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The Creative Muse: Stories of Creativity & Innovation

Madhukar Shukla


  • Preface
  • Introduction

    STORIES:

  • Discoveries about Creativity
  • Laws Of Planetary Motion
  • Electricity From Clouds
  • Band-Aid
  • Pneumatic Tyres
  • Gummed Paper
  • The Trap Of Paradigm
  • Invention Of Sewing Machine
  • Just-In-Time System
  • Transmission of Nerve Impulses
  • Printing Press
  • Dangers Of Locomotives
  • Flashlight
  • Lawn Mower
  • Phonograph
  • Rubber Heels
  • The Periodic Table
  • Discovery Of Electromagnetic Fields
  • The Tao Of Physics
  • Congenital Impact of Rubella
  • Typewriter
  • The Theory Of Evolution
  • The Benzene Ring
  • The Wreck Of Titanic
  • Wagner's Rheingold
  • Underwater Construction
  • Search For The "Hidden Likeness"
  • Fermi & Nuclear Fission
  • Cash Register
  • Discovery Of Current Electricity
  • Cure Of Diabetes
  • Boolean Algebra
  • Principle Of Photosynthesis
  • Ball Point Pen
  • The X-Ray
  • The Fuschian Functions
  • Safety Glass
  • The Creative Triggers
  • Why Aeroplanes Cannot Fly
  • The "Brownies" Of Stevenson
  • The Blunder That Founded 3M
  • Invention Of AC Motor
  • Discovery Of Teflon
  • Toynbee's The Study Of History
  • Inventors' Blindness
  • The Excitement Of Creativity
  • Electric Fan
  • How Typhus Gets Transmitted
  • Proof Of The Big Bang
  • Mathematical Theory Of Chance
  • Coleridge's Kubla Khan
  • Vulcanisation Process
  • Structure Of The Crystals
  • The Compulsion To Create
  • 3M's Post-It Note Pads
  • Ice Cream Cones
  • The Structural Theory Of Atom
  • IBM And Computers
  • Helicopter
  • How Experts Resist Ideas
  • Creative Reveries Of Enid Blyton
  • Predictions In Gulliver's Travels
  • Float Glass Technology
  • Principle Of Immunisation
  • Journey Into Unknown
  • The Genius Of Karl Fredrich Gauss
  • Jean Coceteau's The Knights Of The Round Table
  • Neon Light
  • Transistor Radios
  • Precocious Minds?
  • The Masterpiece Of Sir Walter Scott
  • The "Fraud" That Changed The World
  • The "99% Perspiration"
  • Xeroxing
  • The Poem Of Stephen Spender
  • The Anatomy Of Inspiration
  • Travellers' Cheques
  • Edison's Fraud
  • Awe, Wonder And Alienation
  • The Logic Of Irrational

  • Epilogue: Themes & Patterns

    • Search for the "Hidden Likeness"


    It is remarkable how many creative discoveries were based on borrowed ideas. This is nowhere truer than in pure sciences where great breakthroughs were made by applying principles of one field to another. Nobel Laureate S Chandrasekhar wrote:

        "Sometimes we have the application of the same set of ideas to problems which may appear entirely unrelated at first sight. For example, it is surprising to realise that the same basic ideas which account for the motions of microscopic colloidal particles in solution, also account for the motions of star in clusters."

    This search for hidden similarities is apparent from the following examples:

    • Niels Bohr, the father of Quantum Physics, once said that the Principle of Complementarity first occurred to him when he was he was thinking about the fact that you cannot look at another person simultaneously in the light of love and in the light of justice. These were incompatible ways of looking, and he went on to speculate that there must be an analogue to this in physics.

    • George Gamow's discovery of the play of forces within an atomic nucleus derived from his assumption "that the material of the atomic nucleus is built along the same lines as any ordinary liquid."

    • The idea of Sublimation, a mental mechanism through which the reality is repressed in favour of a more acceptable fantasy alternative, came to Sigmund Freud while looking at a cartoon in Punch. In the cartoon the first frame showed a girl herding geese and the second frame showed a governess herding her children.

    • In 1910, physicist Ernest Rutherford proposed a model of atom. He argued that the structure of the atom is built on the same lines as that of the solar system, with a nucleus at the centre, an the electrons orbiting it, just as the planets orbit the sun.


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