666/(6 + 6 + 6) = 37
and
333/(3 + 3 + 3) = 37
37 and 73 are reversible primes , 37 is the 12th prime and 73 is the 21st - another reversible pair
and ....
and ....
and ....
It arrived in a lovely wooden box with polished brass hinges and was written in a nearly calligraphic hand. Skipping about fifty pages was the conclusion that said its author had found the number 37 was key to gravity and electromagnetism and was being unfairly ignored.
I thought about the first two statements for a few seconds - they were of the form (100x + 10x + x)/3x or 111x/3x = 37 for the integers x = 1 through 9. No surprise.
__________
Universities with famous physics professors get a lot of mail from people out to prove something. The amount of effort is often as astonishing as how wrong the work is. Some universities farm out this mail to upperclass undergrads and grad students as a filter as well as an education. It's true that every once and awhile there's an unknown genius - Ramanujan's letter to Hardy being the most dramatic example in history - but those days are probably gone and Ramanujan was already known in India.
Creativity isn't terribly useful without background and a level of competence. But where does it come from? I'm certainly no neuroscientist, but talk to a few and there's quite a bit of new work going on these days. Some of it is from fMRI imaging.. a technique that can map active areas in the brain while a person is thinking. It seems most early work would have subjects were told to rest between tasks while new trials were prepared. The machines are quite noisy and produced enough data that it only made sense to run them during the active trial. Finally someone decided to look at what was going on when minds were just wandering.
Your brain accounts for about a fifth of your resting energy demand. Surprisingly focusing and thinking deeply about something uses about the same energy as an unfocused wandering mind. When fMRIs were finally used to look at the unfocused wandering state it was found the brain was lit up, often with widely separated areas firing at the same time. It's known as the default mode network. Mind wandering - like when you suddenly realize you can't remember anything about the past six miles you've driven - accounts for nearly half your waking mental state.
Some cognitive neuroscientists - Moshe Bar for example - believe these ramblings may be associated with mood - ruminating ramblings and their connections can lead to worrisome states while creative wanderings can lead to happy moods (this is speculation and there are many other states). It's also noted that your more conscious states can range from exploratory to exploitatory. You seem to be able to know when you should focus and get something done or be open to new things.
Much of what Moshe says squares with how I think about creativity. That doesn't mean it's right, but it strikes this non-specialist as being on the right track. I try to leave the day open and certain times and remove distractions to allow for small creative moments and put myself in the mood by drawing. More important is building a supply of seemingly unrelated potential connections through reading, hobbies, travel, friends and so on. In my case a curious set of friends is central.
The most creative organizations I know tend to have a number of foci and unrelated specialists. I have a relation with one that has almost no overlap with what I do, but pre-pandemic they'd fly me out for a couple of days every year to wander around and drop in on their folks as well as give a little talk. They seem to value it, but I'm the one who probably benefits the most. In a few of these companies internal measures of creativity dropped during the pandemic. Perhaps those semi-random face to face interactions are very important. It's possible, but difficult, to recreate some of that online despite what Meta would try and tell you:-)
Of course there's a bit of speculation here and what works for one person may not for someone else. Major creative moments are rare, but at least we can make the smaller ones more likely. And hopefully blending these moments of creativity with a background of expertise can be useful.
I wish I could have kept the wooden box. It was beautifully made. But its content made a big impression.
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