The Unnatural Nature of Science Read online

  4

  Creativity

  Among the confusions about the nature of science is a widespread attachment to the idea that arts and sciences are basically similar in that they are both creative products of the human imagination, and that attempts to draw a dividing-line are quite wrong. Even scientists tend to share this view, and the great German physicist Max Planck asserted that the pioneer scientist ‘must have a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by an artistically creative imagination’. A similar line was taken by Jacob Bronowski in The Common Sense of Science: ‘The discoveries of science, the works of art, are explorations – more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art.’ This view, however, is misleading and possibly sentimental. Scientists are, of course, creative, and do require a ‘vivid intuitive imagination’, but their creativity is not necessarily related to artistic creations. It is only at a relatively low level that creativity in the arts and in science may be similar: a level which includes almost all human activities that involve problem-solving, from accountancy to tennis.

  Differences between creativity in the arts and science reflect some of the important differences between the two. Creativity in the arts is characteristically intensely personal and reflects both the feelings and the ideas of the artist. By contrast, scientific creativity is always constrained by self-consistency, by trying to understand nature and by what is already known. How unlike the French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet’s view of the novel which ‘crosses itself, repeats itself, bisects itself, contradicts itself’. Moreover, the scientists’ ‘creations’ ultimately become assimilated into public knowledge, as in textbooks, and their contributions are, with rare exceptions, ultimately anonymous (Chapter 5). With artists it is the original creation that is all-important. Even more significant is the nature of what is created. A work of art is capable of many readings, of multiple interpretations, whereas scientific discoveries have a strictly defined meaning. Again, artistic creations may have strong moral overtones, whereas science, in principle, is value-free (but see Chapter 8). In addition to being personal, artistic creations are about singular, often internal, experiences, whereas scientists strive for generality and are interested, for example, in ideas that apply to all cells rather than just to particular ones. Whatever the scientists’ feelings, or style, while working, these are purged from the final work. Finally, there are objective and shared criteria for judging scientific work, whereas there are numerous interpretations for artistic creations and no sure way of judging them. Given all these differences, one should treat claims for similarity between scientific and artistic creativity with deep suspicion.

  Consider the mathematician Henri Poincaré’s attitude to beauty:

  The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it and because it is beautiful. Of course, I do not speak here of that beauty which strikes the senses, the beauty of qualities and appearance; not that I undervalue such beauty, far from it, but it has nothing to do with science. I mean that profound beauty which comes from the harmonious order of the parts and which a pure intelligence can grasp.

  Scientific beauty is not easy to define, but it is related to simplicity, elegance and above all the surprise in finding a novel way of doing an experiment or a theory which explains things in a new way.

  There are many styles in science, and scientific creativity comes in many forms; it is not found only in new ideas like those of Newton or Darwin. In some cases great advances have been made by designing a new apparatus for experiments, like the cloud chamber for observing the collisions of subatomic particles; in others, the brilliance lies in designing the experiments and carrying them out. In all cases the advances are underpinned by an imaginative conceptual framework. But it is no use for anyone to pretend that there is, at present, any real understanding of the creative process in any human activity. For example, the ideas about creativity offered by psychoanalysts are not about the creative process itself but are rather about the supposed reasons why men like Kafka, Newton and Einstein pursued the intellectual life. There is, for example, Anthony Storr’s claim, in The Dynamics of Creation, that creative activity is an ‘apt way for a schizoid individual to express himself’. Whether or not it is true, our understanding of the origins of Newton’s or Einstein’s genius is helped not one whit by their being men who related poorly to others. Paul Valéry’s claim about Racine is equally true of Newton or Darwin: ‘Collect all the facts that can be collected about the life of Racine and you will never learn from them the art of his verse.’ At most one hopes for a glimmer of how their minds worked.

  Even though our understanding of creativity is severely limited, it is possible to explore some of the ideas proposed to account for the origin of scientific ideas and to examine some case histories, since these also help to illuminate the process of science.

  A widely held view is that creativity in science is based on what is known as evolutionary epistemology or the chance-permutation model. In essence, this model suggests that scientists randomly generate theories, of which the good ones survive since they are selected because of their explanatory powers. The creative process is said to entail mental elements which are permutated in a random manner, and these random permutations are selected by another process so that the best ideas survive. This is an approach which has a long history, since Descartes regarded it as a matter of indifference how scientific hypotheses were produced: the important point for him was to make hypotheses and to see where they led. He drew an analogy with deciphering a coded message, where by experimenting with certain substitutions one can eventually obtain the correct cipher even if the substitutions are chosen at random. A hypothesis was, in his view, to be judged by the usefulness of the conclusions that could be drawn from it.

