and motivation
To humble us ordinary folk, mathematician Claude Shannon reminds us in his lecture on Creative Thinking that “a very small percentage of the population produces the greatest proportion of the important ideas”. He points, for example, to Isaac Newton, who developed his theory of gravitation at the age of twenty three. (Albert Einstein, likewise, developed his theory on special relativity at the old age of twenty six.)
Few of us will ever be as bold and brilliant as Newton and Einstein. But that should not deter us from emulating them. And on that front, Shannon has a few tricks to foster creative thinking. First, it goes without saying that you’re going to need the right training, experience, and intelligence. A bumbling charlatan with no aptitude for science is unlikely to make a scientific contribution.
Second is “drive” and “dissatisfaction”. One should have “a desire to find out the answer” and to “think [that] things could be done better”. It took Einstein eight years, following a thought bubble that came to him in 1907, to develop his theory of general relativity. He just kept working at it. And born from that persistence was a world-shattering idea.
Simplicity, generalization, and inversion
Now, assuming you possess the ability and drive, there exist several “gimmicks” to assist with creative work, says Shannon. Firstly, we can pursue “the idea of simplification” and “similar known problems”. The rationale is simple: it is “much easier to make two small jumps than one big jump in any kind of mental thinking”.
Another “is the idea of generalization”. In mathematics, for example, new theories are often found first for a special restricted case. A natural question to follow up with is whether the theory is applicable to a broader or neighboring class of problems. This is similar to Asimov’s point on combination and cross-connection.
It might also be helpful to “restate [the problem] in as many different forms as [we] can”. “Change the words. Change the viewpoint. Look at it from every possible angle”, Shannon writes. Something new may present itself.
Relatedly then is “the idea of inversion”. If you are struggling to find a solution, you might want to look for problems instead. Put another way, while forward problems search for effects from given causes, inverse problems look for causes from given effects. Through inversion, we might “find a fairly direct route” or something new altogether.
Imagination in a terrible strait-jacket
If creativity sounds like a lot of guesswork to you, that’s because it is. As Richard Feynman explains in The Character of Physical Law, sometimes we just have “to stick our necks out”. “If you thought science was certain — well, that is just an error on your part.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that we are throwing darts with a blindfold. “What we need”, Feynman writes, “is imagination, but imagination in a terrible strait-jacket” — much like Shannon’s note on “small jumps” and the concept of the adjacent possible in biology.
Newton’s laws of motion and law of universal gravitation, for example, did not spring forth from the mind’s eye. His achievements followed and built upon Galileo Galilei’s observations on falling bodies, and Johannes Kepler’s studies of planetary motions.
To imagine well, we must be sensitive to the build-up of inconsistencies, Feynman notes. Einstein “guessed” his theory of relativity after thinking long and hard about the “accumulation of paradoxes” under the Newtonian paradigm.
Analogies can help too. James Clerk Maxwell developed his treatise on electricity and magnetism in part by imagining a model of idle wheels and vortices. The analogy, while imperfect, helped Maxwell to conceive of the machinations that led to his ground-breaking equations, Feynman explains.
Finally, thoughtful organization may help us to guess at the unknown. Here, we should remember the chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, who left gaps in his classification of the periodic table — anticipating many elements that scientists would someday discover. (What’s more, like the chemist August Kekulé, the inspiration for the periodic table came also to Mendeleev in a dream.)
Playfulness, what ifs, and fuzzy webs
In the end, creative breakthroughs require a bit of playfulness, a willingness to ask ‘what if’, and an independence to detach oneself from the preconceptions and preoccupations of the prevailing times. Human imagination, you see, rests on a vast, fuzzy, looping web of ideas and knowledge. There exist many roads to the new and unfamiliar.
I should note that I’ve been rather biased with my focus on Asimov, Shannon, and Feynman. Each of them were mavericks who approached creativity as a primarily individual endeavour. Feynman, once an avid bongo player, literally beats to his own drum. So this is, of course, a short and incomplete sample of creativity from the finest minds.
Sources and further reading
- Shannon, Claude. (1952). Creative Thinking.
- Asimov, Isaac. (1959). On Creativity.
- Feynman, Richard. (1965). The Character of Physical Law.