Substantia. An International Journal of the History of Chemistry 6(1): 13-23, 2022 Firenze University Press www.fupress.com/substantia ISSN 2532-3997 (online) | DOI: 10.36253/Substantia-1524 Citation: Dei L. (2022) Creativity in the Art, Literature, Music, Science, and Inventions. Substantia 6(1): 13-23. doi: 10.36253/Substantia-1524 Received: Dec 03, 2021 Revised: Jan 04, 2022 Just Accepted Online: Jan 08, 2022 Published: Mar 07, 2022 Copyright: © 2022 Dei L. This is an open access, peer-reviewed article pub- lished by Firenze University Press (http://www.fupress.com/substantia) and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distri- bution, and reproduction in any medi- um, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All rel- evant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Competing Interests: The Author(s) declare(s) no conflict of interest. Feature Articles Creativity in the Art, Literature, Music, Science, and Inventions Luigi Dei Dipartimento di Chimica “Ugo Schiff ”, Università degli Studi di Firenze, via della Last- ruccia, 13, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino (FI), Italy Email: luigi.dei@unifi.it Abstract. This essay aims to stimulate reflection on the creativity characterising Homo sapiens in the different realms in which it occurs. Over recent decades schol- arly research into creativity has extended the original concept, restricted to geniuses, to a broader field that encompasses the qualities and abilities of every individual, in line with a democratisation of the creative act. However, the aim of this contribution is to illustrate the creativity of geniuses, referring to examples in various fields, accord- ing to Poincaré’s definition of connecting pre-existing elements into new combinations that are novel and useful. The objective of this study is to show that pre-existing ele- ments can be found in works of art, literature, poetry, and music, as well as in sci- entific discoveries or inventions. Having demonstrated the existence of concrete and real analogies in the various – and apparently profoundly different – fields of human creativity, a second objective was to construct a convincing proof of a notion of a cul- ture characterised by an essential unity, without any separation between humanities and sciences. I trust that the analysis of the creative acts that generated Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Michelangelo’s Vaticano Pietà, Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, Giacomo Leopardi’s L’infinito (The infinite) and Wisława Szymborska’s Liczba Pi (Pi), the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Brahms’ Fourth Symphony the finale of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps, the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Conrad Rönt- gen and of the therapeutic properties of lithium salts for psychiatric disorders by John Frederick Joseph Cade, the invention of incandescent light bulbs by Thomas Alva Edi- son and many other inventors and of the electronic television by Philo Taylor Farns- worth, may succeed in achieving the first objective and, by extension, the second also. Keywords: creativity, genius, cultural unity, science, art, literature, music, inventions. 1. INTRODUCTION It is well known that the literature on creativity has significantly evolved from the initial approach focused only on creativity as a peculiarity of geni- uses in the various domains of human activity to what it has recognised as a democratisation of the phenomenon.1-6 In particular, in a recent very accurate and in-depth study by Corazza, a detailed recognition of the literature about this passage from creativity by only geniuses to a broader meaning including qualities and abilities by every individual has been done.7 In the same paper, http://www.fupress.com/substantia http://www.fupress.com/substantia 14 Luigi Dei besides discussing this phenomenon of “creativity for all”, some other very interesting topics are considered, as the mental processes associated with this broad vision of creativity and even the socio-cultural aspects.8 Indeed, the state of the art of the literature allows individuating another further extension of the domain where creativity takes place, in the sense that creativity not only belongs to every human being, but it is also going to become the most important skill for the hyper-technological socie- ties of the future.9 Considering this enlarged vision of creativity, it is possible to extend the classical definition according to which creativity requires both originality and effectiveness, in order to contemplate several other requirements, as novelty, utility, aesthetics and authen- ticity.10-13 In this context, according to the work by Weis- berg who focused the attention on the intentional novelty as the unique criterion eliminating the effectiveness and trying to bypass the question of value assessment to indi- viduate the novelty and/or originality, we may recognise three pragmatic definitions of creativity as reported in the literature.7,14 According to this background, which refers to creativity in a static view, many scholars have investigated the topic of a dynamic concept of creativity, where the adjective potential is put before originality and effectiveness, with the aim of taking into account all the inconclusive outcomes and stressing the dynamic nature of creativity, as selecting a focus, generating the outcomes through complex processes where inconclusive outcomes play an important and decisive role, assessing them, and finally transforming the outcomes to knowledge.7 Inde- pendently on this wide vision of creativity, it is worth- while to recall that, despite the new achievements on the creativity concept above resumed, it remains valid one of the most interesting