|
According to an article in Discover magazine, Russian scientist
Andrei Linde has set his creative sights on nothing
less than understanding what life is. His method is to study the boundaries of the
irrational with the tools of rationality.
In the process he helped formulate the current grand unification theories. His own
"chaotic inflation" theory is the kind of thinking that, at first, only other
geniuses can understand.
But in 1986, Linde ran out of ideas and fell, in his own mind, from the heights of the
theoretical playing field into a deadening depression. He couldn't get out of bed.
Then he received orders from the Soviet Academy of Sciences to deliver a speech at a meeting in Italy. They didn't want to hear any of his
known theories either. They wanted new stuff.
Linde seized this irrational demand and conceived in half an hour the notion of the
self-replicating universe.
There's nothing more irrational to the creative mind than the deadline. What difference
does it make when an idea is completed? "Ideas take whatever time
they take," the creative person argues. And yet when you give a creative person like
Linde a serious deadline, you get results.
As I write, Linde is working on the possibility of creating other universes. I wonder,
what would happen if someone were to tell him, "You've got six days."
|
