Knocking on Heaven's Door (61 page)

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 applied to).

A lot of people prefer to work linearly. But this means that once they are stuck or find that the path is uncertain, their pursuit is over. Like many writers and artists, scientists make progress in patches. It’s not always a linear process. We might understand some pieces of a puzzle, but temporarily set aside others we don’t yet understand, hoping to fill in these gaps later on. Only a few understand everything about a theory from a single continuous reading. We have to believe that we will eventually piece it all together so that we can afford to skip over something and then return, armed with more knowledge or a broader context. Papers or results might initially appear to be incomprehensible, but we’ll keep reading anyway. When we find something we don’t understand, we’ll skip over it, get to the end, puzzle it out our own way, and then later on return to where we were mystified. We have to be absorbed enough to continue—working through what does and does not make sense.

Thomas Edison famously noted that, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” And—as Louis Pasteur once said—“In the fields of observation, chance favors the prepared mind.” Dedicated scientists sometimes thereby find the answers they are looking for. But they might also find solutions to problems apart from the original target of investigation. Alexander Fleming didn’t intend to find a cure for infectious diseases. He noticed a fungus had killed colonies of
Staphylococci
he’d been investigating and recognized its potential therapeutic benefits—though it took a decade and the involvement of others before penicillin was developed into a powerful world-changing medicine.

Subsidiary benefits often arise from a reserve of a broad base of questions. When Raman Sundrum and I worked on supersymmetry, we ended up finding a warped extra dimension that could solve the hierarchy problem. Afterward, by staring hard at the equations and putting them in a broader context, we also found that an infinite warped dimension of space could exist without contradicting any known observations or law of physics. We had been studying particle physics—a different topic altogether. But we had both the big and small pictures in mind. We were aware of the big questions about the nature of space even when concentrating on the more phenomenological issues such as understanding the hierarchy of mass scales in the Standard Model.

Another important feature of this particular work was that neither Raman nor I was a relativity expert, so we arrived at our research with open minds. Neither we (nor anyone else) would have conjectured that Einstein’s theory of gravity permits an invisible infinite dimension unless the equations had shown us that it was possible. We doggedly pursued the consequences of our equations, unaware that an infinite extra dimension was supposed to be impossible.

Even so, we weren’t immediately convinced we were right. And Raman and I hadn’t dived into the radical idea of extra dimensions blindly. It was only after we and many others had tried employing more conventional ideas that it made sense to leave our spacetime box. Although an extra dimension is an exotic and novel suggestion, Einstein’s theory of relativity still applies. Therefore, we had the equations and mathematical methods to understand what would happen in our hypothetical universe.

People subsequently used the results from this research assuming extra dimensions as launching points to discover new physical ideas that might apply in a universe with no such extra dimensions at all. By thinking about the problem in an orthogonal way (here, literally orthogonal), physicists recognized possibilities they had previously been entirely unaware of. It helped to think outside the box of three-dimensional space.

Anyone facing new ground has no choice but to live with the uncertainty that exists before a problem is completely solved. Even when starting from a nice solid platform of existing knowledge, someone investigating a new phenomenon inevitably encounters unknowns and the uncertainty that accompanies them—though admittedly with less risk to life and limb than a tightrope walker. Space adventurers, but artists and scientists, too, try to “boldly go where no one has gone before.” But the boldness isn’t random or haphazard and it doesn’t ignore earlier achievements, even when the new territory involves new ideas or anticipates crazy-seeming experiments that appear to be unrealistic at first. Investigators do their best to be prepared. That’s what rules, equations, and instincts about consistency are good for. These are the harnesses that protect us when traversing new domains.

In my colleague Marc Kamionkowski’s words, it’s “OK to be ambitious and futuristic.” But the trick is still to determine realistic goals. An award-winning business student present at the Creativity Foundation event I participated in remarked that the recent successful economic growth that had escalated into an economic bubble stemmed in part from creativity. But he noted too that the lack of restraint also caused the bubble to burst.

Some of the most groundbreaking research of the past exemplifies the contradictory impulses of confidence and caution. The science writer Gary Taubes once said to me that academics are at the same time the most confident and the most insecure people he knows. That very contradiction drives them—the belief that they are moving forward coupled with the rigorous standards they apply to make sure they are right. Creative people have to believe that they are uniquely placed to make a contribution—while all the time keeping in mind the many reasons that others might have already thought of and dismissed similar ideas.

Scientists who were very adventuresome in their ideas could also be very cautious when presenting them. Two of the most influential, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, waited quite a while before sharing their great ideas with the outside world. Charles Darwin’s research spanned many years, and he published the
Origin of Species
only after completing extensive observational research. Newton’s
Principia
presented a theory of gravity that was well over a decade in development. He waited to publish until he had completed a satisfactory proof that bodies of arbitrary spatial extent (not just pointlike objects) obey an inverse square law. The proof of this law, which says gravity decreases as the square of the distance from the center of an object, led Newton to develop the mathematics of calculus.

It sometimes takes a new formulation of a problem to see it the right way and to redefine the boundaries so you can find a solution where, on the surface, none appears possible. Perseverance and faith often make a big difference to the outcome—not religious faith but faith that a solution exists. Successful scientists—and creative people of all kinds—refuse to get stuck in dead ends. If we can’t solve a problem one way, we’ll seek an alternative route. If we reach a roadblock, we’ll dig a tunnel, find another direction, or fly over and get the lay of the land. Here’s where imagination and superficially crazy ideas come in. We have to believe in the reality of an answer in order to continue, and to trust that ultimately the world has a consistent internal logic that we might eventually discover. If we think about something from the right perspective, we can often find connections that we would otherwise miss.

[
FIGURE 81
]
The nine-dots problem asks how to connect all the dots using only four segments without lifting your pen.

The expression “thinking outside the box” doesn’t come from getting outside your work cubicle (as I once thought might be the case), but from the nine-dots problem, which asks how to connect nine dots with four lines without lifting your pen (see Figure 81). No solution to the ninedots problem exists if you have to keep your pen inside the confines of the square, but no one told you that was a requirement. Going “outside the box” yields the solution (see Figure 82). At this point you might realize you can reformulate the problem in a number of other ways too. If you use thick dots, you can use three lines. If you fold the paper (or use a really thick line, as a young girl apparently suggested to the problem’s creator), you can use just one line.

[
FIGURE 82
]
Possible creative solutions to the nine-dots problem include “thinking outside the box,” folding the paper so the dots align, or using a very thick pen.