I enjoy looking through my husband’s Physics Today. Yes, MBAs and PhD physicists can coexist, though I’ve never caught him reading my Forbes. Lee Smolin’s “Why No ‘New Einstein’?” (Physics Today, June 2005, page 56) presented compelling ideas about fostering creativity at the graduate level and beyond. However, I believe the problem starts far earlier than Smolin would believe. Our oldest daughter is finishing a double major in computer and software engineering. It’s taken a lot of energy and focus to keep her creativity alive. When she was in first grade, her teacher handed out a rectangular sheet of paper and told the kids to “cut it in half the long way.” My daughter cut it diagonally, from corner to corner. The teacher told her that was wrong. I don’t doubt that it wasn’t what the teacher intended, but it was clearly the more correct interpretation.

Can you imagine what a bright, creative teacher could have done with that situation? But that would mean a first-grade teacher with more than minimal math skills. It would mean throwing out the morning’s lesson plan, “No Child Left Behind” tests be hanged. It would mean making education an adventure instead of a sentence.

Our daughters have also had some superlative teachers—one gave extra credit if you could solve the math problem another way and explain why. Talk about throwing down the gauntlet! And there was the teacher of advanced-placement history, who asked random extra-credit questions that had us reviewing each morning’s newspaper, trying to second-guess what would catch his fancy that day. We guessed right only about half the time, but we had some interesting discussions about the morning’s headlines.

I truly believe it is not nature versus nurture, but nature amplified by nurture, that fosters creative genius. Western culture has come to equate creativity with thinking of a new place to put a body piercing. Until we begin to value and nurture true creativity from infancy on, I fear the next Einstein will remain dormant.

Readers of Physics Today are in a unique position to provide some of that nurturing. Certainly encourage creativity in your own home, but be willing to step outside those walls. My husband and I do liquid-nitrogen demonstrations for schools and scout troops. (A downside is that we are now personae non grata at a local school that received calls about gunfire after we blew up a 2-liter soda bottle.) And, with heavy consulting from the actual scientist in the family, I teach after-school science classes.

The benefits of nurturing creativity go far beyond a single Einstein. What about the next Bill Gates, or the next Sergey Brin? Okay, I admit to having a business bias, but can you imagine life without Microsoft Windows? or without Google?? Right now, the US is living off the creative capital of its past. If this country does not rededicate itself to investing in creativity, the future will be greatly diminished, intellectually and materially.