The Act of Creation (101 page)

 

I have been looking for spontaneous generation for twenty years
without discovering it. No, I do not judge it impossible. But what
allows you to make it the origin of life? You place matter before
life and you decide that matter has existed for all eternity. How
do you know that the incessant progress of science will not compel
scientists . . . to consider that life has existed during eternity,
and not matter? You pass from matter to life because your intelligence
of today . . . cannot conceive things otherwise. How do you know that
in ten thousand years one will not consider it more likely that matter
has emerged from life . . . ? [26a]

 

At the age of forty-six Pasteur suffered a stroke which left his left
arm and leg permanently paralysed. Yet his greatest work was done during
the following two decades, when he was an invalid and had to use his
assistants' hands to carry out his experiments. In old age he would often
browse in his earlier publications. 'Turning the pages of his writings,
he would marvel at the lands that he had revealed by dispelling the fogs
of ignorance and by overcoming stubbornness. He would live again his
exciting voyages, as he told Loir in a dreamy voice: "How beautiful,
how beautiful! And to think I did it all. I had forgotten it."' [27]

 

 

 

 

 

2. INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE

 

 

I have been discussing the motivational drive of scientists. Can we make
any generalizations regarding their intellectual characteristics -- in
addition to those described earlier on (Chapters
V
-
X
)?

 

 

 

Precociousness

 

 

In the first place, such data as we possess confirm the popular belief
that scientists reach their peak of creativity at an earlier age than
artists. Most scientists made their basic discoveries when they were
under forty -- exceptions like Faraday or Pasteur always granted. In
a valuable study on Nobel Prize winners by L. Moulin [28] we find the
avenge age at which a person is awarded the prize to be fifty-one;
but for physicists it is forty-five. (The award, of course, often
lags by a number of years behind the discovery.) It is interesting
to note that the stupendous increase, over the last half-century, in
the volume of knowledge to be mastered had no significant influence
on the age at which the award is received: between 1901 and 1930 the
average, for physicists, was forty-five years, between 1931 and 1960,
forty-six years. The average for chemists was fifty years for the first,
fifty-one for the second period; for the award-winner in medicine it
fell from fifty-five in the first, to fifty-three in the second period --
presumably as an effect of increasing team-work. The figures also indicate
an age-gradient from the more 'theoretical' to the more 'empirical' or
'applied' sciences. This is 'in keeping with the well-known fact of
the precociousness of mathematicians -- the most 'theoretical' among
scientists (unfortunately there is no Nobel Prize for mathematics).

 

 

A related phenomenon is the dazzling multitude of infant prodigies
among scientists: for every Mozart there are about three Pascals,
Maxwells, Edisons. To quote only a few examples: the greatest Renaissance
astronomer before Copernicus, Johann Mueller from Koenigsberg, called
Regiomontanus (1436-1476), published at the age of twelve the best
astronomical yearbook for 1448; was asked at fifteen by the Emperor
Frederick III to cast a horoscope for the imperial bride; went to the
University of Leipzig when he was eleven, and at seventeen enjoyed
European fame; he died at forty. Pascal had laid the foundations for
the modern treatment of conic sections before he was sixteen. Jeremiah
Horrocks (1619-1641) applied Kepler's laws to the orbit of the moon and
made other fundamental contributions to astronomy before his death at
the age of twenty-one. Evariste Galois (1811-1832), one of the most
outstanding geniuses in the history of mathematics, was killed in a
duel at the age of twenty-one (cf. p. 111). The notes which he left
behind amount to no more than sixty pages of his 'collected works'; but
those sixty pages inaugurated a new epoch in the theory of equations,
and 'contain more mathematics than is to be found in some libraries
crammed with books bearing mathematical titles'. [29] Clerk Maxwell, who
lived to forty-eight, had his first mathematical paper read before the
Royal Society at the age of fifteen; in the discussion, the geometrical
construction which was the subject of the paper was described as superior
to Newton's and Descartes' discussion of the same problem.

