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54 Creativity

The battle context for the invention of radar contrasts sharply with the
serene elegance of mathematical physics. at the end of the 19th century, James
Clerk Maxwell discovered a phenomenon – the electromagnetic field – that
turned out to unify large parts of physics by showing that both light and
radio signals, among other types of radiation, can be thought of as a wave
that propagates through space. While Maxwell mathematized the physics of
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radiation, some of his French contemporaries worked and lived in a rather
different atmosphere. in 1860–1880, a group of French artists, including Paul
Cézanne, edgar Degas, Èdouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pisarro and
Pierre-august renoir, began painting in a novel way. instead of representing
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the details of people and objects as they are known to be, they put paint on
canvas in ways that were calculated to create particular visual experiences in
the viewer. This shift from a referent-oriented to a viewer-oriented conception
of painting was enduring. a century later, exhibits of French impressionists
invariably draw large crowds to art museums.
The invention of radar, the discovery of electromagnetic waves and the
creation of the impressionist style of painting illustrate the wide spectrum of
human creativity. technologists, scientists and artists work under different
conditions, with different tools and with different aims. Nevertheless, all their
projects ultimately rest on novel ideas: Perhaps we can detect airplanes at a dis-
tance by bouncing radio signals off them; electromagnetic radiation might propa-
gate like a wave; we could paint things the way they look instead of the way we
know they are. The task for a theory of creativity is to explain how such ideas
arise in the mind and become articulated into novel techniques and products
in the course of creative work.

THE CREATIVITY QUESTIONS

Creativity is a complex phenomenon, so what is sometimes called the creativ-
ity question needs to be expanded into a list. Theories of creativity can be
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evaluated by how well they answer the questions on that list.

How is Novelty Possible?

How can anything new come into the world? if the universe is lawful, then
how can anything novel ever appear? Where does it come from? Specifically,
how is it possible for people to formulate novel ideas or concepts? The mate-
rial world rolls along in its causal groove, and the human brain is a material
system. How can it jump to a new groove? We learn concepts on the basis of