and comprehensive definitions of creativity which underline originality and effective- ness, like that described by Poincaré according to whom creativity can be summarised as the capacity of connect- ing pre-existing elements into new combinations that be useful.15 This idea was at the centre of a very interest- ing talk given by Umberto Eco in Florence, Italy for the Nobel Foundation in 2004 which is titled Combinatoria della creatività (Combinatory of creativity).16 It is inter- esting to notice that the “usefulness” to which Poincaré refers is more appropriately relative to the beauty rather than to the effectiveness. Of course, he thinks of beauty not in a strictly aesthetic sense, but rather in the view of mathematicians, that is something associated with ele- gance, harmony, the economy of signs, operational cor- respondence to the aims.17 It is curious and intriguing that this idea of connecting things thought at the begin- ning of the 20th century by Poincaré is repeated almost identically by one of the fathers of the ICT industry, Steve Jobs, who defined creativity in a very concise and incisive way. “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more expe- riences, or they have thought more about their experi- ences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So, they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”18 It is obvious that what is written until now about creativity strongly clashes with the ety- mology of the terms ‘creativity’ and ‘to create’, accord- ing to which the word comes from the Latin creare with shares with the word crescere (to grow in English) the root kar.19,20 Indeed, the most common meaning of the word creativity is associated with the ‘making from noth- ing’, which is referred especially to God and that, in a figurative sense, becomes inventing, generating new and original things.1-14 In the Sanskrit language kar-tr is ‘the person who makes’ (from nothing), the ‘creator’.19 Leav- ing this divine interpretation to philosophy and theol- ogy and reminding the previous introductory remarks on creativity, in particular as defined by Poincaré, it is worthwhile to mention that even Marcel Proust agrees, albeit more lyrically, with Poincaré. «The only true voy- age of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the one hundred universes that each of them is; […]».21 This lyric vision according to which the true discover, the fruit of the creative act, does not consist in finding new territories, but rather in seeing them with different eyes, perfectly matches with Poincaré’s statement where the new territories are simply the pre-existing elements that the creator suc- ceeds to connect generating originality and effectiveness, due to his ability in seeing them in a new combination thanks to his capacity in seeing them with different eyes. In conclusion, we can imagine creativity as an unlimit- ed domain, because the pre-existing elements are in the number of billions and billions, and the combinatory calculus individuates several combinations truly tending to infinite. Therefore, we could define creativity as a bot- tomless pit; indeed, such pit has two negative aspects not coherent with creativity: it is dark, and one has to dive in a random fashion and therefore it is almost impossible 15Creativity in the Art, Literature, Music, Science, and Inventions to sharpen one’s different eyes, to use Proust’s expression. Another metaphor for creativity is perhaps more appro- priate: a sea that offers always new and unpredictable horizons. The present paper aims to illustrate with some examples taken from the art, music, literature, poetry, science, and the world of inventions how creativity con- tinuously opens these new horizons simply by connecting pre-existing elements in some combinations that gener- ate originality and novelty. By this approach we hope to succeed in extending the Poincaré’s definition from the domain of the mathematical invention for which it was coined to all the other fields of the human creativity.15 Indeed, we will revisit some fruits of creativity in the various domains of human activity we mentioned above discovering many analogies and to possibly conclude that there is no division, in contrast with Snow’s idea, between science and art, science and literature, and that humanistic and scientific cultures are two complemen- tary sides of the same medal hanging from the neck of Homo sapiens.22-23 2. CREATIVITY IN ART To investigate the connection between pre-existing elements used to create new original and novel com- binations in art, two examples will be illustrated, one from painting and the other from marble sculpture. The painting by Pablo Picasso Les demoiselles d’Avignon (https://w w w.moma.org/collection/works/79766) has been the subject of several studies focusing on its nov- elty and, above all, on the idea that it could represent the starting point of the nascent cubism.24-25 The pre-exist- ing elements can be recognised in the five women who had been already represented in the very famous paint- ing cycle dedicated to Les baigneuses by Paul Cézanne. (See for example https://joyofmuseums.com/museums/ united-kingdom-museums/london-museums/the-nation- al-gallery-london/masterpieces-of-the-national-gallery/ bathers-les-grandes-baigneuses-by-paul-cezanne/). It is still controversial whether this reference was in Picasso’s mind or not at the beginning of his project to paint his Demoiselles d’Avignon.26-27 Nevertheless, apart from the shapes of the bodies, clearly inspired by the nascent cub- ism, it is evocative the idea that the blue of the triangles, trapezoids, other irregular figures and some outlines of the bodies can be traced back to the blue of the water close to the bathers. In this view, the bathing women and the blue