CREATIVITY AND THE VICISSITUDES OF FAME

Occasional Articles on Creativity 

by John Lobell

CREATIVITY AND THE VICISSITUDES OF FAME

Hedy Lamarr

Billed as the most beautiful woman in the world by the great stage director Max Reinhardt, Viennese-born actress Hedy Lamarr began her career by appearing nude portraying sexual passion in the German film, Ecstasy. Later she moved to Hollywood where she became a leading lady working opposite Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, and Charles Boyer, among many others, which necessitated more modesty. Desiring to help America during the Second World War, she worked in her living room with avant-garde musician turned Hollywood composer, George Antheil, designing advanced electronically controlled weapons.

Their efforts were focused on guidance systems and proximity fuses, looking for ways to detonate a weapon at a given distance from its target, and ways to defeat an enemy’s attempt to jam the guidance and detonation signals. Their designs are the forerunners of today’s smart bombs, as well as playing a role in cell phones, Bluetooth devices, GPS guidance instruments, and other devices.

Lamarr and Antheil were more suited to their task than one might have imagined. Both were very smart, Lamarr had been married to a wealthy Austrian munitions manufacturer and had sat in on some of his negotiations with his clients, and Antheil had built complex mechanisms for his machine age concerts. In 1942 they received a patent for their radiocontrolled spread spectrum torpedo-guidance system, but not recognition. At the time the military did not take Lamarr seriously, but in 1997 when she was eighty-two, she was honored for her work by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Antheil’s honor was posthumous. In 2003 Lamarr was featured as a leading woman of science in a series of Boeing commercials and her work was chronicled in a 2011 book. But it is hard to be taken seriously in the field of high tech weaponry when you are the most beautiful woman in the world.

Claude Shannon

Few have heard of Claude Shannon, although we live in a world he created. In 1948 Shannon, a reclusive thirty-six year old mathematician, electrical engineer, and tinkerer working at AT&T’s Bell Labs in New York’s West Village, published an article titled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The article was modest in its intent; Shannon wanted to quantify the amount of information that could be sent through a given channel, but to do so he had to define information. By the time he was done, his short paper had created what we now know as information theory. What Shannon realized was that the information in a message can be quantified by the number of 0s and 1s required to transmit it, and has nothing to do with its content. We now call these 0s and 1s bits, a term coined by Shannon in his paper.

This paper was preceded some years earlier by Shannon’s MIT master’s thesis in electrical engineering. In the 1840s the English mathematician and philosopher, George Boole, developed what is now called Boolean logic, which formalizes a set of rules in which, for example, we might say that if A and B are true, then we get C. If A is true and B is not true, then we get D, etc. In his 1937 master’s thesis, titled “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,” Shannon showed that these rules could be built into electric circuits, enabling the logic operations to be automated, thus laying the foundation for all electronics including modern computers. His thesis did not gain any special attention when he wrote it, but it is now recognized as the most important master’s thesis of all time. With these two papers, Shannon had created the modern technological world. Besides being the basis of computer science and everything we do on the Internet, his information theory is now being used to recreate all of science: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, etc., as we will briefly discuss later.

In other words, Shannon developed the science on which our entire digital age is built and on which all of science is being rebuilt. Neil Sloane, editor of Shannon’s papers, stated that, “He’s one of the great men of the century. Without him, none of the things we know today would exist. The whole digital revolution started with him.”

In his book, Microcosm, George Gilder observes that in the macrocosm (the realm of big industrial machines), when devices become more powerful, they become larger, more likely to break down, more expensive, and more energy consuming. But in the microcosm (the realm of the computer chip), when devices become more powerful, they become smaller, less likely to break down, less expensive, and less energy consuming. And Gilder observes that our entire economy is moving from macrocosm to microcosm, from matter and energy to information, that is, to the world conceived by Shannon.

Also in 1948, in the same building in which Shannon worked, a group of Bell Lab scientists developed the transistor, later to be miniaturized and placed by the billions on single chips in our computers. Three of these scientists received the Nobel Prize. Shannon did not receive a Nobel Prize; there is no Nobel Prize in information theory or computer science or even in mathematics. Shannon is one of the most important scientists of the twentieth century, indeed one of the most important Visionary Creatives of all time, but it is hard to get recognition in a field that no one knows about because you just invented it. Few people have heard of Claude Shannon.

Hugh Everett III

John Archibald Wheeler was a towering figure in physics, having worked with both Einstein and Niels Bohr. He coined the terms “black hole,” “worm hole,” “quantum foam,” and “it from bit,” and we quote him several times in this book. He is also known for his prominent students, including physicist Richard Feynman and quantum computing pioneer David Deutsch. And Hugh Everett III, who only belatedly received some recognition.

