Alan Lightman is a physicist and Adjunct Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is author of Einstein’s Dreams, Good Benito and The Diagnosis. His new novel, Reunion, will be published in July by Pantheon Books in the US and by Bloomsbury in Britain. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science
I VIVIDLY remember the occasion, years ago, when I took my two-year-old daughter to the ocean the first time. It was a mild, hazy day in June. We parked our car a half-mile from the water and walked the rest of the way. A speckled pink crab shell lying on the sand caught her attention. Then, a few hundred yards farther on, we heard the long roll of the waves. And I could tell that my daughter was curious about what made that sound she had never heard before.
Holding her up with one arm, I pointed to the sea. Her eyes followed along my arm, across the sand, and then out to the vast, blue-green of the sea. For a moment she hesitated. I wasn’t sure whether she would be puzzled or frightened by that first sight of infinity. Then she broke out into a radiant smile and giggled with pleasure. It was as if she already understood something about the sea, as if the sea were both unexpected and expected at the same time. I knew how she felt. This seemingly contradictory combination of qualities is exactly what I have experienced in my most creative moments: a stunning surprise joined with a feeling of rightness and inevitability.
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It has been my good fortune to have worked both as a physicist and as a novelist. And I have found that the “creative moment” feels the same in both professions. Indeed this particular sensation, one of the deepest and most beautiful of human experiences, provides the basis for a powerful understanding between the scientist and the artist – an understanding that Charles Percy Snow (also a physicist and a novelist) overlooked in his grim differentiation between “the two cultures”.
Creativity, of course, eludes easy grasp. Like a timid forest animal, it quickly darts behind a tree when you stare at it. How does one articulate that sense of the expected and unexpected at once? Where does it come from? How does one prepare for discovery? Most difficult of all to describe is the creative moment, that luscious instant when an idea, or an insight, or an unorthodox understanding, suddenly gels. I say “instant”, but whenever I experience the creative moment, in science or in art, I lose all sense of time. I also lose all sense of my body, my ego, my surroundings. I forget who I am and where I am. I dissolve into the imagined world. I become pure spirit. Perhaps it is part of the essence of this delicate and mysterious experience that it cannot be understood. Certainly, the sensations cannot be trapped and defined while in motion.
Despite these difficulties, writers, musicians, actors and other artists often attempt to describe their creative process. żěè¶ĚĘÓƵs, however, rarely do. In a paper written for Nature in 1920 but never published, Einstein mentions the “happiest thought of my life”, when he suddenly realised that the force of gravity disappears for a person falling freely through space. That simple but profound insight became the foundation of his general theory of relativity.
Max von Laue, in his Nobel Prize Lecture of 1915, briefly describes a meeting with another scientist one evening in February 1912 when they discussed the behaviour of long- wavelength electromagnetic waves in crystals. During that conversation, von Laue was “suddenly struck” by the image of short-wavelength waves traversing an atomic lattice, producing telltale interference patterns. And so was created the new field of X-ray diffraction. In The Double Helix, exceptional for its detailed and personal story of discovery, Jim Watson writes that “my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race” the instant he saw Rosalind Franklin’s new X-ray diffraction picture of DNA, realising that the patterns could arise only from a double-helical structure.
But accounts like these are few. Such comments by scientists often amount to only a sentence or two, and they hardly ever describe the emotional and psychological sensations of creating.
My own first experience with the creative moment in science occurred when I was a graduate student in physics in the early 1970s. After waffling around with course work for a year, I had finally settled into some genuine research. My first couple of research problems were tidy and brief. Then I fastened onto a more open-ended investigation, something that held the distinct possibility of leading me off a cliff. My project, inconsequential in the grand sweep of science, was to prove or disprove the conjecture that known experiments required all theories of gravity to be geometrical in form.
After an initial period of study and work, I had succeeded in writing down all the equations I thought relevant. Then I hit a wall. I knew something was amiss, because a simple result at an early stage of the calculation was not coming out right. But I could not find my error. And I didn’t even know what kind of error it was. Perhaps one of the equations was wrong. Or maybe the equations were right and I was making a silly arithmetic mistake. Or perhaps the conjecture was false, but would require an especially devious counter-example to disprove it. Or maybe I had misconceived the investigation from the beginning. Day after day I checked each equation, paced back and forth in my little, windowless office, but I didn’t know what I was doing wrong – what I had missed. This confusion and failure went on for months. I began keeping cans of tuna in my desk drawer and eating my meals in the office.
Then one morning, I remember that it was a Sunday, I woke at about five o’clock and couldn’t get back to sleep. I felt terribly excited. Something strange was happening in my mind. I was thinking about my research problem, and I was seeing deeply into it. I was seeing it in ways I never had before. I felt that my head was lifting off my shoulders. I felt weightless. And I had absolutely no sense of self. It was an experience completely without ego, without any thought about consequences or approval or fame.
The ego, so important to our sense of consciousness and identity, is in some ways a kind of friction, a drag, and it magically slips away when we’re creating. For me, the best analogy is what sometimes happens when I’m sailing a round-bottomed boat in strong wind. Normally the hull stays down in the water and the drag greatly limits the speed of the boat. But in high wind, every once in a while the hull lifts out of the water and the drag disappears. It feels like a great hand has suddenly grabbed hold and flung me across the surface like a skimming stone. It’s called planing.