of the water are the pre-existing elements, and the new, unexpected, and amazing connection is the geometry of the nascent cubism. Among all the possi- ble connections of these pre-existing elements – bathers and water – whether he is referring or not to Cézanne, Picasso sees with different and new eyes the shape of the bathing bodies and the blue-coloured geometries repre- senting the water. Another interesting case of connecting pre-existing elements into new combinations that generate beauty in art is the Pietà by Michelangiolo housed in Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City. (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ jorge-11/48126571846) Here the pre-existing elements are the well-known sculptural groups called Pietà (Com- passion) mainly made of wood and typical of Northern- Europe with the German term Vesperbild.28 The tradi- tion until Michelangiolo, both in painting and sculpture, was characterised by a rigid and geometric structure of the Madonna and Christ pair. The seated Madonna was the vertical element to whom the dead Christ in a horizontal position was opposed with a clear associa- tion with the geometry of the cross. All the paintings and sculptures focused on this iconography were char- acterised by rigidity: a striking example is the oil paint- ing Pietà by Pietro Perugino housed at the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ nikonpaul/31992383947) and executed a few years before Michelangiolo’s Pietà in the Vatican.29 Moreover, anoth- er example of the strong rigidity of the sculptures is in a Vesperbild by an anonymous German sculptor (ca. 1380- 1400) conserved at Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, Frankfurt-am-Mein.28 (https://www.foglidarte.it/luoghi- mostre-eventi/699-vesperbild-alle-origini-delle-pieta-di- michelangelo.html) Michelangiolo has in front of him the following pre-existing elements: the dead body of Christ which of course must remain in an almost hori- zontal position, the seated Madonna who has to hold her son. His extraordinary creativity is to combine these two figures to compose the group with two amazing novel- ties: softness replacing the rigidity and the horizontal/ vertical contrast that tends to dissolve. The artist con- centrates his action to give softness to the marble – it may seem like a paradox or oxymoron while it is an inspired new combination of pre-existing elements! – working briskly at the Madonna’s drapery. Another virtuoso combination concerns the two arms of the Madonna, obvious pre-existing elements. The left arm is completely autonomous and does not even touch Christ and the left hand is directed towards us, as if inviting us to meditate with the typical gesture of an almost open hand exposing the palm.30 In sculpting the right arm Michelangiolo succeeded in capturing an amazing com- bination by achieving both the softness and the realis- tic effect of supporting the heaviness of a lifeless body. He concentrates on the region of the marble that con- nects Mary’s arm, the Christ’s right arm and ribs: these 16 Luigi Dei three elements had to be connected in an original, never seen before way. The creative genius of Michelangiolo is expressed with a combination in that area of the statue which produces a kind of an elongated “sausage” of flesh between the arm and the ribs due to the firm hold of the Madonna opposed to the weight of Christ’s listless body. 3. CREATIVITY IN LITERATURE AND POETRY Probably the most impressive example of the con- nection of pre-existing elements ingeniously combined to generate the creation of a literary work is Il sistema periodico (The periodic table) by P. Levi.31 In this won- derful book the writer, a chemist, succeeds in creating one of the most original connections of pre-existing elements. Indeed, he starts from the chemical elemen- tary elements of the Mendeleev’s table, the bricks of the whole universe, and he associates to each of the select- ed elements – twenty-one in total – an autobiographi- cal life experience. Two extraordinary combinations are worthwhile mentioning in relation to the aim of the present contribution. The first deals with story that we find in the central pages of the book – the eleventh, enti- tled Cerium – where the pre-existing chemical element, apparently completely removed from the dramatic expe- rience of the lager deportation, becomes the fulcrum around which the theme of the “saved and drowned ” is developed, building in a few pages one of the crud- est and most realistic testimonies of the Shoah.32 In the second – the book’s last one, entitled Carbon – the masterful combination of pre-existing elements is that between carbon, the very atom of life and the author’s act of writing: the continuous panta rei of the matter finds concrete realisation through a “labelled” carbon atom that passes from a compound to another travelling in space and time until it arrives in Levi’s brain, driv- ing his pen or typewriter to write the final full stop of both the story and the book. Keeping the focus on Levi’s work, there is another excellent example of an almost jarring combination between two elements: a make-up item such as lipstick and its main chemical component called alloxan which is also found in chicken drop- pings, a kind of revival of the old Latin motto aurum de stercore! «The fact that alloxan, destined to embellish ladies’ lips, would come from the excrement of chickens or pythons was a thought which didn’t trouble me for a moment. […] I will go further: far from scandalizing me, the idea of obtaining a cosmetic from excrement, that is, aurum de stercore (“gold from dung”), amused me and warmed my heart like a return to the origins, when alchemists extracted phosphorous from urine.» (See ref. 31 English transl. story “Nitrogen”, pp. 