  Dorothy Sayers has, in modern times, expressed this idea clearly. Listen to Lord Peter Wimsey:

  I always make it a rule to investigate anything I feel like investigating … but this is the real sleuth – my friend Detective-Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard. He’s the one who really does the work. I make imbecile suggestions and he does the work of elaborately disproving them. Then, by a process of elimination, we find the right explanation, and, the world says ‘My God, what intuition that young man has!’

  Successful as Wimsey may be, this approach, in its extreme form, can be thought of as being no more than making use of Darwin’s apes. If apes sat at word processors, randomly tapping the keys, then, in the course of time and provided we could recognize the good and important ideas, out would pop the theory of evolution, Newton’s mechanics, the theory of relativity and all other scientific theories. This gives no insight into what is involved in generating ideas, for the question is: where do the random thoughts come from, are they really random, and is there no real creativity in the generation of the variations itself? It is silly to think that any one thought is equivalent to any other, and that every idea has an equal chance of being put forward. The mark of a good scientist lies precisely in the new variants proposed. In all branches of science there is a great deal that must first be learned and understood at a deep level, so that the right questions are posed, before the generation of new thoughts can even be contemplated. The number of scientists in a particular field at that level of competence is probably small: there is a strong selective pressure before anyone even enters the creative arena. The talent, gift, genius of scientists is first to understand properly the current state of a field, then to recognize what problems can be solved, then to generate creatively new ideas. The thoughts are not random, but that is not to say that they don’t explore a wide range of new ideas, including some that at first sight may seem to be absurd. What is so impressive about good scientists is the imaginative solutions they come up with. Perha
ps the analogy is with chess – choosing the right line many moves ahead: to think of the chess master as making random searches, like a crude computer program, is quite misleading.

  Once we get rid of the random element in generating new ideas, however, we may be left with an important idea: the idea of bold conjectures, or guesses, followed by verification or falsification. For example, the molecular biologist Sydney Brenner has commented:

  For twenty years I shared an office with Francis Crick and we had a rule that you could say anything that came into your head. Now most of those conversations were just complete nonsense. But every now and then a half-formed idea could be taken up by the other one and really refined. I think a lot of the good things we produced came from those completely mad sessions. But at one stage or another we have convinced each other of theories which have never seen the light of day … I mean completely crazy things.

  The physicist Richard Feynman considered science to proceed by guesses:

  In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right … If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science … It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong … It is true that one has to check a little to make sure that it is wrong …

  It is no shame to be wrong, only disappointing. But what Feynman does not point out is that some guesses are very much better than others, and he ignores the influence of doing experimental work. Even so, his approach is similar to that adopted by Newton.

  Analysis of Newton’s procedures has shown that they fit quite nicely with Feynman’s guessing model. Newton’s procedure in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica involves an alternation of two phases or stages of investigation. In the first, the consequences of an imaginative construct are determined by applying mathematical techniques to the initial conditions. In the second phase, the physical counterpart of the initial conditions or the consequences are compared or contrasted with observations of nature. The first stage removed constraints – Newton could explore the consequences of any consequences he found mathematically interesting. He explored the implications for planetary motion of Hooke’s suggestion that bodies attract each other without concerning himself about the nature of the attracting force. Only later, when he had his celestial mechanics worked out, did he then turn his attention of the problem of the force.

  There can be little doubt that bold, almost unconstrained, thinking can be an invaluable procedure. But, as always, the question of where the imaginative ideas come from is left unanswered. Nevertheless, this discussion should at least have dispelled the notion that progress in science comes only from the patient accumulation of facts and tedious observation. It is to the philosopher Karl Popper’s great credit that he has emphasized the imaginative nature of scientific thinking.

  In contrast to conscious guessing, unexpected, unconscious illumination is also regarded as a typical feature of scientific thought. The classic incident is that related by Poincaré, in relation to his solving a mathematical problem:

  Then I turned my attention to the study of some arithmetical questions without much success and without a suspicion of any connection with my preceding research. Disgusted with my failure, I went to spend a few days at the seaside and thought of something else. One morning walking on the bluff, the idea came to me, with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness and immediate certainty, that the arithmetic transformations of indeterminate ternary … quadratic forms were identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry.

