In his op-ed article on creativity in the NY Times, Prof. Adam Grant, management and psych professor at the Wharton School of UPenn, says step one to creativity is to procrastinate.  “Creativity takes time.  So I’m trying not to make progress toward my goal.”  I think that’s BS, and I’m hoping I’m not alone.  The first part depends on your definition of creativity, of course.  Presumably, this prof, who’s trying to sell his book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, is using a business definition.  I don’t see much creativity in the business world.  I see it in the author/composer of Hamilton; I’ve seen it in the works of Alejandro Obregon and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; and I’ve seen it in scientists and engineers, from researchers to smart phone and car designers.  Grant confuses creativity with business acumen.  Trump has the latter, but he isn’t creative (come to think of it, Trump and his progeny went to Wharton).

So, let’s get past that first statement in the quote and move on to the second.  Procrastination is the opposite of creativity!  If one procrastinates, s/he’s doing absolutely nothing.  Now Alan Watts might say doing nothing is accomplishing something—that’s part of Buddhist teaching (make your mind blank to achieve enlightenment)—but it sure as hell isn’t being creative.  I’d generally call it wasting time!  At a conference once some Austrian physicists told me that they were in the process of thinking about getting some dinner.  Maybe that’s typically Austrian—I seem to remember Vienna as pretty laid back (but probably not during WWII)—but dinner just isn’t that complicated, and time spent in the process of thinking about it would be better spent doing physics in this case, where a physicist can and should be creative.  Leave the dinner creativity to chefs—culinary art is creative, but only when you do it, not in the process of thinking about it.

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[A new feature just for my readers, wee bits of popular science nostalgia.]

John Archibald Wheeler (7/9/1911—4/13/2008) might have received only popular recognition for his students if he hadn’t coined the term “black hole” (Hawking popularly comes to mind first as the scientist most associated with black holes, of course).  His most famous student was Feynman, but Misner and Thorne were two others (the doorstop-sized tome Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, is one classic on the subject of general relativity).  Wheeler was a physicist’s physicist, though, like Feynman, dabbling in anything that interested him.

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (8/8/1902—10/20/1984) was more like physic’s Harper Lee; he did a few things too (the idea of physical “constants” varying on a cosmic scale is intriguing), but he’s most famous for the equation that bears his name and postulating the positron as the electron’s anti-particle to make sense of it (it took physicists awhile to find that pesky particle, though).  He had an early tome on quantum mechanics where he introduced bras and kets—today we know them as vectors in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space and complex-valued linear functions on them (Hilbert spaces existed in Dirac’s time, but, like Feynman and many other theoretical physicists, Dirac eschewed rigorous mathematical formalism).

At a conference in the early 1970s held at New Orlean’s Loyola University (next to Tulane), Dirac and Wheeler were guests of honor and sat in the front row competing to see who could doze off first when the geekiness became as stifling as the bad AC.  Dirac was particularly energetic during his talk, though.  Loyola is a Jesuit school, so one smartass grad student decided to embarrass Dirac by asking him if his belief in absolute measurements didn’t imply a belief in God.  Dirac, either agnostic, atheist, or just pissed (those might not be mutually exclusive, from Dirac’s reaction), dashed offstage and returned with a meter stick.  “This is a meter,” he said, “and it will be a meter whether God exists or not” (that’s a paraphrase).  Since Napoleon’s scientists invented the meter, he had a pretty good case.

By shifting several decades, black holes had a history similar to the positron—theory predicted them long before they were discovered.  Many other predictions of general relativity were confirmed experimentally before that happened (I’m discounting extensions to women’s large handbags).  Physicists play with positrons and a whole slew of anti-particles now; no one wants to play with or even come close to a black hole (unless you’re one of Pohl’s HeeChee).  Today astrophysics brings the small (like the positron) and the large (like the black hole) together, at least theoretically.  I’m sure Dirac and Wheeler are smiling about that—if they’re not taking a nap.

And so it goes….

Let’s give the old guy credit: he was received in the U.S. like a rock star and showed more resilience and stamina than men half his age.  Moreover, he’s speaking out on progressive issues.  On the plane en route to the U.S. from Cuba, a reporter asked if he was a leftist.  He replied something to the effect that everything he does is commensurate with the gospels.  Translation: Christ was a progressive revolutionary AND a religious man.  The two went hand and hand, no matter what conservative wonks think (some are right-wing Catholics, of course).

