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On the creativity of science

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Posted: April 13, 2011 - 12:54am

Today I was sitting at my desk, diligently working, when I looked outside through the haze that once was tinting on my office window and started pondering. It wasn't my normal daydreaming, which all too often occurs, but a deep question about the field into the field into which I have entered.

Physics, in general, attempts to explain the universe in which we live using mathematics. This places a double-edge constraint on what we do: not only must it make sense mathematically, but it also needs to match up with reality. One can theorize all they want, and write down any equation, but unless it matches what nature does, it's a moot point. So this got me wondering, how creative is physics and what role does imagination hold in the entire process?

Come to think of it, in my day to day activities I spend a lot of time thinking about how things work and imagining what's going on. For instance, when you're heating up oil for frying, have you noticed the neat granular pattern that develops? These little features bulge up slightly at their centers and fall down near the edges. I would quickly find myself thinking "now what could cause this behavior." Of course, it's probably little convective cells, but you can see how this is interesting.

Much of what I do is observational. I see something happening and then I attempt to explain it mathematically. The middle steps often involve several iterations of ideas and models that ultimately end up failing to describe the situation entirely. But when I say "models" what do I really mean? Often they are just simple geometrical constructions that I've slightly modified to suit my needs (since I'm working with stars things often start out as spheres, and disks as hollow short cylinders). But is this modification really creativity, or just the next logical step?

What do you think? Is science really creative or just logical? Is it a mix of both or neither?

Bikeman

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Posted: April 14, 2011 - 2:13pm

Interesting topic indeed! While the scientic method calls for strict reasoning and logic when checking hypotheses and making inferences, at the very begging of a new theory, there is always an informed guess. A piece of intuition, imagination, some creative event. There is a famous lecture by Richard Feynman, I think it's the final part of the Messenger lectures he held at Cornell, about how we arrive at new theories and finally new laws of physics. He describes it as an art of guessing. the lectures from this series are now available as videos on the Internet, http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html#data=3%7C%7C%7C [1] Or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIN_-Flswy0&feature=youtube_gdata_player [2] CS HBE [1] http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html#data=3%7C%7C%7C [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIN_-Flswy0&feature=youtube_gdata_player

david_benn

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Posted: April 21, 2011 - 9:22am

Two of my favourite quotes from scientists are: "The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy."(Steven Weinberg)

"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth

of our answers."(Carl Sagan)

Words like effort, courage, significant, depth in the foregoing suggest something beyond the application of rules in a formal system.Of course, logic and mathematics are the means by which the world can be abstracted, represented and understood as models. But before models can be created and tested against evidence, surely imagination and creativity play a role. Einstein imagined what it would be like to "ride" on a light beam, wondering how the world would look at close to the speed of light. I quite like the flowchart here: http://www.boredstop.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=179&Itemid=32 The "Get an Idea" box is a good candidate forimagination andcreativity. No matter how mundane, devising experiments (and crearing models) must surely often require creativity also. So, I think science is a mix of both creativity and logic. It's a human endeavour after all. But it's the most successful way of understanding the world we've invented, a wonderfully self-correcting approach. David