The anticipation has already begun. Every year, on the first Monday of October, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded, followed by the Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace and Economics Prizes. The Nobels are so distinguished that they have become a byword for excellence – if there was anything like “the prize” it would be the Nobel Prize in these fields.
It is not that people actually work for the prize — C. V. Raman, goes the apocryphal story, was an exception and did in fact believe that he would be decorated. A few people shun prizes because of the hype around them. However, some discoveries go beyond awards and prizes and actually shift the gears of the machinery that is the field itself — such as Albert Einstein’s remarkable papers on relativity, the establishment of the foundations of quantum mechanics by Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, etc. There are some individuals who went even further and stood head and shoulders above the rest, such as Srinivasa Ramanujan or Isaac Newton.
In this spectrum of achievements, looking only at those who revolutionised a field, it is perhaps not surprising that the authors of these revolutions had to undergo a virtual transformation of their own bodies and souls before they were able to think differently and come up with their brilliant ideas.
Chilean author Benjamin Labatut’s novel When We Cease to Understand the World, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, takes snatches from the lives of extraordinary mathematicians and scientists, and dramatises these to bring out several facets of the process of discovery and the extent of suffering and extreme living scientists may go through in order to put down on paper, and with some clarity, the ideas germinating in their minds.
The example of Heisenberg
The story of German physicist Werner Karl Heisenberg’s self-imposed exile to Helgoland, an island in the North Sea, where he pushes himself to endure extreme trials before the extraordinary idea – the uncertainty principle – pops out on to paper as a bunch of equations that can be communicated to the world. Yes, he still had to work on them to bring them up to a publishable quality, but the germ of the idea did come out then after his stay on the island. Would Heisenberg have managed to bring out this idea if he had led a so-called ‘normal’ life and conformed to the regularities of nine-to-five living?
From the example of Heisenberg, and there are other such stories, it would seem that truly revolutionary ideas require isolation and spartan living, even an extraordinary degree of physical exertion before they emerge from the depths of the mind.
Even in everyday situations, some isolation and quiet thinking may help the process of discovery. As a complement to this allowance of silence and isolation, intelligent questions coming one’s way can help too. Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne describes this way of working in his book Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. He stresses on the importance of time when he is alone, not disturbed by any telephone calls or conversation that could disrupt the smooth flow of thoughts. Then again, he also points out that relevant questions and ideas coming from others can actually help in the flowering of ideas.
In the classroom
Such insights beg the question, are our lives and classrooms designed for the flowering of this creative urge which lies within most young people? A good place to start this inquiry is with school. There is no doubt that education is a necessary and formative element in the making of society; however, there is something within an individual that ‘gnaws at the shackles’ that school imposes on the free-flowing spirit. Classrooms should be designed to encourage questioning and nourish free-flowing spirits, just as much as they stress on discipline and learning outcomes.
