Play is Needed ...

Monday, November 21, 2011. We had a chat this morning at breakfast, as part of the workshop which I am attending. We talked about content and about applications, about usefulness and insight into some subject. Is the focus on usefulness always helping the insight?

How are we encouraging creativity? …

What can you do to encourage creativity and insight? Is it focus which is helping science? What is a good setup on which creativity can grow?

It is an important observation which has been found by many leading people in science: to be creative you need freedom. You need to play when you want to find something new and deep. Of course, science is a serious enterprise with a huge number of applications. Our society would not exist as it is without scientific discovery. But new things are often discovered by chance, when people play around with some problem.

Today, it seems that it is important to find and keep some balance between focussed research into some application and the freedom to try to understand some area, some phenomena, to play with tools and techniques to combine them to something new! This insight has, of course, important consequences to our funding streams, the way we manage science in the research community and beyond.

God loves to play! …

When I look into nature, then I usually feel a sense of what play means in connection with creativity. When you study the shapes and colors of birds, for example, it seems that God played around and invented this or that type of bird.

Of course, we might consider the diversity as a result of the mechanism of evolution. But for me that is not a contradiction to the work of the Lord. His way to play with shapes appear to us as random variations. What we call selection is a part of his way to choose. He can let things grow and develop, and he can intervene any time and move things to where he wants them to move.

But what is more important is that God has the sense of play. His creativity is not completely absorbed by some particular goal or by the demand of usefulness. Things will turn out to be useful later. But when he creates something, it is just a game. It is a play. It is without thinking about what it might be good for. He creates things, and they are good, just because they have been made by him. (Roland Potthast) ... more texts