PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

4. THE RISE AND FALL OF CREATIVITY
maximum) pointed at 1843, when Brahms was ten years old. This point in
time must be considered as the beginning of the pulse of composition for
Brahms. Why, then, did he start composing only ten years later?
Seeking an answer to that question, I consulted Brahms’ biography
and found that he had been drawn to music early but for some reason
was directed toward piano playing. He distinguished himself as a young
pianist. At the age of fourteen he gave public concerts, performing some
of the most difficult contemporary pieces. His rare talent for composition
manifested itself at the age of twenty, when he suddenly began
composing with fervor—three important piano pieces the first year. By
1854 he had nine compositions, as many as they would have been had
he spent the previous ten years composing rather than piano playing, but
at the more “natural” rate dictated by the pattern he followed so closely
until the end of his life.
In retrospect one may say that circumstances made Brahms behave
like a pianist between the ages of ten and twenty while his vocation as a
composer was brewing inside him, trying to find means of expression.
Once it did so, his urge for composition released pent-up energy that
made him work feverishly and make up for the time lost.
DID EINSTEIN PUBLISH TOO MUCH?
To further test the hypothesis that one’s creativity may grow according
to natural laws in a competitive environment, I found myself tabulating
Albert Einstein’s scientific publications as they are described in a biography
published shortly after his death. 4 In Figure 4.2 the data points
represent Einstein’s cumulative publications, with the S-curve describing
the data well. The nominal beginning of the curve (the 1 percent of
maximum) points to 1894 when Einstein was fifteen. This would mean
that he had no impulse to investigate physics when he was a child. According
to the curve, this impulse started when he was a teenager. Still,
he produced no publications until the age of twenty-one, probably because
nobody would take the thoughts of a mediocre teenage student
seriously, let alone publish them.
The S-curve shown is the one that best fits the data points. And
once again the fitting procedure includes the possibility of a parameter
88