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What Is Creative? - Part 3

What we will be concerned about in this book are the methods, techniques, and principles involved in developing new and dif­ferent concepts and in putting those concepts into action. For the sake of familiarity, concepts will from now on be referred to as ideas.

Just what is an idea, anyway? It may be a discovery—the per­ception for the first time of something that has been in existence but not previously known. An idea may be an innovation—some­thing new or novel applied to an existing way of doing something. An idea may be a new synthesis—a different mixture of known elements or parts to make a new whole. Or an idea may be a mutation—an alteration in the form or the qualities of an existing entity or concept. An idea may be any of these or a combination of any of them. Probably the quickest way to compare them is to look at a few ideas and analyze the differences.

A discovery, we said, usually involves the perception of some­thing that no one has ever perceived before. Discoveries may come about as the result of an accident. Such an example that has become famous is Charles Goodyear's experience of accidentally dropping a ball of gum rubber he was experimenting with onto a hot stove. In scraping it off, he suddenly discovered that the gum had changed character; it had, in fact, become almost a new substance. This was one of the key points in his eventual develop­ment of rubber as we know it today.

Most worthwhile or important discoveries, however, are the result of long, careful, and painstaking study of cause and effect by a patient searcher. One of the most significant recent discov­eries of our time involved the "repeal" of the "law of parity" in physics. This concerns the behavior of submicroscopic particles. Two Chinese-born physicists, Dr. T. D. Lee and Professor C. N. Yang of Columbia University, were conducting studies of such particles when they discovered that some of them weren't doing what the "natural laws" of physics said they should be doing. They then suggested some experiments to find out what was going on. Other experimenters followed through and found that, indeed, the two physicists had hit upon a discovery that opened new possibilities for the development of theories on subatomic particles.

Back before World War I, a similar observation of the defiance of generally accepted theories resulted in the discovery of the nucleus of the atom by Ernest Rutherford. At the time, he was experimenting with the newly developed "X rays," and found that alpha particles produced by the rays weren't behaving as they "should" when fired into a cloud chamber. His subsequent observations and deductions led him to the discovery that an atom was not, as was then thought, the smallest particle in existence —that the atom had within itself a still smaller particle that made its nucleus.

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