So I woke up at five in the morning to find myself planing. Although I had no sense of my ego, I did have a feeling of rightness. I had a strong sensation of seeing deeply into this problem and understanding it and knowing that I was right – a certain kind of inevitability. With these sensations surging through me, I tiptoed out of my bedroom, almost reverently, afraid to disturb whatever strange magic was going on in my head, and went to the kitchen. There I sat down at my ramshackle, faux-wood kitchen table. I got out the pages of my calculations, by now curling and stained. A tiny bit of daylight was starting to seep through the window.
I was oblivious to myself, my body and everything around me, though I was completely alone. I don’t think any other person in the world would have been able to help me at that moment, and I didn’t want any help. I had all these sensations and revelations in my head, and being alone with all that was an essential part of it.
I sat down at the table and began working. Somehow I had reconceptualised the project. I immediately spotted the error in my thinking and began anew. I’m not sure how this rethinking happened, but it didn’t occur by going from one equation to the next. After a while at the kitchen table, I solved my research problem. I had proved that the conjecture was true. Feeling stunned and powerful, I strode out of the room. Suddenly I heard a noise and looked up at a clock on the wall and saw that it was two o’clock in the afternoon.
The experience I’ve just described is quite similar to the creative moments I’ve had as a novelist. I write in two places. One is an island in Maine. From my writing desk, I can see spruce trees and cedars and a pine needle path that goes down a hill from my house to the ocean. The other place I write is a small storage room, without windows, attached to the garage of my house in Massachusetts. There, my view is a rough plaster wall. Both places have served me equally well in my writing, because after twenty minutes I disappear into the imaginary world I am creating.
I had an extraordinary moment with my last novel, The Diagnosis. I was stuck on a character called Melissa, the wife of my protagonist, just as I had been stuck on my equations in the physics problem. Being desperately stuck is apparently one of the best goads to creativity. After several drafts of the novel, the character was still wrong. In one draft, she was too mechanical and hard, in another she was a stereotypic alcoholic, in another her affection for her husband seemed false. When she spoke, her words didn’t sound real. I could never hear her speaking with her own voice. She always spoke with my voice, or said what I wanted her to say, or what I thought she should be saying. She wasn’t alive, even though I had been trying to breathe life into her for more than two years. Then one day, when I was discussing her with a friend, I suddenly felt myself inside of her. Unconsciously, I stopped talking because the universe had tilted. I was no longer myself. I was her. And I was suffering. I began to cry. I sat there numb, for how long I don’t know. After that moment I was able to write her.
Similar accounts of the creative process have appeared in dozens of interviews with writers in the The Paris Review over the past two or three decades. In Janet Sonenberg’s book The Actor Speaks (Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1996), two dozen leading actors describe their acting techniques. From John Turturro: “Once the scene’s dynamic is starting to occur, I’ll go with it and then try to shift it, too, just like you would in life. The shifting is important. Then, if I can get to the point when that’s happening and I don’t know what I’m doing, that’s inspiration. I’ve done all my work and then I try to achieve this other, living dimension, the human dimension. It ceases being my work and it becomes living.”
The research and hard work. The prepared mind. The being stuck. The sudden shift. The letting go of control. The letting go of self. The pattern seems almost universal.
I am not sure why scientists have been more reluctant than artists to write about their creative moments. But I believe that a major factor must be the understanding of objectivity in science. What is most important in science is the final, dispassionate, impersonal result: the law of nature that would be known by smart Martians, or the experiment that can be duplicated in any laboratory in the world. Max Delbruck, in his Nobel Prize Lecture of 1969, put it well: “A scientist’s message is not devoid of universality, but its universality is disembodied and anonymous. While the artist’s communication is linked forever with its original form, that of the scientist is modified, amplified, fused with the ideas and results of others and melts into the stream of knowledge and ideas which forms our culture.”
Somehow, this understanding of science, which I share in most ways, has spawned the more dubious notion that any sign of personal struggle or emotionality in the individual scientist will compromise the whole enterprise. Thus, scientists are trained to write in the passive voice, humour in journal articles is usually frowned upon, and until recent years there has been a substantial stigma against scientists “popularising” their work for the public. (In the 19th century, Carl Friedrich Gauss – one of the greatest mathematicians of all time – took pains to destroy all written traces of his heuristic methods and winding paths, so that his theorems and proofs appear to have been born fully formed and perfect, like Athena from the head of Zeus.) All these admonitions, in subtle and not subtle ways, reflect the deep-seated idea that the scientist must wear sterile gloves at all times.
By now it is well known that this notion is false. It is certainly true that scientists, with the exception of behavioural scientists, study objects that reside outside the emotions while for artists the emotional life lies at the centre. But the process of doing science is human. Individual scientists have all the passions, the prejudices and biases, the psychological hills and valleys of other creative people. Indeed, as chemist Michael Polanyi so forcefully describes in his book Personal Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 1974), these personal passions are probably essential for the success of science. The objectivity and method of science come not so much from the individual scientist as from the community of scientists, who are always eager to criticise and test each other’s work.
Acknowledging the passions and struggles and creative moments of individual scientists will not diminish the discipline at all. Instead, it will help strengthen the understanding between scientists and others.