He’s painted environmental concerns as a moral issue that transcends all religions.  Climate change is a pressing concern for every human being on this planet, not to mention Gaia’s flora and fauna.  It’s the moral imperative of this generation to protect Gaia and all her creatures, according to the pope.  Of course, I didn’t need his encyclical to realize that.  Many people didn’t.  And a few are either too greedy and/or stupid, that they’ll resist that idea until they die, which might be sooner than later if we don’t deal with the pressing environmental problems.

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My new epic sci-fi novel, More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, is the tale of an invading ET virus and its effects on human society and space exploration.  That’s a strange combo (it’s sci-fi, after all), but the space exploration isn’t interstellar this time like it was in “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.”  It’s restricted to our solar system, to Mars and beyond.  Being a wee bit more local, many of the events are in the realm of the possible.  Most of the action is current day only because of the virus, though.  I don’t expect to see a Mars colony in my lifetime.  But exploration of our solar system will occur.  Of course, it’s already occurring with robot probes carrying specialized payloads.  That process is speeded up by the virus in the novel.

I’ve always been an avid reader and exhausted all the sci-fi in my public library by the time I entered high school.  I’ve read about Mars colonies since those halcyon days, although I’ve always thought that the space opera adventures were a bit too optimistic.  But I used recent reports as references for my novel, some optimistic and others pessimistic, to complement my imaginative musings.  Among these are: Bruce Bower, “Extreme Teams,” Science News, 11/29/2014; and the NY Times special issue on Mars, 12/9/2014: “On Mars,” by Kenneth Chang; “A One-Way Trip? Many Would Sign Up”; “Looking to a Neighbor for Help,” by Dennis Overbye; “Covering Mars Opened a New World,” by John Noble Wilford; and “Rover Finds Stronger Potential for Life,” by Marc Kaufman.  Other recent findings (about water in the solar system, for example), mostly in Science News, were also used.

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As a writer, I love words.  Sometimes I love a particular word because it’s mysterious.  “Eldritch” is an example.  You can understand its meaning from context when you combine it with “light”—it just looks spooky and sinister.  Because English is spoken in so many places, an author can give local color to his prose by choosing particular words (often not consciously).  I love the sound of “scarpered”—it just sounds like someone in a hurry to leave town.  When my beta-reader knew what it meant but still objected to its use in one of my books, I went on a search to find out how I’d picked it up.  Turns out it’s very UK-ish—sort of like “forthwith” and other words where I love how they trip off the tongue.  I’d picked it up from Ian Rankin (love his Inspector Rebus books), so my beta-reader was right and made a good catch.  Unless it occurs in dialog associated with a character who’s from the UK, or who’s trying to sound like a person from the UK, it isn’t quite appropriate in American prose.  Still love the sound, though.

“Troglodyte” is a word that looks and sounds good too.  It’s a fun word.  If I remember correctly, it originally means “cave dweller.”  (The origins of English are well mapped out in David Crystal’s The Stories of English—a lot of fun if you’re into that kind of thing.)  The word is more conventionally used to mean “deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned.”  Ergo, this long segue is just leading up to my main topic: There are anti-science troglodytes among us who are challenging science with their far-out beliefs and attacking scientific progress at all levels, some even funding campaigns against science.  Ironically, many of these same troglodytes are using science and technology as tools to further their anti-scientific agendas.

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At the end of ABC World News one evening last week, Kip Thorne made an appearance.  Seems he was a consultant for the new movie Interstellar.  The subject, of course, was FTL (faster-than-light) travel, what you need to visit other star systems in subjective times less than several hundreds of human generations.  Seemed Thorne was proposing wormholes (Deep Space Nine, anyone?).  While most sci-fi authors (including myself) just write a few words of pseudo-scientific technobabble and then get on with the story, I guess the director of Interstellar wanted to put some fancy ribbon around the technobabble.  I’m sure Prof. Thorne did a good job.

Generations of grad students have struggled with Einstein’s general theory of relativity.  The “classic texts” are Weinberg’s more experimentally grounded tome and the much longer differential geometry-oriented tome written by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler (yes, that same Thorne).  Both were creatively and simply titled Gravitation.  Between the two, you had more than enough information to solve any problem on a PhD qualifying exam related to that subject, assuming you had learned the material well, of course.  Feynman’s simpler and less mathematical introduction in some of the first editions of the second volume of his famous lectures could be used to get in the mood, so to speak (Feynman did the same with his introduction to quantum mechanics in Vol. 3; with a bit more material, it’s a better introduction than any you’ll find elsewhere).

