Creativity Unleashed Book Reviews

Creativity

Creativity is the central focus of this site, so provides an obvious and important starting point for the bookshop.
More >>

General Business

We are interested in creativity from a business viewpoint. This isn't detached, arty creativity, but creativity with a real business purpose. This makes it natural to expand into recommendations for wider business requirements.
More >>

Popular Science

One of our strongest recommendations to help improve personal creativity is wider reading, and experience has shown a particularly effective subject to get a creative boost is popular science. This section links out to our sister popular science site, www.popularscience.co.uk
 

Featured Business/Creativity Book

Thinkertoys (Second Edition) by Michael Michalko

There are lots of good books on different aspects of creativity out in the world, but there really aren't many that you can regard as a book to buy if you really want to change the way you think to become generally more creative. We'd modestly say that one of these is our own Imagination Engineering, and another is Michael Michalko's Thinkertoys.

This is the second edition of Michalko's book - the first has been around since 1991 - but don't think that this makes Thinkertoys lack any freshness. One of the great things about a good creativity book is that it gets better with age, rather that dating. Creativity doesn't change - and neither do the effectiveness of good techniques. In fact in this case, coming back to the book after 10 years since I first read it, I'd say it has got better. It's partly because this an expanded and revised version, but also because it's more obvious that Thinkertoys really stands out from the crowd.

Practically from page one, this book leads you into the fundamental challenge of creativity - tackling the assumptions we make all the time, and that's an experience you will find repeated time and time again. This might seem a bit repetitive (and this was my original complaint about the book) but there are two important lessons. Firstly that it takes a lot of practice to become aware of making those assumptions - the reader gets caught out time and again - and there are all sorts of different ways we make assumptions and fail to find new ways of looking at a problem.

This is a really polished book. The pages neatly mix exercises, information, techniques and more with effortless ease. Sometimes there's so much on the page it can hit the eye rather hard, forcing the reader to slow down and pull it apart - but that's not a bad thing. Creativity is often a matter of slowing down your thinking.

It's interesting to put Thinkertoys alongside our Imagination Engineering, because each is better in a different way. If you want a framework - an approach to use to systematically come up with new ideas and solve problems, Imagination Engineering has the edge. But when it comes to a book designed to improve your personal creative ability, to make you as an individual more reflexively creative, Thinkertoys is peerless. It's simply the best.

This is a big book (over 380 large format pages), and isn't one I'd recommend reading from cover to cover in one go. It's more appropriate to treat it as a mini-course. Taken a chapter a day it works excellently.

For those who like their techniques packaged in card form to get an instant zap, there's the accompanying ThinkPak card pack. This can be used independently or as an add-on to the book. Accompanying card pack (Thinkpack):

Paperback.

Featured Popular Science Book

The God Effect by Brian Clegg 

We are used to hearing about "Einstein's greatest mistake" being his throwing in the cosmological constant to explain the expansion of the universe. These days this seems less of a mistake than it was first thought. But there's one thing he definitely didn't get right - that's quantum entanglement, a concept so bizarre, that Einstein used it as an example of why quantum theory had to be wrong.

In fact it was Einstein who for once was mistaken, and entanglement has proved, as Brian Clegg's subtitle suggests, to be one of science's strangest phenomena. Imagine a link between two particles that is so low level that you can separate them to either side of the universe and a change in one particle will be instantly reflected in the other. Forget special relativity - the spooky connection of entanglement doesn't know about the light speed barrier.

The God Effect (the title is a reference to the Higgs boson, also known as the God Particle, which it has been suggested requires entanglement to function) begins with an excellent background to where entanglement came from - Einstein's original "entanglement busting" paper EPR, early attempts to show whether or not entanglement existed and the definitive experiments that demonstrated it in action. Although we're dealing here with quantum physics at its most mindboggling, Clegg makes a great job of explaining what was going on in layman's terms, and bringing alive the major characters not widely known outside this field, such as John Bell and Alain Aspect.

Where the book really triumphs, though, is when he moves onto the remarkable applications of entanglement that have started to be developed over the last few years. Unbreakable encryption, computers that can crack problems that would take conventional computers longer than the lifetime of the universe to cope with, even Star Trek-style matter transmitters. It's great stuff. I particularly liked the chapter on why entanglement doesn't allow us to send faster than light messages. Most of the books I've read on the subject just dismiss this as obvious, but it isn't - in fact it's what most people think of as soon as they hear about entanglement: surely it could be used to send faster than light messages. Clegg explains just what the implications would be - why faster than light messages would allow us to send information back in time - then shows how entanglement entices, but can never actually deliver on this promise.

There's also some fun speculation from top scientists on what else entanglement could do - not just providing a mechanism for the Higgs boson, but also the existence of life, telepathy and more. The only criticism I have is that the chapter on quantum computers told me rather more than I wanted to know about different ways to make quantum computers work - it was still interesting, but I didn't need that much detail.

Overall this is a superb exploration of this weird and wonderful physical phenomenon and the ways it could change our lives. It's well written and approachable without any technical background, though I think it may also appeal to undergraduates, as entanglement tends to get very limited coverage on physics courses. Recommended.

Only in hardback

Copyright © Creativity Unleashed Limited 2006
Last update 22 November 2007