CREATIVE SCIENCE 345 



adopted an unprofitable line of thought, the oftener we pursue it, the 

 harder it is for us to adopt instead the profitable line. As Nicolle says, 

 "The longer you are in the presence of a difficulty, the less likely you 

 are to solve it." 



Rather more than inability to meet a difficulty may be involved: 

 there may be inability to see a difficulty that habitually accepted pat- 

 terns of thought deny. Youth can thus be doubly privileged in con- 

 frontation of problems others have grown gray in seeking to solve, 

 or to ignore. And, in characteristic challenge of what its elders have 

 held unquestionable, youth may detect the implicit assumption that 

 has concealed a problem where there is one— or made a problem 

 where there is none: Alexander was a young man when he cut the 

 Gordian knot. 



Strongly favoring productiveness of new conceptual patterns, 

 youth is not absolutely essential to such creativity. Older scientists 

 may remain highly productive of major new ideas. Yet I find com- 

 paratively few who, like Planck, have in maturity first initiated any 

 great work of theoretic re-construction. The vast majority of older 

 innovators in ideas seem to fall in three other categories that do not 

 at all infringe on the privileged status I have imputed to youth. 

 There is first the group of those who make important extensions or 

 refinements of existing theoretic patterns, without making any fimda- 

 mental re-construction thereof. Perhaps this is where Dalton fits. And 

 here surely we will place the great empiricists, such as Roentgen, 

 who interpret in familiar terms the strikingly unfamiliar phenomena 

 they discover in their later years. 



A second group comprises those who in maturity completed and 

 declared a major theoretic re-construction they actually initiated at 

 a much earlier period. These are the great men described by Comte: 



What is the life of a great man? It is a thought of youth realized in 

 maturity. 



Jenner took thirty years to bring to a test his youthful conception that 

 cowpox might confer immunity to smallpox. Newton and Einstein 

 recognized in their teens the problems they fully worked out years 

 later. Copernicus and perhaps also Galileo belong in this category. 



The third group of older innovators contains those who in maturity 

 passed from one scientific field to another whose problems they could 

 see with something of the freshness of youth. In scientific research 



