Eureka moments

“After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees…he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself…”

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2170052-newtons-apple-the-real-story/#ixzz7LL2crIR3

At school we were all told the story of Isaac Newton.  He sat one day under the shade of an apple tree and at one point the apple fell on his head and he more or less instantly discovered and was able to identify that the moon isn’t falling to the earth and the earth isn’t falling into the sun and in short articulate the theory of gravity that rests with us today.  Marvellously convenient, except of course it’s apocryphal – a grain of truth with an awful lot of embellishment.

The quote at the top of this piece came from William Stukeley’s biography of Isaac Newton and it recalls the two being prompted into a discussion of gravitation because of an observation of an apple falling from a tree.  And gradually because we all love a good story we shift from someone who was already curious and observing activities in the field of gravity to a strange notion that being bombarded with apples someone triggers the brain to conceive of one of the most fundamental laws of physics.

Another of my childhood school favourites was the concept of Archimedes principle.  Thanks to Mr Jones in 4F, we were vividly treated to a picture of Archimedes deciding to take a bath.  Picture the sage and wisely Archimedes tugging on his probably wise and sage long beard and improbably climbing into a Victorian roll-tap bath (it possibly didn’t help that my maths text book had a picture of a 19th century bath to illustrate the point).  As the story goes, Archimedes climbs in, notices the water rises and is semi-instantly embodied with the wisdom of displacement and then of course as every school-kid enjoys, ran naked through the streets of ancient Greece shouting Eureka.

And yet that didn’t happen either.  What we do know is Archimedes was attempting to solve a challenge set by the king to understand whether a crown he had been given was real gold or not and water displacement helped him to be able to determine density of metals and therefore is the crown was the real deal or not.  A Victorian roll-top bath was likely not part of the story.

What I love about both these stories, except for a reminisce around some perhaps slightly doubtful education in my earlier years is that both stories attract us because of what David Burkis calls the Eureka Myth.  The Eureka Myth implores us to believe that creativity happens suddenly and almost from nowhere.  If we are not creative then it’s just that we’ve not been in the right place at the right time.   Nothing can be further as we now know, from the truth.

The Eureka Myth is tempting to absolve us of responsibility to accept we need to work towards creativity but more critically it disrespects the concept of rigorous knowledge and craft as part of the creativity process.

Take Newton for example.  We don’t know truly from Stukeley’s diary how far Newton had already got in his conceptual understanding of gravity but we know in his account that they were in the garden discussing conceptual gravitational forces and the falling apple became an illustration.  In other words he was already exploring and researching before the apple fell and most likely his brilliantly scientific brain did a lot of further research to be able to articulate the theory, turn it into models, persuade his peers of the time that it was true and establish the notion we accept today.

The Eureka myth insults Newton because it tempts us to believe that fate of a falling apple created our understanding of gravity not the hard work and research that Newton put in before and afterwards.   Similarly with Archimedes, even if we accept the Victorian roll-top bath story, it’s extremely unlikely that no-one had ever noticed when you put a large object into a bowl of water, the water level rises.  But it was Archimedes who took the observation and the curiosity that step further to turn something that others saw into something that we now understand.

Creativity thrives on expertise.  You need solid craft in order to riff.  Let’s get up to more modern times and take jazz musicians.  The ability to improvise so effortlessly comes from years of deep hard and long practice, an accomplished understand of the musicality and the instrument being played.   When we think of the great jazz musicians as creative geniuses we are prone to ignore the years of labour that went into to perfecting their craft, it didn’t happen just because they were hit on the head by a falling musical instrument.

Take the gifted dancers of our age who have been studying and rehearsing day after day to ensure they have the athletic stamina and flexibility and craft to turn their bodies into accompanying musical instruments.   That the best performers look effortless on the dance floor is a tribute to the deep craft and years of practice.

In the eighteenth century French mathematician Jules Henri Poincare set out four stages of creativity which we can still see today.

Stage 1 is preparation where you delve into the problem, gather up as much insight as you can and really “breathe in the mud”

Stage 2 is incubation which purports that after soaking up the knowledge you need to walk away and resume your daily activity.  Incubation involves then reflecting on what you have learned against what you continue to experience and drawing conclusions from the new inspirations that arise organically through this process

Stage 3 is lighting which is the moment that these concept ideas percolate through and start to solidify in the shape of one clear concept in your mind, a revolutionary idea or concept on the subject

Stage 4 is execution because no idea is of any use unless someone is able to take it forward and make it happen and this takes persistence through the process of trial, error and refinement until the idea is fully conceived.

In 1968 Spencer Silver, working for the 3M company was tinkering with glue (professionally I should add) but unable to come up with a glue that would stick.  Not much use to anyone perhaps.  Until Art Fry, a colleague and chemical engineer who worked alongside Silver contemplated whilst in his church choir the challenge of holding down bookmarks without damaging his bible.  The idea through incubation came to a lighting moment of what if we created a bookmark that could be inserted into things and taken out and repositioned.  And so the removable bookmark was created.  But there wasn’t much demand for removable bookmarks and the idea sat around for a while.  Until one day when Fry needed to add a note to a report up to a supervisor.  Instead of writing a memo he reached for his removable sticky paper and wrote the question on it.  By return he got another removable sticky with the answer and within short order the post-it note was taking off at 3M.

The Eureka myth of creativity is tempting but leads us down an unhelpful path.  It tempts us into ignoring the fact that behind creativity lies a depth of accomplished knowledge and insight.   It entices us to consider that as well as conceiving an idea, the rest of the hard miles are somehow achieved on our behalf as if by magic.  It creates the risk that if we don’t succeed with the first idea we have or we can’t get there quick enough then the process is wasted.   And most importantly it paints the picture of creativity as something that happens to some people and remains out of the grasp of everyone else.