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V INSTITUTE EXPLORATION
Principles of Creativity
How revolutionary leaps of insight
occur across disciplines—they’re
not always sudden.
by Corydon Ireland
Breakthroughs An apple falls on Isaac
Newton’s head: gravity. Benjamin Franklin
unfurls a kite, iron key dangling, during a
rainstorm: transmissible electricity. Archimedes
climbs into a bathtub: a way to measure volume.
Eureka!
Not exactly. It turns out that creative breakthroughs are not always
leaps or jumps, despite the centrality of that idea in our shared cultural
narrative of discovery. (Eureka means “I found it”—joyfully and fast.) In
real life, these breakthroughs may have more languor than leap. They
may take longer, involve more people, and even require years of unconscious
preparation. Creativity does not come cheap—one of the lessons to
emerge from a daylong workshop on May 21 at the Radcliffe Institute for
Advanced Study.
“Breakthroughs: Creativity Across Disciplines” was itself a kind
of breakthrough: a gathering of breakneck verve for the eclectic. Its
experts—in two panels, one musical interlude, and one keynote address—
were a poet, an experimental writer, a music critic, an art historian, a
science biographer, a particle physicist, a pastry chef, an architect, and
a neuroscientist. There was also a composer, John Aylward RI ’12, who
said with creative defiance, “I live in constant fear of not being misunder-
stood.”
The poet was David Ferry, a World War II veteran who translates Horace
and Virgil. The music critic was Alex Ross of the New Yorker, whose
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Picador, 2008)
won a National Book Critics Circle Award. The particle physicist was
Maria Spiropulu, who helped discover the Higgs boson. The pastry chef
was Bill Yosses, a fan of scientific cooking whose workplace is the White
House. The architect was the Harvard urban planner Rahul Mehrotra,
whose inspirations are at street level.
Then there was the day’s varied, talkative audience, including a string
theorist, a Wellesley professor of British romanticism, a EE16
BEHIND BREAKTHROUGHS
Radcliffe’s workshop on creative breakthroughs was organized by four people
in conjunction with the Institute’s Academic Ventures staff. Leah Price RI ’07,
the senior advisor to the humanities program in Academic Ventures and a
professor in the English department at Harvard, collaborated with Anna
Henchman, Ray Jayawardhana RI ’12, and John Plotz RI ’12 to plan the day’s
activities. The James Family Innovation Fund provided financial support.
EUREKA!
These participants
discussed discoveries
in their respective
disciplines: literature,
experimental physics,
astronomy and astrophysics,
art history,
and culinary arts.
John Plotz
14 radcliffe magazine Summer 2013