At the age of twelve, Everett was writing fan letters to Einstein, and later he became a physics student at Princeton studying under Wheeler. In 1956 he completed a paper titled “Wave Mechanics Without Probability”, proposing a radically different approach to quantum theory. Everett was bothered by Niels Bohr’s proposal that particles are waves of probability until we look at them and then they “collapse” from a “superposition” into a “classical state” and become particles. What did this mean? How did this collapse come about? Everett asked, what if we assume that the “particles” remain waves of probability and never collapse into particles? Then all quantum possibilities would play out in a multitude of universes. In other words, when a particle has to make a choice, it makes all choices, and the universe divides, one for each choice, as in, “When the particle comes to a fork in the road, it takes it.”

In describing Wheeler, one of his colleagues writes: “Somewhere among those polite facades [of Princeton] there was a tiger loose... who had the courage to look at any crazy problem.” But Everett’s idea was too crazy even for Wheeler. Wheeler showed it to Niels Bohr, who was his mentor, but Bohr hated it. Rather than backing his student, Wheeler pressed Everett to modify his PhD thesis so that it became essentially meaningless. Wheeler did arrange for Everett to meet with Bohr, but Bohr was unable to understand what Everett was talking about, and one of Bohr’s acolytes said that Everett was “undescribably stupid and could not understand the simplest things in quantum mechanics.” In disgust, Everett left physics and joined the Pentagon doing weapons systems analysis and later founded several companies. He became overweight, drank, smoked, and died at the age of fifty-one. After Everett’s death, Wheeler formally renounced his theory.

Go to a large gathering of physicists today and ask for a show of hands on which interpretation of quantum theory attendees agree with. Everett’s many worlds theory, also known as the parallel universes theory, will often win. The physicist, Max Tegmark, refers to it as one of the most important discoveries of all time, comparable to Newton’s theory of gravity and Einstein’s theory of relativity. But few have heard of Everett.

Billy Lee Riley and Carl Perkins

Much of what we call Rock and Roll began in the 1950s at Sam Phillips’ Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee. Sun began the careers of Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and Roy Orbison among others.

Sun was tiny and lacked the resources to properly promote its artists, and Phillips famously sold Elvis Presley’s contract to RCA to keep his company going. One Sun artist, Billy Lee Riley, a Rockabilly pioneer, had a modest hit with “Flyin’ Saucers Rock and Roll.” He then did “Red Hot,” a song that had the potential to break out, but Phillips pulled his promotional efforts to focus on Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls Of Fire.” Lewis became a major star. Riley, after a few more recordings at Sun with no promotion, went to Los Angeles to become a backup musician for major performers, and then quit music to move back to Arkansas where he had been born to start a construction business. In the late 1970s he was rediscovered and went back to performing. In 1992 he was rediscovered again, this time by Bob Dylan, who had been a fan since the 1950s. He began performing again, this time until his death in 2009, but he was never a major star.

Carl Perkins was always an important figure in Rock and Roll and the defining figure in Rockabilly as well as working with many leading musicians. In 1956 he participated with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash in an impromptu jam session at the Sun studios that is now known as the “Million Dollar Quartet.” Later in his career he worked with the Beatles, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Bob Dylan among others. But there was a missed step at the beginning. Perkins wrote and recorded Blue Suede Shoes, released it in 1956, and it spent sixteen weeks on the Cashbox list. But his promotional tour and television appearances were cut short by an automobile accident. Elvis Presley had done a cover of the song and was available for television appearances. Perkins remained a respected and influential musician. Elvis became the King.

If someone were listing major creative figures, would Twain, Melville, Fitzgerald, Lamarr, Shannon, Everett, Riley, and Perkins be on the list? Certainly Twain at any point in his career and through today. Fitzgerald during his early career, then forgotten, and now widely read. In their own times, perhaps Lamarr and Perkins would have been recognized, but not as major figures. Today, Melville and Shannon would certainly be. Everett is all but forgotten, while Lamarr is remembered today only by movie buffs, and Riley and Perkins only by Rock and Roll buffs. Fitzgerald is regarded as one of our greatest novelists. Many have talent. A few ignite themselves and burn as supernovas, and sometimes we notice. Some are discouraged and never fully ignite. Some are extinguished. And some all but disappear, perhaps to reappear at another time.

ABOUT ME: Looking at books on creativity, I found that most of them were based on psychological and sociological studies, fields that know nothing about creativity. Van Gogh writes, "Wings, wings to fly above life! Wings to fly above the grave and death! That is what we want, and I am beginning to understand that we can get them." These words mean nothing to psychologists, but are the language of creativity.

I have studied with and worked with some of the leading creative figures of our time, and I write about the worlds they inhabit. I will be posting articles based on my book, "Visionary Creativity: How New Worlds are Born." Find it on Amazon.

I am a professor of architecture at Pratt Institute, received degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, and am the author of several books, including:

• Visionary Creativity: How New Worlds are Born

• Louis Kahn: Architecture as Philosophy

• Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I. Kahn

• Movies Myths and Archetypes

Find more at JohnLobell.com