180-181). Some years before the publication of the book by the chemist-writer Levi, the Italian songwriter-poet Fab- rizio De André combined the same elements in his very famous song Via del Campo: «dai diamanti non nasce niente, dal letame nascono i fiori» (transl. « diamonds bring nothing, manure brings flowers »).33 Concerning creativity in poetry, it is particularly interesting to analyse two different examples: the poems L’ infinito (The Infinite) by the Italian G. Leopardi and Liczba PI (Pi) by the Polish W. Szymborska.34-35 The theme of the infinite is a subject that drew the interest of philosophers, theologists, mathematicians, physicists and astronomers alike since the beginning of human civilisation. Indeed, even writers and poets have been fascinated by this topic, but the amazing ways that Leop- ardi finds to describe the infinite in his poem are truly unparalleled. Leopardi, according to Poincaré’s defini- tion of creativity, establishes several new combinations (see bold below) by connecting pre-existing elements.15,35 The hedge as the limit of finiteness and the farthest hori- zon as a symbol of infinity; the visual boundless spaces opposed to the auditory, superhuman silences; the same silence and the voice both combined with the wind that moves the plants; the present time perceived through its sound, that is, the living season as opposed to eternity, dead, silent; the final paradoxical and oxymoronic con- nection between the drowning of the thought on the one hand and the shipwreck of the thinker at the other. How many combinations of these pre-existing elements could the poet choose? We can very well say, an infinite number! But Leopardi selected the ones marked in bold below in the poem quoted in its entirety (Box 1). We could venture that the reason why among the various possibilities for such combinations only some – very few – extraordinary ones, the fruit of the ingenious creativity, succeeded in generating eternal cultural prod- ucts, resides in a kind of evolutionary theory involving natural selection. The literary “species”, the fruit of crea- tivity, that show the best “fitness” to the judgment of the posterity survive and do not become extinct, all the oth- ers do not survive the natural selection process and end up in oblivion. Something similar has been established by a group of scientists who have recently concluded that mutations and gene variability explain why a lot of music of a single genre with various species is produced in each period. Then, the free choices of the listeners determine the pressure of the external environment – fitness – and cause some species to become extinct, making certain others durable and transmissible for centuries.37 Another fantastic example of an ingenious and incredible combination of pre-existing elements used to 17Creativity in the Art, Literature, Music, Science, and Inventions build a wonderful, unique, and original poem is Liczba Pi (Pi) by the Polish poetess W. Szymborska.34 In this poem there are a number of brilliant connections of many pre-existing elements to constitute an extraordi- nary combination: a transcendental number, the number Pi, is the pretext to lyrically suggest reflections on man- kind, nature, life, consciousness, eternity. A poetic way to look at an ancient philosophical subject, that of finite- ness and infinity, thanks to the very ingenious combina- tions: “five nine two because it never ends”, “the longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet”, but it “doesn’t stop at the page’s edge” and finally it nudges the “sluggish eternity to continue” (Box 2). Starting from an ordered, infinite set of integers that seem randomly put one behind the other, and which instead represent a very tangible concept, i.e., the ratio between the length of a circle and its diameter, the poetess combines some ele- ments to evoke feelings and emotions perfectly succeed- ing in making warm and throbbing what is considered by everybody one of the coldest and driest objects, a number! Another perfect demonstration of what Poin- caré intended for connection of pre-existing elements to generate an ingenious combination. 4. CREATIVITY IN MUSIC Trying to apply Poincaré’s definition of creativity to music is a truly difficult challenge, since the pre-existing elements are the most abstract and intangible. So far, the pre-existing elements have been well tangible and con- crete, like marble or coloured pigments, or intangible like words, but still evoking specific concepts or things. In music the combination is made of sounds whose physical frequency and mathematical duration give melody and rhythm, whereas Fourier’s spectral analysis and simultaneous presence of different frequencies give timbers and harmony, respectively.37 It is almost impos- sible to show how some combinations of sounds origi- nate music that becomes original and encounters the appreciation of the listeners: therefore, the strangest and somehow most absurd combination of pre-existing ele- ments which will be illustrated as capable of originating novelty and originality is that of sounds and silence, that is, the use of breaks in music generating something truly original and ingenious. Every musical piece obvious- ly starts from silence, but we cannot conclude that the combination between the silence before the first sounds of the musical piece represents a demonstration of an ingenious combination of pre-existing elements, i.e., silence and sound. Nevertheless, there are some cases where the composer intentionally combines a break with the first sounds to start his or her musical piece in a very original way, as if the music gushed out of nowhere. Two very famous examples where Poincaré’s definition could be applied to creativity in music are the begin- ning of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and that of Brahms’s 4th Symphony. How did Beethoven succeed in starting his Symphony so that just based on its beginning it was celebrated as “the destiny knocking on the door”? By a combination of a quaver rest, followed by three identical quaver notes and by a final minim note with a crown. The knocking on the door by the destiny is a rest, that is, a silence! The combination between the rest and the four L’infinito Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle, e questa siepe, che da tanta parte dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude. Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani silenzi, e profondissima quiete io nel pensier mi fingo; ove per poco il cor non si spaura. E come il vento odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello infinito silenzio a questa voce vo comparando: e mi sovvien l’eterno, e le morte stagioni, e la presente e viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa immensità s’annega il pensier mio: e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare. The infinite Always dear to me was this solitary hill and this hedge, that excludes so great a part of the farthest horizon from my sight. But sitting and gazing, boundless spaces beyond it, and superhuman silences, and deepest quiet, I envision in my mind; where almost awed is the heart. And as the wind I hear sighing through these plants, I that infinite silence to this voice go comparing: and I remember eternity, and the dead seasons, and the present and live one, and its sound. So in this immensity my thought is drowned: and sweet to me is shipwreck in this sea. Box 1. 18 Luigi Dei subsequent notes generated what is considered one of the most powerful beginnings of a musical work.38 The music gushes out of nowhere and it makes it in an abrupt and violent way thanks to the combination of the pre-existing elements above described. But the music can also gush out of nowhere like a silence that softly and gently becomes music, as if silence contained somehow music. Brahms succeeds in making this mira- cle with the beginning of his 4th Symphony: Beethoven started with the silence – the quaver rest – here Brahms starts with a quasi-silence, with all the instruments hav- ing a crotchet rest while first and second violins play- ing an upbeat B crotchet with anacrustic rhythm. The creativity manifests itself with this ingenious combi- nation and the conductor’s ability consists of realis- ing this gushing out of music from nothing: one of the best realisations is by Carlos Kleiber, who brings music out of thin air with a masterful gesture.39 Very appro- priately, they have written that “this opening is a prime example of Brahms’s natural ability to compose within the strictest and oldest of structures, yet with a fluid, modern sound that belies its rigidity”.40-42 One could conclude that in this case the quasi-nothing represented by those rests and by that short upbeat note he creates something truly original, novel, effective, and useful.10-15 But the rests, the silence, can also be an ingenious inven- Liczba Pi Podziwu godna liczba Pi trzy koma jeden cztery jeden. Wszystkie jej dalsze cyfry też są początkowe pięć dziewięć dwa, ponieważ nigdy się nie kończy. Nie pozwala się objąć sześć pięć trzy pięć spojrzeniem, osiem dziewięć obliczeniem, siedem dziewięć wyobraźnią, a nawet trzy dwa trzy osiem żartem, czyli porównaniem cztery sześć do czegokolwiek dwa sześć cztery trzy na świecie. Najdłuższy ziemski wąż po kilkunastu metrach się urywa. Podobnie, choć trochę później, czynią węże bajeczne. Korowód cyfr składających się na liczbę Pi nie zatrzymuje się na brzegu kartki, potrafi ciągnąć się po stole, przez powietrze, przez mur, liść, gniazdo ptasie, chmury, prosto w niebo, przez całą nieba wzdętość i bezdenność. O, jak krótki, wprost mysi, jest warkocz komety! Jak wątł y promień g wiazdy, że zakrzy wia się w lada przestrzeni! A tu dwa trzy piętnaście trzysta dziewiętnaście mój numer telefonu twój numer koszuli rok tysiąc dziewięćset siedemdziesiąty trzeci szóste piętro ilość mieszkańców sześćdziesiąt pięć groszy obwód w biodrach dwa palce szarada i szyfr, w którym słowiczku mój a leć, a piej oraz uprasza się zachować spokój, a także ziemia i niebo przeminą, ale nie liczba Pi, co to to nie, ona wciąż swoje niezłe jeszcze pięć, nie byle jakie osiem, nie ostatnie siedem, przynaglając, ach przynaglając gnuśną wieczność do trwania. Pi The admirable number Pi: three point one four one. All the following digits are also initial, five nine two because it never ends. It can’t be comprehended six five three five at a glance, eight nine by calculation, seven nine or imagination, not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison four six to anything else two six four three in the world. The longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet. Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may hold out a bit longer. The pageant of digits comprising the number Pi doesn’t stop at the page’s edge. It goes on across the table, through the air, over a wall, a leaf, a bird’s nest, clouds, straight into the sky, through all the bottomless, bloated heavens. Oh how brief — a mouse tail, a pigtail — is the tail of a comet! How feeble the star’s ray, bent by bumping up against space! While here we have two three fifteen three hundred nineteen my phone number your shirt size the year nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents hip measurement two fingers a charade, a code, in which we find hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert alongside ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm, as well as heaven and earth shall pass away, but not the number Pi, oh no, nothing doing, it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five, its uncommonly fine eight, its far from final seven, nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity to continue. Box 2. 