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I still have a copy of Benoit B. Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature sitting on my shelf.  That 1982 hardcover edition is $31.90 on Amazon now.  Surprisingly, there is a 2010 Kindle edition, priced at $45.06, technically an eTextbook.  I say surprisingly because the original had many graphics pages.  I guess you’d better have a Kindle Fire or some other color tablet; you won’t see much on the Kindle paper white.  The coffee-table size of the original must have made the Kindle edition difficult too.

That said, I wonder how many millennials know what a fractal is.  Computer science types of all ages might, because displaying fractals is often a programming exercise (best seen on the high-res monitors found with graphics workstations).  However, even for them, fractals might seem akin to the much simpler Lissajous figures—very intriguing graphics, but so what?  Graphics artists might be familiar with fractals as an option when portraying landscapes like mountains and so forth.  The origins of these computer applications can be found as wow-content in Mandelbrot’s book.

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In the spirit of last Tuesday’s post on global warming and greenhouse gases and the current changing of the seasons (something affecting both hemispheres, mind you), I thought I’d write about a few things we human beings take for granted about Gaia.  One thing is the tilt of the planet’s axis.  Gaia’s is optimal.  It’s the Goldilocks Principle all over again: too little tilt and the equatorial zones could become too hot, with maybe sweltering jungles or dry deserts; too much tilt and the winters everywhere could become too harsh, perhaps making the planet like that Ice Planet in Star Wars (probably without the white apes, because they wouldn’t have anything to eat).

We often complain about the seasons.  My friendsl have likely heard me say, “Gee, I wish it was between 65 and 75 and sunny all year around.”  I’d qualify this by recognizing the need for rain, but raining only at night would be nice, wouldn’t it?  Medellin, Colombia falls into that temperature range most of the time, but temperature in Colombia is a strong function of altitude, which means other parts of the country can be sweltering.  That’s one way to avoid some effects of no axis tilt—just throw some high mountains into the mix.  But high altitudes can cause problems.  People have nosebleeds even in Denver.  Elderly Bogotanos (residents of Colombia’s capital) are often advised to retire to lower altitudes if they can, especially if they have cardiac problems.  Equatorial countries experience many of the effects that an E-type planet with little or no axis tilt might have.

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I’m amused by the euphemistic phrase “climate control.”  Have we become so politically correct that we can’t say “don’t poison the environment” or “don’t kill Gaia”?  Even the latter phrases don’t put the blame where it belongs.  The very liberal NYC mayor Bill De Blasio is calling to reduce the Big Apple’s greenhouse gases by 80% by 2050.  That’s laughable not only for the date but because NYC’s contribution represents one little drop in a huge ocean of pollution in the Northeastern U.S.  Every wee bit helps, I suppose, but the city and its people don’t produce most of the greenhouse gases and pollution.  It’s industry.  Our slogan should be “control industry’s excesses.”  But industry likes the phrase “climate control” because it avoids blame.  It wants people to forget that it’s industry that’s destroying the planet.  De Blasio is a nincompoop falling into industry’s trap.  But what else is old news?

NYC might be producing tons of garbage and polluting waterways with sewage effluent, but industry is the culprit for that and other pollution as well.  Has been, is, and will always will be, unless controls are enacted to lower greenhouse emissions.  I don’t want to hear any whining about the cost.  Sure, we want to make this reduction as painless as possible—heaven forbid that we use a few millions out of the many billions industry makes in order to clean up the planet it’s made into a dirty mess!  Industry is naïve.  Do they think they’ll still be making these billions when the world’s population is starved of oxygen and simmering on the polluted planet that’s fast becoming another Venus?  Greed obviously has no foresight, no appreciation for future problems in its haste to roll in the dough.  Industry lives for the present, not the future.  It doesn’t give a rat’s ass about human beings, let alone the environment.

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I was recently encouraged by NASA’s decision to use Space-X and Boeing to send astronauts to the International Space Station.  You might say, “Well, you’re a sci-fi writer, so I’m not surprised!”  Yes indeed, I have written a few sci-fi stories.  I also write suspenseful thrillers and mysteries.  Only one of my stories takes place on ISS (The Secret Lab), so I don’t have any particular agenda.  In fact, I’ve conjectured that the Chinese will make it to Mars first (see Survivors of the Chaos).  Cancelling the Shuttle Program only convinced me more.

I’m encouraged for two reasons.  The first is that it’s high time capitalism goes into space.  I’m talking good capitalism here, the kind that improves products and services and increases the inventive spirit through healthy competition.  Changing the slogan “We have to beat the Russians to the moon!” to “We Space-X engineers and scientists have to beat Boeing’s” is a positive development.  The more competitors, the merrier, I say, as long as there are enough oversight and control to keep things like o-ring mishaps to a minimum (does that company still exist?).

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