 

 

In contrast to this streak of precocity, however, is the fact that the
majority of geniuses seem to have done rather badly in the normal school
curriculum -- often including the very subject on which later on they
were to leave their mark. 'In his student days Einstein had been a lazy
dog,' his erstwhile teacher Minkovsky remarked: 'He never bothered about
mathematics at all.' [30]

 

 

 

Scepticism and Credulity

 

 

But the paradox is not too difficult to resolve. I have emphasized before
(Book One,
X
) that the scientific genius is a
curious mixture of scepticism and credulity. At school he is frequently
bored by and cynical about orthodox doctrines which unimaginative and
tradition-bound masters try to cram into his head. To quote Einstein
once more: 'Physics too [as taught in the classroom] were split into
special fields each of which could engulf a short life's work without
ever satisfying the hunger for deeper knowledge. For the examinations
one had to stuff oneself with all this rubbish, whether one wanted to
or not. This compulsion had such a terrifying effect on me that after
my finals the consideration of any scientific problems was distasteful
to me for a whole year.' [31]

 

 

The student's matrices of thought are still fluid -- later on, when they
have hardened, he will only be able to recapture his erstwhile innocence
at inspired moments. Under propitious conditions, inexperience can be
an asset: it entices the novice into asking questions which nobody has
asked before, into seeing a problem where nobody saw one before. That is
what young Maxwell probably did when be was lying on the grass before his
father's house, looking at the sky and
wondering
. That is what
Einstein did when at the age of sixteen he indulged in the fantasy of
travelling at the speed of light; and what Edison did when 'his demands
for explanations of what seemed obvious to his elders created the belief
that he was less than normally intelligent'.

 

 

Einstein has compared the intellectual appetite of youth 'to the
voraciousness of a healthy beast of prey'. When the child has learned
that everything has a name, it develops a 'naming mania'. When it has
learned that all events have 'becauses' it develops the mania of asking
'Why? -- Why? -- Why?' A fool says the Bible, can ask more questions
in a minute than a sage can answer in a week. But sages are scarce, and
the child soon learns to accept answers which are not real explanations
but conventional formulae or evasions, and to be content with them;
the keen edge of its appetite for knowledge has become blunted. Only
geniuses preserve their infantile voracity for 'becauses' -- and the
naïve hope that there are real answers to every question. 'Why is the
moon round? Why does the apple fall from the tree? Why are there five
planets instead of twenty, and why do they move as they do? Why does milk
go sour? Why could the dairymaid not get the pox? Why is the colour of
a sailor's blood in the tropics a brighter red than in Hamburg? Why did
the dead frog's legs twitch?' One of the hallmarks of genius is that
he has never lost the habit of asking foolish questions like these --
each of which led to a momentous discovery.

 

 

 

Abstraction and Practicality

 

 

The reasons for this peculiarity have already been discussed: scepticism
towards the conventional answers, the refusal to take anything
for granted, the freshness of vision of the unblinkered mind. Taken
together, these create an acuity of perception, a gift for seeing the
banal objects of everyday experience in a sharp individual light --
as painters and poets do, each in his own way; to observe details and
notice trivia which escape the attention of others. This leads us to a
second pair of complementary qualities (the first was scepticism paired
with credulity) in the scientist's make-up: the coexistence of abstract
and concrete moulds of thought, the faculty of combining high flights of
theory with a keen sense of the practical and down-to-earth -- a knack
for picking up trivial clues. Pythagoras in search of the harmony of the
spheres enters the blacksmith's workshop; Archimedes gets his solution
from observing a smudge in his bath-tub; Galileo exhorts his friends to
learn natural philosophy from the craftsmen in the arsenals of Venice;
Kepler notices that the slit in his roof which let the rain through can
be used as the aperture of a camera obscura to observe the sun; Claude
Bernard takes the temperature of a rabbit's denervated ear and is led
to the discovery that blood-vessels are controlled by nerves.

