Of creative thinking

Dr. Raj Shree Dhar
Over a period of millions of years, the Sun will swell; the Earth will heat; many life forms will be extinguished; the Oceans will rapidly evaporate and the Earth will become dry, barren and airless. Eventually, the Sun will fill most of the sky and engulf the Earth. – C. Sagan
The powers of creativity in the Universe or Universes are so vast and unimaginable that human mind has been quite incompetent for determining the working conditions of the universe. There was once a time before life, when the earth was barren and utterly desolate. How did the first living things arise? How did life evolve to explore the mystery of our own origins?
For a million years it was clear to everyone that there were no other places than the Earth and then we noticed that we were not the center and purpose of the Universe, but rather lived on a tiny and fragile world, drifting in a great cosmic ocean with a hundred billion galaxies and a billion trillion stars . The discovery that Earth is a little world was made by Eratosthenes in Alexandria. Eratosthenes was a mathematician, astronomer and philosopher. He was the director of great library in Alexandria, the first true research institute in the history of the world. The Earth is now thoroughly explored. It no longer promises new continents or lost lands but the technology permits us to venture into space to explore new worlds.
It was in Alexandria around 300 B.C. that the human beings began the intellectual adventure of space. There were many mathematicians and the astronomers e.g. Hipparchus, who mapped the constellations and estimated the brightness of the stars; Euclid who brilliantly systematized Geometry, Heron the inventor of gear trains and steam engines and the author of Automata, the first book on robots; Apollonius who demonstrated ellipse , parabola and hyperbola- the curves followed by the planets, comets and the stars and many more like Archemedes, Ptolemy and among those great men was a great woman Hypatia, mathematician and astronomer, the last light of the Alexandria Library.
Johannes Kepler, mathematician and physicist was born in Germany in 1571. He discovered the true orbits of the planets. In such orbits, the Sun is not at the center but is offset at the focus of the ellipse. When a given planet is near the sun, it speeds up and when it is farther it slows down. He found that Mars moves about the sun in an elliptical orbit and other planets have orbits less elliptical. Issac Newton, born in 1642 a mathematician was the first person to discover Gravitational force. Things had been falling since the beginning of time but he showed that the same force that pulls an apple down to Earth keeps the moon in its orbit. Leibnitz a great mathematician invented Differential calculus and integral calculus. According to Leibnitz, every being is a unit called monad and God is the supreme monad responsible for maintaining order and continuity of the universe.  John von Neumann was a brilliant mathematician, synthesizer, and promoter of the stored program concept. At a very young age, von Neumann was interested in math, the nature of numbers and the logic of the world around him. Even at age six, when his mother once stared aimlessly in front of her, he asked, “What are you calculating?” thus displaying his natural affinity for numbers. When he was only six years old he could divide eight-digit numbers in his head. However, even at that young age, he had a wide range of interests.
In 1839 Alexandre Edmond Becquerel discovered the photovoltaic effect which explains how electricity can be generated from sunlight. He claimed that “shining light on an electrode submerged in a conductive solution would create an electric current.” Today we see solar cells in a wide variety of places. You may see solar powered cars. There is even a solar powered aircraft that has flown higher than any other aircraft with the exception of the Blackbird. With the cost of solar cells well within everyone’s budget, solar power has never looked so tempting. Recently new technology has given us screen printed solar cells, and a solar fabric that can be used to side a house, even solar shingles that install on our roofs. International markets have opened up and solar panel manufacturers are now playing a key role in the solar power industry.
The Sun glows faintly in neutrinos, and now it has been proved that neutrinos have mass but initially it was supposed that it weigh nothing and travel at the speed of light. They carry an intrinsic angular momentum, or spin. Matter is transparent to neutrinos, which pass almost effortlessly through the earth and through the sun. As we look up at the Sun for a second, a billion of neutrinos pass through our eyeball and come through back of our heads.
Creative thinking is the process which we use when we come up with a new idea. It is the merging of ideas which have not been merged before. Brainstorming is one form of creative thinking: it works by merging someone else’s ideas with your own to create a new one.
There are worlds on which life has never risen. There are worlds that have been charred and ruined by cosmic catastrophes’. We are fortunate; we are alive, if we do not speak for earth then who will?

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