19Creativity in the Art, Literature, Music, Science, and Inventions tion for a sensational final twist: the example that comes to mind is represented by those three rests – dotted qua- ver, crotchet, dotted quaver – after the rapid ten-note sequence by flutes that precedes the thunderous finale chords of the Sacre du printemps by Igor’ Fëdorovič Stravinskij. 5. CREATIVITY IN SCIENCE Two examples of a combination of pre-existing ele- ments to create new progress in science by means of an important and fundamental discovery will be illustrated. It is interesting to notice that a special role was played also by serendipity, i.e., “the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for”.43 Therefore, the pre-existing elements can be found with some serendipity, but creativity consists of connecting and combining them so as to lead to a new discovery. In relation to this aspect, it is worth mentioning that in science, unlike in the other branches of the human activity described in this work, the above-mentioned combination/connection is associated with the impor- tance of inductive reasoning in ‘creating’ creativity. We could state that inductive reasoning is some kind of pre- requisite for the selection of the pre-existing elements to be combined; in other words, inductive reasoning is the sieve that separates wheat from chaff, but the ‘crea- tive jump’ is linked to the ability of Homo sapiens to combine the wheat grains to give an ‘original, novel, and useful bread’! The first example is the discovery of X-rays by Wil- helm Conrad Röntgen in 1895. It is well known that several pre-Röntgen experiments had evidenced radia- tions of some kind, but as well characterised as to differ from cathode rays and fluorescence radiation.44 Firstly, there were Morgan’s experiments in 1785, followed by many other observations involving such great scientists as H. Davy, M. Faraday, P. Lenard, W. Crookes, F. San- ford, H. Helmholtz, H. Hertz, I. Puluj, N. Tesla.45-47 It is difficult to ascertain the true origin of Röntgen’s X-rays discovery, but the received hypothesis, as reported by the most important biographers, is that he succeeded in isolating the effects of fluorescent radiation visible to the naked eye, by wrapping in black cardboard a Crookes tube where experiments of electric discharges on very rarefied gases were carried out. Apparently, the differ- entiation with the already known cathode rays occurred by serendipity – as is testified by Lenard in 1888 who in his experiments observed the effects of cathode rays (per- haps, unknowingly, even of X-rays!) on photographic plates outside the tube in the region of the cathode and measured their penetration through various materi- als.47-49 Indeed, at 1 m distance from the cathode of the Crookes tube there was a fluorescent screen painted with barium platinocyanide that showed a green glow even when nothing was apparently coming out of the tube. Röntgen thought to connect and combine the follow- ing two pre-existing elements: (i) no visible fluorescence coming out from the tube due to the black cardboard, (ii) a fluorescent screen painted with barium platinocya- nide placed at a considerable distance far from the tube compared to Lenard’s experiments. From this connec- tion, Röntgen drew a novel idea, the fruit of his creativ- ity: some invisible rays coming from the tube were pass- ing through the cardboard and succeeding in crossing 1 m of air to react with the barium platinocyanide making it fluoresce. Two months of further experiments went by when he thoroughly investigated these new invisible rays before publishing his first paper. He decided to name the rays “X” same as the mathematical unknown.50 But the combination of pre-existing elements did not stop here: during the experiments, Röntgen realised that one of the most impressive characteristics of such mysteri- ous rays was the ability to go through some materials, such as paper, books, wood, but not others such as met- als and stone. Connecting this experimental evidence, he designed three ground-breaking experiments: he made the invisible rays going through three different objects and placed a few inches beyond each object a photo- graphic plate and then darkened the whole room. The first object was a wooden box that contained the small metal weights of a balance; the second consisted in the various parts of his shotgun’s barrel; and the third was the hand of his wife. The amazing combination of pre- existing elements originated in a very short time three extraordinary applications of the newly-discovered X-rays: metal detector, quality control in the metal indus- try, and radiology and radio-diagnostics in medicine! The second example deals with the discovery of lithium-ion therapy for manic depressive patients by the Australian psychiatrist Dr John Frederick Joseph Cade who worked at the Bundoora Repatriation Men- tal Hospital in Melbourne. Here the connection and combination of pre-existing elements are truly unbe- lievable, also because the means and laboratories avail- able to Cade at that time were verging on what has been named “ramshackle pantry”.51 The first element from which Cade started his research was a conviction, the classical hypothesis to be validated by experiments: depressive diseases (i.e., manic syndromes and bipolar disorders) could be due to chemical metabolic disorders that should determine a change in the chemical com- position of the urine of his patients compared to that 20 Luigi Dei of healthy people. With the aim of checking the valid- ity of such assumption, he injected urine of both ill and healthy people into the