Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
“Invention,” Frankenstein author Mary Shelley wrote in contemplating how creativity works, “does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos” — the chaos of existing inspirations, properly comprehended and reconfigured into something new. Einstein termed this reordering “combinatory play.” But it is a process mostly unconscious, the product of which — the creative breakthrough we call originality — cannot be willed.
It arrives unbidden, with an abruptness that often startles the very mind to which it alights — an exhilarating startlement the French polymath Henri Poincaré called “sudden illumination.” It constitutes the third stage in Graham Wallas’s pioneering 1926 guide to the four stages of the creative process — a moment Wallas described as “the culmination of a successful train of association, which may have lasted for an appreciable time, and which has probably been preceded by a series of tentative and unsuccessful trains.”A captivating account of one such moment of creative breakthrough comes from the great physicist Freeman Dyson (b. December 15, 1923) in Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters (public library).
At twenty-two, Dyson was elected Fellow at Trinity College — a position Newton had held a quarter millennium earlier. During his time at Trinity, where he lived in a room just below Wittgenstein’s, Dyson was awarded a Commonwealth Fellowship that sent him to the United States in pursuit of a doctorate in physics. He landed at Cornell, where he quickly befriended Richard Feynman, not yet thirty himself.
At the time, Feynman was working on a then-radical formulation of quantum electrodynamics based on his now-famous diagrams. His method was in rivalry with another, devised by Julian Schwinger. “The two ways of explaining the experiments looked totally different,” Dyson recalls, “Feynman drawing little pictures and Schwinger writing down complicated equations.”
In the spring of 1948, Dyson took a cross-country road trip with Feynman. They filled the time and distance with fiery conversation about physics punctuated by Feynman’s bittersweet memories of the love of his life, who had died three years earlier. Upon his return, Dyson headed to Ann Arbor to spend six weeks studying with Schwinger. He left Michigan for another cross-country trip, this time traveling by himself, with Feynman’s and Schwinger’s ideas swirling and bobbing around his head on the long bus journey. He was the only person to have been in close direct contact with both QED formulations and the minds of their originators.
Suddenly, in what Dyson terms a “flash of illumination on the Greyhound bus,” everything fell into place — he saw the equivalence of the two competing formulations with…
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