PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

4. THE RISE AND FALL OF CREATIVITY
compositions, and with his last work his creativity will be 91
percent exhausted. Most people who die of old age have realized
90 percent of their creative potential. There is very little left
for Mozart to do. His work in this world has been practically
accomplished. The irregularity at the high end of his creativity
curve indicates a sprint at the finish! What he has left to do is
not enough to help him fight the illness that is consuming him.
MOZART IS DYING OF OLD AGE is the conclusion flashing
on the computer screen.
“Not true!” cries Mrs. Mozart, waking up violently from her
nightmare. “My husband is only thirty-five. He cannot die now.
The world will be deprived of so many musical masterpieces.”
• • •
In discussions with musicians I have found that many are not
shocked by the idea that Mozart may have exhausted his creative potential
at the age of thirty-five. He had already contributed so much
in every musical form of the time that he probably could have added
little more in another fifty years of calendar time. He himself wrote
at the age of twenty-one: “To live until one can no longer contribute
anything new to music.” 3
His Dissonant Quartet in C major, K465 (1785), has been cited as
evidence for Mozart’s possible evolution, had he lived. I consider this
an unlikely scenario. The learning curve of music lovers of that time
could not accommodate the kind of music that became acceptable more
than one hundred years later. Mozart would have soon stopped exploring
musical directions that provoked public rejection.
Besides Mozart, I tried to fit S-curves to the works of other personalities
from the well-documented world of arts and sciences. Brahms,
for example, has 126 musical compositions to his credit. I made a
graph of their cumulative number and found an S-curve passing closely
to most of the data points approaching a ceiling of 135, Brahms’ perceived
potential (Appendix C, Figure 4.1). That makes Brahms’
creativity 93 percent exhausted at the time of his death at the age of sixtyfour,
which did not seem to deprive him of a chance to realize an appreciable
amount of remaining work. The beginning of the curve (the 1 percent of
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