Natural Science Forum / Physics / General Physics / June 2007

Hi,

I think, that a low-budget life ist just that what is needed, if  you
wanna do something that you love, without always feeling pressure.
Pressure is definitely something (according to my experience), that
destroys creativity. I always have my best ideas, when I am walking
around through the city and let my thoughts circling around. When I
walk around, I feel nearly no pressure. Unfortunaly I found out about
this late, but at least not too late. It took some time to find a
theme complex, that's worth to think about, I mean, something that is
not just written down somewhere in arXiv or any journal, so something
this is new (at least to me). So, I let my thoughts going around about
the things I am interested in and then by some magical procedure you
find something, that you already don't know, if it's true or new, but
I am always eager to produce such situations and check them then: this
is great. Nearly always I find things that are known, if I check them,
but sometimes, these thoughts are new, at least to me. They show a
different way to think about one thing. And I believe Richard Feynman
said this at least one time (I red this somewhere), that he tries to
see things from different points of view. May be that was his way,
that empowered his thoughts becoming concise and precise theories.

The point is, that if you feel pressure, than your thoughts aren't
free and that spoils your creativity. I have such moments sometimes,
when I try to enforce my thoughts for example to finish some work. And
nowadays I make progress identifying such moments. It is always, when
I feel a dizzy or tired, because then I become bored. In this case, I
need to do some different things, like reading a book, listening to
music or what is new to me, do some different research or math, some
different physics, or some different topic I'm working on. Doing some
different physics or math is quite satisfying.

Feeling pressure, because you seem to need to publish something is
such a problem. On one hand I want to understand things on the other
hand I want to publish what I am working on. The latter pushes some
pressure on me, because of two reasons: first, I'm eager to know, if
other scientists are interested in it and of course I want to know, if
other scientists find it reasonable. The funny thing is, that Feynman
wrote something like this somewhere: he was also always insecure, if
other scientists share his opinion. So, this seems to be a problem,
that everyone has. When I red this statement, I felt somehow strange.
I thought: of course, everyone would listening to him, how can he
doubt that ? But, hey people like Feynman sure know (may be more than
others), that they are not perfect and they may know how deep their
work "hit"  "former" reality sometimes. So they feel pressure, but on
a different scale.

So feeling two parts of pressure, first the pressure that your income
is secure and second, that your work is developing in a good way is
too much. The solution seems to be quite easy, if you look at life in
that way, that you just live and don't plan anything.

Just don't think about secure income, because there's no secure
income. There's just life and, as the title of the song by Talk Talk
of the middle of the eighties says: "Life's what you make it". So I
said some time ago, that I should live life and this works, even if I
sometimes fall back to the "planning" ideas. Then I need to remind me
of my childhood, where I was playing with things. Yes, that's also
what is recommended for scientists and somewhere written down:
preserve your abilities to be naive and play with science ideas.

Greetings

Kay