In anticipation of Sunday's EST/Sloan Project 2012 Fall Artist Cultivation Event we will be posting published text from each our panelists. Today we have is an excerpt from Knocking On Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World by Theoretical Physicist and Harvard University professor Lisa Randall. The newest addition to our panel, Lisa will appear with along with David Auburn, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jonathan Weiner & Doron Weber to discuss what makes a great potential science play.
"Inspiration is needed in geometry, just as much as in poetry." -- Alexander Pushkin
Creativity is essential to particle physics, cosmology, and to mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries -- the arts and humanities. Science epitomizes the extra richness that can enhance creative endeavors that take place in constrained settings. The inspiration and imagination involved are easily overlooked amid the logical rules. However, math and technology were themselves discovered and formulated by people who were thinking creatively about how to synthesize ideas -- and by those who accidentally came upon an interesting result and had the creative alertness to recognize its value.
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