E = mc²

It may be the most famous equation: E = mc².

It came to the public with a 1905 publication by Albert Einstein. Even people with no real interest or ties to science tend to know the equation. The vast majority of people who know of and can tell you the equation have no idea what it means.

In 1905, Einstein finally completed his doctoral thesis on “A new determination of molecular dimensions.” But he also published four groundbreaking papers that banner year in the German journal Annalen der Physik (Annals of Physics).

One paper  (“On a heuristic point of view concerning the production and transformation of light”) proved that light could behave as a particle as well as a wave, and gave rise to quantum theory.

In another paper, he used Brownian motion (the irregular movement of small but visible particles suspended in a liquid or gas) to prove empirically that atoms exist.

The third paper, “On the electrodynamics of moving bodies,” presented his theory of Special Relativity, which deals with the way the speed of light affects the measurement of time and space.

And on September 27, 1905, he submitted a paper that asked, “Does an object’s inertia depend on its energy content?” This is where he used the equation E = mc².

It translates to mean that energy (E) equals mass (m) times the speed of light squared (c²) and that this reveals that matter and energy are deeply connected.

The equation came from his work on Special Relativity. While working through his calculations, he had an insight that surprised him. If an object emits energy, the object’s mass must decrease by a proportionate amount. Einstein actually wrote about it to a friend, “This thought is amusing and infectious, but I cannot possibly know whether the good Lord does not laugh at it and has led me up the garden path.”

Brian Greene explains it in this simpler way: “When you drive your car, E = mc² is at work. As the engine burns gasoline to produce energy in the form of motion, it does so by converting some of the gasoline’s mass into energy, in accord with Einstein’s formula.” To get the energy to move the car you have to lose some gasoline.

Einstein’s original thoughts and certainly not his intention was the discovery that a small amount of mass can be converted into a large amount of energy. This was what would eventually lead other scientists to the development of nuclear energy, and the atomic bomb.

The atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki used less than an ounce of matter into explosive energy.

Down the Creativity Rabbit Hole

When I was writing recently about Mary Shelley I fell down that Internet rabbit hole of related links. The Internet is a dangerous place for anyone who has attention deficit disorder - and I think that includes almost all of us.

Maria Popova writes the fascinating BrainPickings website and if you read any post there you will find it filled with links to other posts and sources and images. It is its own rabbit hole. She posted that creativity is combinatorial. That's a new word for it.

It means that being creative we use all of our accumulated "knowledge, memories, bits of information, sparks of inspiration and combine and recombine, mostly unconsciously, into something" we then believe is new and our own, original idea.

Albert Einstein called that “combinatory play” and he was known for coming up some of his best ideas violin breaks, walks and bike rides.

When I take a deep dive into the many links rabbit hole, the real value for me only happens when I actually start writing.

Oliver Sacks said that “The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing… a special, indispensable form of talking to myself.” Sacks was thinking about storytelling and the river of consciousness in the psychology of writing.

"If imitation plays a central role in the performing arts, where incessant practice, repetition, and rehearsal are essential, it is equally important in painting or composing or writing, for example. All young artists seek models in their apprentice years, models whose style, technical mastery, and innovations can teach them. Young painters may haunt the galleries of the Met or the Louvre; young composers may go to concerts or study scores. All art, in this sense, starts out as “derivative,” highly influenced by, if not a direct imitation or paraphrase of, the admired and emulated models. 

When Alexander Pope was thirteen years old, he asked William Walsh, an older poet whom he admired, for advice. Walsh’s advice was that Pope should be “correct.” Pope took this to mean that he should first gain a mastery of poetic forms and techniques. To this end, in his “Imitations of English Poets,” Pope began by imitating Walsh, then Cowley, the Earl of Rochester, and more major figures like Chaucer and Spenser, as well as writing “Paraphrases,” as he called them, of Latin poets. By seventeen, he had mastered the heroic couplet and began to write his “Pastorals” and other poems, where he developed and honed his own style but contented himself with the most insipid or clichéd themes. It was only once he had established full mastery of his style and form that he started to charge it with the exquisite and sometimes terrifying products of his own imagination. For most artists, perhaps, these stages or processes overlap a good deal, but imitation and mastery of form or skills must come before major creativity."

Oliver Sacks makes a creative note on the run
(Photograph by Lowell Handler from On the Move)

Staying within the BrainPickings universe, I then turn to poet Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel, the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. 

Rilke saw creativity as more than just putting down memories.

And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves — not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

Musician poet Patti Smith says of the creative process in songwriting:

It’s a channeling. Burroughs always called it a shamanistic gift. Sometimes I feel I am channeling someone else. Part of it is experience from performing and understanding that, as a performer, one has a mission, like Coltrane, to take your solo out to talk to God, or whoever you talk to, but you must return. So it has structure. That’s one way that I write. Others take quite a bit of labor. Often the simplest song is the hardest to write. “Frederick” was very hard to write because in its simplicity I also wanted it to be perfect.

Oliver Sacks says that many creators don’t make the leap from mastery to “major creativity” or what Schopenhauer considered to be the distinction between talent and genius. Many of us would be quite satisfied to reach a level of mastery. I think that "genius" is used much too casually these days.

Why is it that of every hundred gifted young musicians who study at Juilliard or every hundred brilliant young scientists who go to work in major labs under illustrious mentors, only a handful will write memorable musical compositions or make scientific discoveries of major importance? Are the majority, despite their gifts, lacking in some further creative spark? Are they missing characteristics other than creativity that may be essential for creative achievement — such as boldness, confidence, independence of mind? 

It takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all.

As a teacher, I have always been very impressed with students who can make connections from course content to their own lives, current events and other courses. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote:

My talent is making connections. That’s why I’m an essayist. It’s also why my technical work is structured the way it is. How do the parts of the snail shell interact? What are the rates of growth? Can you see a pattern? I’m always trying to see a pattern in this forest and I’m tickled that I can do that. … I can sit down on just about any subject and think of about twenty things that relate to it and they’re not hokey connections. They’re real connections that you can forge into essays or scientific papers. When I wrote Ontogeny and Phylogeny I had no trouble reading eight hundred articles and bringing them together into a single thread. That’s how it went together. There’s only one way it goes together, one best taxonomy, and I knew what it was.

Oliver Sacks writing in his seventies (Photograph by Bill Hayes from On the Move)