abdominal cavities of Guinea pigs and, probably due to some preliminary not statisti- cally reliable results, he found that urine from patients with depressive diseases was more toxic to the Guinea pigs than that of healthy people.51-53 This unreliability of the experimental result was the serendipity touch, since it convinced Cade about the rightness of his hypothesis and led him to focus on the two main nitrogenous com- ponents of urine, for which it was important to ascertain the possible specific lethal constituent that, coherent to the hypothesis and the preliminary unreliable experi- ments, could be particularly concentrated in the urine of ill patients.55 The treatment with the urea solutions led to the same effect of urine from ill patients, but it was impossible to explain the greater toxicity of the urine of manic patients simply in terms of higher concentra- tions of urea. Indeed, urea is toxic for Guinea pigs from a certain threshold of concentration and there was no difference in the effect of the urine from healthy or ill people since it was the unreliability of the experiment described, a true mistake, that was going to generate the discovery! Cade had the idea to add the second constitu- ent, uric acid, to test whether it had a synergistic – posi- tive or negative – effect, or not.54,55 In his first article in 1947, Cade noted that uric acid had a slightly enhancing effect on the toxicity of urea.56 This result prompted him to continue this research strategy, but unfortunately, it was impossible to increase the concentration of uric acid due to its very scarce solubility in water (0.06 g/L equiv- alent to 3.57.10-4 M compared to 1,193 g/L equivalent to ca. 20 M of urea). Therefore, Cade selected lithium salt as it was the most soluble salt of uric acid, to increase the concentration of the possible enhancer of urea toxic- ity. To Cade’s surprise, when he injected the Guinea pigs with lithium urate in conjunction with urea, the toxic- ity was reduced rather than enhanced, suggesting that the lithium could have been protective. Cade further explored this lead by injecting the Guinea pigs with lith- ium carbonate in conjunction with urea, and once more observed a reduced toxicity. He concluded that lithium itself provided a protective effect against the action of urea. This belief then prompted him to wonder whether lithium per se would influence his Guinea pigs. Inject- ing them with large doses of lithium carbonate, he found them to become lethargic and unresponsive. Now we can deduce that the lithium ion itself had a protective function against the convulsant death caused by toxic doses of urea.55,56 A mistake and a touch of serendipity coupled with the combination and connection of some pre-existing elements by the creative mind of Dr Cade: the toxic effect of urea and uric acid, the low solubility of uric acid, the higher solubility of lithium urate, the even higher solubility of Li2CO3 (1.75.10-2 M) resulted in a novel, original, useful, and effective discovery that had to wait another twenty years to become a worldwide- accepted therapy. But this is another story. 6. CREATIVITY AND INVENTIONS Even the inventors can be considered creative in the sense illustrated in the previous section: two examples will be described to demonstrate once again the creative act always as a combination of pre-existing elements. The first case concerns the invention of the incandes- cent light bulb; despite the fact that the invention is attributed to Thomas Alva Edison the story is much more complex and involves several more inventors who worked for many years between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.57 These inven- tors combined pre-existing elements into an ingenious invention that led the American writer Oliver Sacks to entitle “Light for the masses” one of the chapters of his extraordinary book Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood and here I will illustrate the pre- existing elements and the ingenious combination and connection thereof. The pre-existing elements were the following: (i) Joule effect condensed in the formula Q = I2.R.t, (ii) black body radiation, (iii) heat transfer by conduction, convection, and radiation, (iv) oxidation reactions, and (v) matter phase transitions. The com- bination of the first two elements led many inventors to design an ingenious new object consisting of a fila- ment of matter that, when heated by an electric current at high temperature, emitted radiation in the visible region of the spectrum as a black body. The third ele- ment combined with the fourth convinced these ingen- ious men to put such filaments in a vacuum to enhance radiation against conduction and convection and inhibit oxidation processes that caused the light bulbs to have a very short lifetime. The combination with the fifth ele- ment was the most ingenious and came later: instead of the vacuum an inert gas like Argon was used. This prevented oxidation and simultaneously favoured con- duction and convection, losing a little bit of radiation power, but lowering considerably the sublimation of the tungsten filament, because of the decrease in heat pro- duced during this transition phase. As a matter of fact, sublimation reduced the life of the filament and caused a blackening of the glass due to condensation of tung- sten vapour: in this way, for the first time in the histo- ry, humans succeeded in illuminating the dark not by 21Creativity in the Art, Literature, Music, Science, and Inventions chemical combustion, but by radiation-induced electric- ity. It was the beginning of a new era.59 The second example is the invention of the elec- tronics-based television. Probably this is the best exam- ple to illustrate Poincaré’s definition of creativity. Philo T. Farnsworth was an