Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall [191]
For me, the most absorbing films are those that address big questions and real ideas but embody them in small examples that we can appreciate and comprehend. The movie Casablanca might be about patriotism and love and war and loyalty but even though Rick warns Ilsa that “it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” those three people are the reason I’m captivated by the movie (plus, of course, Peter Lorre and Claude Rains).
In science, too, the right questions often come from having both the big and the small pictures in mind. There are grand questions that we all want to answer, and there are small problems that we believe to be tractable. Identifying the big questions is rarely sufficient, since it’s often the solutions to the smaller ones that lead to progress. A grain of sand can indeed reveal an entire world, as the title of the Salt Lake City conference on scale (referred to in Chapter 3)—and the line of poetry by William Blake it refers to—remind us, and as Galileo understood so early on.
An almost indispensable skill for any creative person is the ability to pose the right questions. Creative people identify promising, exciting, and, most important, accessible routes to progress—and eventually formulate the questions correctly. The best science frequently combines an awareness of broad and significant problems with focus on an apparently small issue or detail that someone very much wants to solve or understand. Sometimes these little problems or inconsistencies turn out to be the clues to big advances.
Darwin’s revolutionary ideas grew in part out of minute observations of birds and plants. The precession of the perihelion of Mercury wasn’t a mistaken measurement—it was an indication that Newton’s laws of physics were limited. This measurement turned out to be one of the confirmations of Einstein’s gravity theory. The cracks and discrepancies that might seem too small or obscure for some can be the portal to new concepts and ideas for those who look at the problem the right way.
Einstein didn’t even initially set out to understand gravity. He was trying to understand the implications of the theory of electromagnetism that had only recently been developed. He focused on aspects that were peculiar or even inconsistent with what everyone thought were the symmetries of space and time and ended up revolutionizing the way we think. Einstein believed it should all make sense, and he had the breadth of vision and persistence to extract how that was possible.
More recent research illustrates this interplay too. Understanding why certain interactions shouldn’t occur in supersymmetric theories might seem like a detail to some. My colleague David B. Kaplan was mocked when he talked about such problems in Europe in the 1980s. But this problem turned out to be a rich source of new insights into supersymmetry and supersymmetry breaking, leading to new ideas that experimenters at the LHC are now prepared to test.
I’m a firm believer that the universe is consistent and any deviation implies something interesting yet to be discovered. After I made this point at a Creativity Foundation presentation in Washington, D.C., a blogger nicely interpreted this as my having high standards. But really, belief in the consistency of the universe is probably the principal driving force for many scientists when figuring out which questions to study.
Many of the creative people I know also have the ability to hold a number of questions and ideas in their heads at the same time. Anyone can look things up using Google, but unless you can put facts and ideas together in interesting ways, you aren’t likely to find anything new. It is precisely the slightly jarring juxtaposition of ideas coming from different directions that often leads to new connections or insights or poetry (which was what the term creativity originally