Elizabeth’s Journal

Creativity and Physics

I just got back from my first solo evening out since Kayleigh was born!!! She’s asleep on Dale right now in one of the chairs in front of the television. Very exciting development here in our household.

For my first excursion, I went to hear Steven Weinberg, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 and teaches/researches here at UT, speak at the Plan II Perspectives seminar that I have attended in previous years. The topic this year is creativity; for the first hour, the professor whose turn it is addresses the topic from the perspective of his/her discipline, then the rest of the panel responds to the speaker’s talk, and then discussion is opened up to include the students and alumni.

Dr. Weinberg’s talk was not quite what I had expected, and I thought he mostly seemed to talk around the topic of creativity in physics. I guess that’s what you get when you ask a physicist to talk about creativity! Were he inclined to ruminate about that kind of thing in greater depth, he probably would have gone into a different field. But more came out in the panel discussion and in the audience participation time. I even got called on and was able to speak directly to him (and luckily he agreed and appreciated what I had to say)—a brush with a great mind.

His best example of creativity in physics, although he did not talk about it much at all, was of the person who proposed the existence of the neutrino (Wolfgang Pauli). The more I thought about it, the more I thought it was a fantastic example of true creativity. Some people think that creativity means throwing everything away and doing something completely new, but I disagree with that (which was the point I made in the discussion)—creativity requires some parameters to operate within, a framework that guides or contains it. (End of the day, my articulateness factor is very low.) Dr. Weinberg doesn’t think much of most of 20th century art, and I think it’s for just that reason (he mentioned the Dadaists in response to my comment)—they threw everything out the window. Perhaps that’s innovation (he had a nice phrase, “pernicious innovation”), but I don’t think it qualifies as creativity.

Anything, the thing about the neutrino was that it really was creative. The person who proposed it didn’t have access to facts that no one else had—anyone else could have seen this, but they didn’t. He took facts and evaluated them from a completely different angle than had occurred to anyone else in the field, and his insight and creativity in approaching a problem led him to the answer. Really very elegant.

It was a breath of fresh air attending the seminar. Unfortunately there’s only one more, next week, and then not only is it over for this year but for forever—Dr. Woodruff is stepping down as head of Plan II at the end of the school year, and this yearly seven-week seminar was his baby. I shall really miss it.

Posted by elizabeth at March 1, 2006 10:14 PM