How do you get a bright and new idea, or the clever turn of phrase that illuminates your thought? By staring stoically at a well-lit light bulb until, by empathy, the ‘outer’ bulb ignites the ‘inner’ one? By heroically grappling with the problem in a tryst with will? Think about it for a second and let me know. I’m sure I’ll gather many totally different methods this way.
Write a personal tweet? Not bad! But no cigar, unless you work for the US State Department, that is, and need to attract attention.
My own is the lazy man’s method. Never tackle a problem head-on. Indeed, I shy away from it, procrastinate, and reward myself by doing pleasant asides, like getting that hot cup of coffee. I shirk from the test of will – though, like a cat, I come back to it feigning disinterest.
One way is a short and wilful slumber: turbo-sleep, a technique I developed while driving long distances. As soon as grappling with the problem leads to tell-tale signs – burning in the eyes, spinning head, and restless legs – I know it’s time to take ‘forty winks’. I lie down, go over the issue in my head as I plunge towards sleep (sometimes the feeling is literally one of dropping down a chute, which wakes me up refreshed), and 20 minutes later (or the next morning), I wake up with pretty much the ‘bright’ idea in my head.
Another way is to bring the topic to my friends, and have a roaming discussion about it. For example, I give a draft blog entry to read: by the time I’ve finished explaining the inchoate thoughts in it, a few more ideas and better formulations have come up.
Turbo-sleep may favour emergent behaviour of the brain. Social discourse may lead to emergent properties of collective thought. Staring reflectively at the light bulb? In my case, it never works – it just leads to solitary frustration. I reckon creativity is an emergent – and foremost social – process.
It took evolutionary biologists a good 150 years to expunge the idea that species ‘jump’: that a lion can beget a cat through sudden and favourable genetic change. Evolution of species is a messy affair: were you to follow the process through generations, you’d never be able to draw the line – lion here, cat there. The old people used to say: natura non facit saltum.
Historians still love ‘heroic’ tales of protagonists saving the world, and scientists begetting great ideas by staring at a light bulb.
Lisa Jardine’s book Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution describes the Scientific Revolution in the making. This is the period in the seventeenth century when we started to get a hold on the basic laws of physics, when astronomy shed its astrological pretensions (see When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth by Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber). The Royal Philosophical Society took as its motto: nullius in verba (‘take no word for it’), and henceforth shunned faith and logic for observation.
It is worth reading about the Scientific Revolution so as better to understand how even epochal scientific changes come about. Were there lonely scientific heroes who led the way? Can we draw the line clearly between ‘before’ and ‘after’?
First, there were always many scientists interacting. They met in coffee-houses, furiously wrote letters to each other, and yes, hated each other, were full of spite, envy, or admiration in turn. Some had a theoretical bent, others tinkered with experiments, and a few acted to spread knowledge. Henry Oldenburg, the first secretary of the Royal Society, kept an incredible correspondence with other societies – today he would be spending his time on the internet informing, asking, and, as some at the time opined, spying.
Second, they were everything but ‘rational’ – the very curiosity of their mind led them to being at times hopelessly credulous. Many astronomers were also astrologers, and the great Newton had a mystical streak in him we would have difficulty reconciling with his great laws. So they moved wildly from one approach to another, testing wild analogies, illuminations, and intuitions. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it did not – but in the end they (grudgingly or silently) bowed to the facts. Newton blundered on comets and tides. It did not stop him, or lower his self-esteem.
Third, what they all had in common, was perseverance – if you want: pig-headedness. In all of them, failure was prelude to success. Some succeeded, others were overtaken by untimely death and remained minor figures.
Fourth, they seldom worked alone, though they may have pretended otherwise. Boyle may be celebrated for his laws of pressure, but it was Hooke who made a success of the undergirding experiments. That the laws were named after Boyle reflects social prejudice in favour of the aristocrat.
And I’m not talking of the wholesale stealing that learned minds did from ‘artisans and low mechanicks’ (see A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and Low Mechanicks by Clifford D. Conner), who had evolved through painful experimentation that lasted centuries. One can argue that what we call ‘scientific discoveries’ were to a great extent the professionalisation of popular knowledge embedded in practitioners. This pilfering was sometimes ugly, if not downright appalling. Skilful midwives were ousted from their jobs to make room for ‘doctors’ – who did deliveries with dirty hands and spread birth bed fever. It took the profession more than one generation to introduce hygiene in medicine.
Fifth, those who made scientific advances did so largely by chance. If Newton had died young, others would have taken his place – we would hardly notice the fact. At any one time, independent and parallel discoveries abound: scientists were always claiming priority, and each nation had its ‘genius’ (see The Double Helix by James D. Watson). As in the case of Gregor Mendel, truly solitary insights go unnoticed until the time is ripe.
Looking at the process, one is surprised by the central importance of enablers – in this case, scientific tools. Invent a new tool – say the telescope – and observations ensue, better than the previous ones. Centuries-old armchair speculations can be resolved through testing. Systemic errors can be detected and explained. Practical needs drive further research – and keep scientists in bread and butter. Louis XIV needed better maps for his wars, so three generations of Cassini (from Italy) worked on it.
As tools raise the horizon of the possible, theoreticians will hypothesise new laws. Practitioners may verify or object – sometimes they have vested errors in discounting irregularities as noise (see footnote about Cassinis in conflict with Newton). Arguments fly in all directions. At the end of the day, knowledge emerges. We call the overly messy result the ‘scientific revolution’ and name some landmarks in the process after meritorious men. We see affirmation bias in the making. At any one moment, there are many conjectures competing for the rank of ‘theory’ or even ‘truth’. As they are all tested, one wins, the others are discarded. After that, the winner is that famous far-sighted scientist.
Forget heroes, and observe the glory of the complex process of discovery as it unfolds.
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An epistemological footnote: American historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn has developed a theory of scientific revolutions (see The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn). The ensuing controversy has made – and destroyed – academic careers. I am not sure one needs to plunge into the controversy.
If one takes the ‘evolutionary’ analogy at the beginning, and (gingerly) compares a new scientific insight to a ‘new’ species, Kuhn is certainly right in arguing that scientific advances do not occur by ‘saltation’. There is no ‘heroic’ history of science, though there were always brilliant minds involved.
Kuhn is then keen to prove that the ‘new’ paradigm is ‘incommensurable’ with the old one – i.e. that the ‘new’ scientific ‘truth’ is certainly different, but not necessarily ‘truer’ than the old one. He is, one suspects, pressing too much the analogy of evolution.
Indeed, a cat is not truer than a lion – just different. There is no direction in biological evolution, with the ‘better’ atop the ‘lesser’ species – which would make us the top of the material ‘chain of being’, halfway between the material and the spiritual. But science is not quite the same thing as evolution. The Newtonian celestial model is not simply different from the Ptolemaic model. It is a measurable improvement – we can better predict planetary motions. And so is relativity theory – at least until it met quantum mechanics.
One would agree with Kuhn that the passage from one paradigm to another is a social process. Scientists have to agree to discard the old paradigm for the new. Some do, others don’t. Because the process is continuous, there is never a line in the sand when the conversion is inevitable. Some will jump ahead – and may do so for base reasons of professional competition. Others may camp on the status quo and their power base. It ends when the losers die out.
This is all a distraction. All that practitioners like diplomats need to know – and feel on their skin, so they can defend the position aptly – is that ‘heroic’ tales of scientific advance are mostly bunk. Cooperation – between scientists, and between theoreticians and experimentalists – is the key.
The post was first published on DeepDip.
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