extraordinary inventor and the idea to design a way to capture images in movement and reproduce them on a fluorescent screen came to his mind after observing a farmer ploughing a field.60 The pre-existing elements were the following: (i) cer- tain materials, submitted to an electrical potential when illuminated have the properties to generate an electrical current proportional to the illumination intensity, due to a decreased resistance induced by the light, (ii) the elec- trical signals so obtained can be transmitted at distance by means of radiofrequency waves, (iii) the cathode rays produced in a Crookes tube manage to illuminate the phosphors in the internal side of a fluorescent screen, and (iv) the electrical signals of element (ii), that are a faithful mirror of the image collected, can be used to attenuate the cathode rays according to the inverse pro- portionality law (i.e., strong electrical signal = high illu- mination of the photosensitive material = weak attenu- ation of the cathode ray = high illumination of the tel- evision screen). The extraordinary connection of these four elements was invented ingeniously by Farnsworth thinking of a fast-moving plough. According to the Ital- ian standard, the plough (cathode tube emitting cathode rays) ploughed the field (scanned the fluorescent screen) with 625 furrows (lines) repeated 50 times per second! The lines were constituted of alternated microscopic black (no light) and white (light) spots moving exactly in the same way they were collected by the camera. The viewer does not notice this process of image composition due to the double phenomenon of the high speed of the electronic brush and the persistence of the image on the retina of the human eye (1/16th of a second). 7. CONCLUSIONS Starting from the recent review of the literature on creativity research and recollecting the ever current defi- nition by Poincaré for the creativity in the mathemati- cal invention, the present contribution tried to demon- strate that the creativity jumps typical of geniuses in the various domains of the human activity can be aptly described in terms of combination and connection of pre-existing elements to generate novelty, originality, and effectiveness.1-15 In particular, some examples of cre- ativity outcomes in art, literature, poetry, music, science, and the world of the inventions were reviewed focusing on the pre-existing elements and on the ingenious com- bination and/or connection between them to generate the creative jump. The examples illustrated here, while belonging to apparently separate fields of human creativ- ity, reveal, on the contrary, a common matrix precisely in the creative act by the genius who conceived it. In the end, we discovered the common traits of the creation of Michelangiolo’s Vaticano Pietà, Beethoven’s Fifth Sym- phony’s beginning, Primo Levi, Leopardi or Szymbor- ska’s works, the X-rays’ discovery, or television and light bulbs inventions. Besides confirming the shrewd intui- tion inherent in Poincaré’s definition of creativity, it was demonstrated that the analogies found in the genesis of the above-mentioned products of creativity were very strong, enabling us to conclude that there is no division, in contrast with Snow’s idea, between science and art, science and literature, and that the humanities and sci- ences are two complementary sides of the same medal hanging from the neck of the Homo sapiens.22-23 8. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author expresses his deep gratitude to Dr Sonia Carla Torretta for the accurate and careful revision of the English language, and to Dr Lucia Cappelli, librar- ian of The British Institute of Florence, for the kind assis- tance. 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Wise, in Essays in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the ASME Heat Transfer Division (E. T. Layton and J. H. Lienhard, eds.), The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, New York, 1988, pp. 189-211. 60. D. Godfrey, Philo T. Farnsworth – The father of tel- evision, University of Utah Press; Reprint edition (November 30, 2016), Salt Lake City, 2016. Substantia An International Journal of the History of Chemistry Vol. 6, n. 1 - 2022 Firenze University Press To Print or not to Print? Preprints and publication: how the Covid-19 pandemic affected the quality of scientific production Pierandrea Lo Nostro Faraday’s Dogma Stephen T. Hyde Creativity in the Art, Literature, Music, Science, and Inventions Singlet Dioxygen 1O2, its Generation, Physico-chemical Properties and its Possible Hormetic Behavior in Cancer Therapy Marc Henry1, Miro Radman2, Luc Benichou3, Khalid O. Alfarouk4, Laurent Schwartz5,* Is the Second Law of Thermodynamics Able to Classify Drugs? Laurent Schwartz1,*, Luc Benichou2, Jules Schwartz1, Maxime Pontié3, Marc Henry4 History of Research on Phospholipid Metabolism and Applications to the Detection, Diagnosis, and Treatment of Cancer Peter F. Daly1, Jack S. Cohen2,* Capillary Electrophoresis (CE) and its Basic Principles in Historical Retrospect. Part 3. 1840s –1900ca. The First CE of Ions in 1861. Transference Numbers, Migration Velocity, Conductivity, Mobility Ernst Kenndler The Early History of Polyaniline II: Elucidation of Structure and Redox States† Seth C. Rasmussen Path to the Synthesis of Polyacetylene Films with Metallic Luster: In Response to Rasmussen’s Article Hideki Shirakawa Comments on Shirakawa’s Response Seth C. Rasmussen Lipids, Chloroform, and Their Intertwined Histories Carlos A. Ramírez Professor Alexander Kessenikh (1932-2021) Andrey V. Andreev1, Vadim A. Atsarkin2, Konstantin V. Ivanov1, Gennady E. Kurtik1, Pierandrea Lo Nostro3, Vasily V. Ptushenko4,5, Konstantin A. Tomilin1, Natalia V. 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