On Creativity - David Bohm ***

Physicist David Bohm was an unusual character. This American physicist spent much of working life in the UK. A collaborator on the Manhattan Project, Bohm is best known for his alternative approach to quantum theory which did away with conventional ideas of locality and that gave him the opportunity to bring both physics and the nature of thought into the same framework. Bohm's more original ideas were largely dismissed, but have had some resurgence of interest in the last few years.

In his classic book On Creativity, originally written several decades ago, but with some more recent material added, Bohm provides a series of long essays on topics from the nature of creativity and the relationship of science and art, to 'the art of perceiving movement' and 'art, dialogue and the implicit order.'

I found the first two essays quite interesting, particularly in Bohm's insights into the relationship of science and art, but the later essays seemed over-heavy with philosophical concepts that more got in the way of understanding than giving any great clarity, and the concluding interview has the typical shallowness of an attempt to interview a scientist with questioning from an arts background.

If you want to see how the mind of someone with genuinely wide-ranging curiosity and impressive ability to cross cultural and scientific boundaries operated, this book is well worth a go, though expect parts of it to be extremely hard work to read. If you want a clear exposition of the nature of creativity, beyond the basics in the first few pages, it is probably best to look elsewhere.

Hardback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms. On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...

Search This Blog