  And an important advance in mathematics had been made.

  A similar experience is related by the English mathematician Christopher Zeeman. Seven years after trying to prove a theorem in topology, that one could tie a sphere in a knot in five dimensions,

  I sat down one Saturday morning and I thought ‘Well I’ll have another crack at this damn problem.’ And lo and behold, I suddenly found to my surprise, that I had proved the opposite … and I was so excited that I spent the whole weekend writing this paper up, about twenty pages. And then late that night, I confess, I went and sat on the lavatory and while I was there the real flash of inspiration struck me like a bomb. I suddenly saw how to reduce the proof from twenty pages to ten lines.

  It is not only in mathematics that such insights apparently come suddenly. ‘A film of no importance. Slumped in my seat, I dimly perceive in myself associations that continue to form … I am invaded by a sudden excitement mingled with vague pleasure. It isolates me from the theatre from my neighbours whose eyes are riveted on the screen. And suddenly a flash. The astonishment of the obvious. How could I not have thought of it sooner’. Thus François Jacob’s Nobel-Prize-winning insight into the essential similarity between how enzyme synthesis is turned on in bacteria and the replication of bacterial viruses; namely, that both are controlled by a special molecule binding to the DNA.

  Attractive though unconscious processing of ideas might be, for it has a certain romantic ring of artistic genius à la Coleridge, the evidence that any real processing, testing of combinations of ideas, occurs in the unconscious has been questioned. What real evidence is there for novel thoughts coming via the unconscious? In every case where scientific illumination occurs suddenly, it is preceded by a long period of intensive conscious study. The need for rest, for a new start, may give a false impression of sudden discovery, for we can carry only a small number of concepts in our minds; when the problem-solver takes a rest from the problem for a time, information in the short-term memory that is not found to be contributing to a successful solution may be lost – selective forgetting. When the problem is returned to, a quite new path may be followed. There is even reason to doubt Coleridge’s story of how he created Kubla Khan, which was, he claims, written in an opium trance and was interrupted by a person from Porlock who had come to discuss business. Again, the classic and influential story of Kekulé’s dreaming about snakes biting their tales leading to the discovery of the six-carbon-atom benzene ring, of great importance in chemistry, may be less dependent on dreaming than he would have us believe. His injunction ‘Let us learn to dream, gentlemen’ may be unwise advice, for such insights are far from typical and are invariably dependent on an enormous amount of earlier work and preparation. For example, when Crick and Watson solved the DNA structure, the solution did come quickly at the end, but it was the result of a long process of hard work. And many other discoveries are far less dramatic.

  Poincaré was, for a scientist, unusual in that he gave a great deal of thought to the nature of creativity. His own work pattern comprised a number of stages: conscious work, unconscious work, illumination (when he was successful) and then the work of ‘verification’. Poincaré himself admitted that what he called unconscious work was always preceded by periods of conscious work. Poincaré also held to something like the random generation and selection view of creativity. But, as he rightly asked, how does selection occur, particularly if it is an unconscious process? His answer is not very helpful, since he talks of his ‘intuition’ guiding the choices in extremely subtle and delicate ways, that they are felt rather than formulated, and that the process also involved a sense of beauty.

  Other scientists too gave much credit to the unconscious, and the nineteenth-century German physicist Von Helmholtz quoted Goethe’s words:

  What man does not know

  Or has not thought of

  Wanders in the night

  Through the labyrinth of the mind.

  It is hard to avoid thinking that intuition (and the unconscious) as used by Poincaré and others is no more than a convenient black box which contains the creative process but about whose workings we are ignorant. (Unfortunately, cognitive psychology, with its emphasis on connections, networks and computer programs, is no more illuminating.) But it is
important not to confuse intuition as defined in this context with that used in our day-to-day lives. For example, as Einstein pointed out, a scientist’s intuition rests on a technical understanding of what can be regarded as reliable and important. Common-sense intuition is quite different. While both are based on experience, the nature of that experience is very different. Scientific intuition relates not to common-sense experience but to the great fund of highly specific knowledge that has been acquired; it involves knowledge of how other scientists have solved problems, of what is expected of a scientific theory and of what may and may not be solvable. So strong was Einstein’s conviction that he didn’t have the necessary intuition that he decided not to become a mathematician: he knew he did not have the ‘nose’ to decide which were the really important problems.