68 SCIENTIST 



for example, but much time and skill are necessary to adapt 

 the basic technology to the specific purpose the experi- 

 menter has in mind. 



However much of his time a scientist may spend "making 

 like" an engineer, he is still distinguished by his primary 

 concern about the uses for his special devices. In the case 

 under discussion, the overall objective was to explore and 

 extend the generahty of the idea of the chemical mediation 

 of nerve impulses. Some scientists get much the same fun 

 that the engineer does out of designing a better gadget; 

 others regard such preliminary developmental work as al- 

 most pure drudgery. Both engage in it, however, because 

 in the long run it is the only way to show whether the 

 idea they have in mind is vahd or invahd. 



When we get to the very highest level of creativity in both 

 science and engineering, our argument for a distinction 

 between the two becomes even more difi&cult to sustain. 

 The difficulty arises in part because we understand very 

 little about the processes involved in what we call creativity. 

 In one sense almost everyone is capable of making some 

 new thing or having some new idea. Every home craftsman 

 who puts up a new shelf in his wife's kitchen is creating 

 something new. Even a high school theme can contain some 

 new, at least slightly new, thought about a teen-ager's re- 

 sponse to a trip to Washington. 



The term "creativity" is usually reserved for activity on 

 a somewhat higher level than this. In this discussion we are 

 considering "the very highest level" — the creation of very 

 new and very general ideas in science and the development 

 of very ingenious solutions to engineering problems. In the 

 first category are people Hke Copernicus, GaUleo, Newton, 

 Maxwell, Rutherford, and Niels Bohr. In the second are 

 the unknown inventors of the wheel or the smelting of 

 copper ore, and more modern inventors like James Watt, 