 

 

Throughout history, genius displays these complementary qualities
of making lofty generalizations based on humble clues. 'It is very
necessary', wrote Maxwell, 'that those who are trying to learn from
books the facts of physical science should be enabled to recognize
these facts when they meet with them out-of-doors. Science appears to
us with a very different aspect after we have found out . . . that we
may find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and
gymnastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air
and of the sea. This habit of recognizing principles amid the endless
variety of their action . . . tends to rescue our scientific ideas from
that vague condition in which we too often leave them buried among the
other products of a lazy credulity.' [32]

 

 

To have one's head in the clouds does not prevent one from having one's
feet firmly on the ground. The scientist, as the artist, must live
on several planes at once -- look at eternity through the window of
time. All great geniuses of science were endowed with this particular
dualism of their faculties: a head for generalizations and an eye for
minute particulars; searching for the secret of life in the beet-juice
of M. Bigo; tilting at windmills without falling off the horse.

 

 

 

Multiple Potentials

 

 

I must mention one more characteristic property shared, apparently, by
most great scientists: one may call it the 'multiple potential'. It helps
to explain the paradox of the apparently haphazard way in which scientists
are often launched on their career or on a particular line of research.

 

 

Kepler was designated to become a theologian when he was unexpectedly
offered the job of a mathematician at a provincial school. Halley was
a botanist when the accident of dropping his friend's precious spar
crystal made him change to crystallography, and become a pioneer in that
field. Darwin, preparing to become a country curate, had the good luck
of being invited to join the expedition of the Beagle -- without that
chance it is extremely doubtful whether he would have written
The
Origin of Species
. The direction of all of Pasteur's later researches
was determined by his first discoveries about the optical activity of
paratartaric add: he himself said that he had become 'enchained to the
inescapable logic' by which one discovery gave birth to the next. As
for Alexander Fleming, the coincidences which determined his initial
choice of career are about as fantastic as the actual circumstances of his
discovery. He had adopted the medical profession because his brother was a
doctor; he had gone to St. Mary's where he was to spend the whole of his
life, because he had played against their water-polo team; and he chose
bacteriology as his branch of research because Freeman, the assistant
of Almroth Wright, wanted to keep Fleming, who was an excellent shot,
in St. Mary's rifle club.

 

 

The answer to the paradox is, apparently, that given the type of mind
which Fleming had, he would in all likelihood have left his mark on
any other branch of experimental science into which the wind of chance
had blown him. In Pasteur's case, for instance, Dubos has convincingly
shown that 'the inescapable logic' which his researches followed was
by no means inescapable; for in Pasteur's notebooks and casual remarks
there are projects and germs of discoveries which, had he only had the
time to follow them up, or had the wind of circumstance blown from a
different direction, would have brought an equally fertile harvest.

 

 

True genius, according to Dr. Johnson, 'is a mind of large general
powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction, ready for
all things, but chosen by circumstances for one'. Dubos, after quoting
the Doctor, fully concurs with his opinion: 'It is often by a trivial,
even an accidental decision, that we direct our activities into a certain
channel, and thus determine which of the potential expressions of our
individuality become manifest. Usually we know nothing of the ultimate
orientation or of the outlet towards which we travel, and the stream
sweeps us to a formula of life from which there is no returning. Every
decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn
bodies of all our possible selves that will never be.' [33]

 

 

This moving confession of a great scientist seems to be based on the
assumption that creativity is a kind of convertible energy which can be
applied to various forms of activity -- as the pressure of steam can
be converted into electricity or motion. Stated in this extreme form,
it is certainly an exaggeration: you cannot convert the creative energy
of a painter into the composition of an opera. But it is nevertheless
true that the particular type of intuition which makes the scientific
genius can be focussed on problems as wide apart as colour-theory and
celestial mechanics in Newton's case, or electro-magnetism and the theory
of gases in Maxwell's -- with equally striking results. The versatility,
the quicksilvery mobility of minds like Archimedes', Galileo's,
Descartes', Franklin's, Faraday's, or Edison's is truly phenomenal;
they seemed to walk through life charged with static electricity,
so that whatever object they touched, they drew a spark. One-idea
men, such as Copernicus or Darwin, seem to be the exceptions among
the truly great, and multi-potentiality the rule. The ominous trend
towards over-specialization, its dangers to the creative mind, and the
educational and administrative reforms needed to remedy it, are outside
the scope of this book.