Need Some Inspiration? Here’s How the World’s Greatest Scientific Minds Can Help You Unlock Your Creativity.
The following is adapted from Into the Impossible by Brian Keating.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
— Arthur C. Clarke
When 2017 Nobel Prize winner Barry Barish told me he had suffered from the imposter syndrome, the hair stood up on the back of my neck. I couldn’t believe that one of the most influential figures in my life and career — as a scientist, as a father, and as a human — is mortal. He sometimes feels insecure, just like I do. Every time I’m teaching, in the back of my head, I am thinking, who am I to do this? I always struggled with math, and physics never came naturally to me. I got where I am because of my passion and curiosity, not my SAT scores. Society venerates the genius. Maybe that’s you, but it’s certainly not me.
I’ve always suffered from the imposter syndrome. Discovering that Barish did too, even after winning a Nobel Prize — the highest regard in our field and in society itself — immensely comforted me. If he was insecure about how he compared to Einstein, I wanted to comfort him: Einstein was in his awe of Isaac Newton, saying Newton “…determined the course of Western thought, research, and practice like no one else before or since.” And compared to whom did Newton feel inadequate? Jesus Christ almighty!
The truth is, the imposter syndrome is just a normal, even healthy, dose of inadequacy. As such, we can never overcome or defeat it, nor should we try to. But we can manage it through understanding and acceptance. Hearing about Barry’s experience allowed me to do exactly that, and I hoped sharing that message would also help others manage better.
These words are not for aspiring Nobel Prize winners, mathematicians, or any of my fellow geeks, dweebs, or nerds. In fact, I wrote them specifically for nonscientists — for those who, because of the quotidian demands of everyday life, sometimes lose sight of the biggest-picture topics humans are capable of learning about and contributing to. Most of all, I hope you will see common themes emerge that will boost your creativity, stoke your imagination, and most of all, help overcome barriers like the imposter syndrome, thereby unlocking your full potential for out-of-this-universe success.
Skills of the Scientist
Physicists are mental Swiss Army knives, or a cerebral SEAL Team Six. We dwell in uncertainty. We exist to solve problems.
We are not the best mathematicians (just ask a real mathematician). We’re not the best engineers. We also aren’t the best writers, speakers, or communicators — but no single group can simultaneously do all of these disparate tasks so well as physicists. That’s what makes them worth listening to and learning from. I sure have.
There is a skill to know when to listen and when to talk, for you can’t do both at the same time. Scientists have navigated the challenging waters between focus and diversity, balancing intellectual breadth with depth, which are challenges we all face. Whether you’re a scientist or a salesman, you must “niche down” to solve problems. (Imagine trying to sell every car model made!)
By studying the habits and tactics of the world’s brightest, you can recognize common themes that apply to your life — even if the subject matter itself is as far removed from your daily life as a black hole is from a quark. You’ll learn how to deconstruct the most vexing problems in your life, see common threads between widely separated aspects of your life or career and weave them together, and find meaning in the interactions in occasional struggles you have with collaborators along the way. You’ll learn why it’s essential not only to immerse yourself in the past of your craft but also to invest in the future of it by teaching upcoming generations of practitioners in your field.
You’ll learn the virtue of patience, that science has a great deal in common with art, and the value in doing something for its own sake rather than to receive accolades and attention. And you’ll be powerfully reminded to allow curiosity, beauty, and serendipity to bring joy into your life through the surprising cracks that open up each time we turn fresh eyes onto a new problem.
Why learn these skills from physicists specifically? First, they are problem solvers by design. They are also talented observers of physical reality, trained to minimize their biases. And they have done so by being generalists: by pulling tools from disparate fields, including mathematics, logic, art, and even mysticism. Finally, their ultimate goal is to make sense of the universe and our place in it, a goal all humans are eager to pursue. The scientific method is the most powerful tool to analyze the physical world around us. In that way, science belongs to all of us.
Geniuses are mere mortals. They suffer from the same foibles, challenges, and prejudices that afflict us all. Inspiration is a chain — and my ultimate goal is to lengthen and strengthen it.
The Crutch of Genius
There is a scene in A Few Good Men where Colonel Jessup barks at Lieutenant Kaffee, “You want me on that wall — you need me on that wall!” I’ve often felt that laypeople want to know that Nobel laureates exist more than they really want to know why they won the Prize! It’s almost as if society sleeps better, collectively, knowing that such geniuses exist, perhaps if only to desist from doing the work themselves. It’s a form of absolution and comfort, to some, to think, “Well, so-and-so may be a physics nerd, but they were lucky; they had some unfair advantage — genetic, birthright, status, or otherwise — that I do not have.”
Or, as Nietzsche put it:
Thus our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of the genius: for only if we think of him as being very remote from us, as a miraculum, does he not aggrieve us…. Genius too does nothing but learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, and continually seek for material and continually form itself around it. Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a “miracle.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
The laureates I have known — most, if not all, from humble backgrounds — built solid intellectual walls, showing that genius is often a triumph of hard work, not merely the caprice of fortune. To me, this is more comforting: what one craftsman can build, so can another. That is our task too. Brick by brick.
To learn more about unlocking your own creativity and genius through the words of the world’s best physicists, Into the Impossible is available on Amazon.
Brian Keating is the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor at the University of California San Diego and the author of more than 200 scientific publications, two US Patents, and the bestselling memoir Losing the Nobel Prize. Keating did research at Case Western Reserve University, Brown University, Stanford, and Caltech. In 2007 he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Bush. Keating is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and co-leads the Simons Array and Simons Observatory cosmology projects in Chile. He is a pilot and an honorary lifetime member of the National Society of Black Physicists.
