The Act of Creation (25 page)

In one of his experiments, Carl Duncker -- the psychologist who fathered
the Buddhist monk problem -- set his experimental subjects the task
of making a pendulum. The subject was led to a table on which had been
placed, among some miscellaneous objects, a cord with a pendulum-weight
attached to its end, and a nail. All he had to do was to drive the nail
into the wall and hang the cord with the pendulum-weight on the nail. But
there was no hammer. Only fifty per cent of the experimental subjects
(all students) found the solution: to use the pendulum-weight as a hammer.
Next, another series of students, of the same average age and
intelligence, were given the same task under slightly altered
conditions. In the first series the weight on the table was
attached to the cord, and was expressly described to the students
as a 'pendulum-weight'. In the second series, weight and cord were
lying separately on the table, and the word 'pendulum-weight' was not
used. Result: all students in the second group found the solution without
difficulty. They took in the situation with an unprejudiced mind, saw a
nail and a weight, and hammered the nail in, then tied the cord to the
nail and the weight to the cord. But in the minds of the first group
the weight was firmly 'embedded' into its role as a 'pendulum-weight'
and nothing else, because it had been verbally described as such
and
because visually it formed a unit with the cord to which it
was attached. Thus only half of the subjects were able to wrench it out
of that context -- to perform the shift of emphasis which transformed a
'pendulum-weight' into a 'hammer' -- as Sultan transformed a 'branch'
into a 'stick.'
I have quoted only one among many experiments on similar lines. The
fact that fifty per cent of Duncker's presumably bright students failed
at this simple task is an illustration of the stubborn coherence of
the perceptual frames and matrices of thought in our minds. The visual
gestalt of weight-attached-to-cord, plus the verbal suggestion of their
venerated teacher, made that pendulum-weight stick to its matrix like
an insect caught in amber.
To undo wrong connections, faulty integrations, is half the game. To
acquire a new habit is easy, because one main function of the nervous
system is to act as a habit-forming machine; to break out of a habit is an
almost heroic feat of mind or character. The prerequisite of originality
is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know. Hence, once
more, the importance of the Unconscious -- as an anaesthetist, who puts
reason to sleep, and restores, for a transient moment, the innocence of
vision. Without the art of forgetting, the mind remains cluttered up with
ready-made answers, and never finds occasion to ask the proper questions.
If forgetting can be an art, ignorance can be bliss -- in the limited
sense, of course, of procuring for a certain type of mind freedom from
certain types of constraint. To Faraday, his ignorance of mathematics was
an asset; Edison benefited from his shocking ignorance of science. As
a child, 'his demands for explanations of what seemed obvious to his
elders created the belief that he was less than normally intelligent. As
his head was abnormally large, it was thought that he might have a brain
disease'. [6] At a time when his inventions were transforming the pattern
of our civilization, 'his ignorance of scientific theory raised criticism
and opposition, especially among highly trained scientists and engineers
without inventive talent'. [7] He was said to have carried the art of
forgetting to such extremes, that on one occasion, when he had to queue
at New York City Hall to pay his taxes, and an official suddenly asked
him his name, Edison could not at the moment remember it, and lost his
place in the queue.
Let me return from the laboratory of the Sorcerer at Menlo Park to that
blacksmith's workshop in Samos which, according to tradition, was the
birthplace of the first quantitative law in physics. One would expect
that Pythagoras, as an acute and scientifically minded observer, would
concentrate on the techniques the men employed in the exercise of their
craft. Instead of this, his attention shifted to a phenomenon that was
totally irrelevant and adventitious to that craft -- the fact that under
the strokes of the hammer, iron bars of different size gave out different
sounds. The ear-splitting crashes and bangs in the workshop, which,
since the Bronze Age had yielded to the Iron Age, had been regarded by
ordinary mortals as a mere nuisance, were suddenly lifted out of their
habitual context: the 'bangs' became 'clangs' of music. In the technical
language of the communication engineer, Pythagoras had turned 'noise'
into 'information'.
'The great field for new discoveries', wrote William James, 'is always
the unclassified residuum. Round about the accredited and orderly facts
of every science there ever flows a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional
observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with,
which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.' [8] The
genius of Sherlock Holmes manifested itself in shifting his attention
to minute clues which poor Watson found too obvious to be relevant, and
so easy to ignore. The psychiatrist obtains his clues from the casual
remark, the seemingly irrelevant drift of associations; and he has
learned to shift the emphasis from the patient's meaningful statements
to his meaningless slips of the tongue, from his rational experiences to
his irrational dreams. The Lord Almighty seems to be fond of the trick
which Poe's character employed when he let the secret document lie open
on his desk -- where it was too obvious to be seen.
Standing on One's Head
A drastic form of displacement is the sudden shift of emphasis from
one aspect of a situation to its opposite, accompanied by a kind of
'reversal of logic' (
p. 65
).
'The dream', wrote Freud, 'neglects in a most conspicuous manner the
logical category of opposition and contradiction. The concept "No" does
not seem to exist in the dream. It likes to compress opposites into
a unity, or to represent them as one. It takes the further liberty of
representing any given entity by its emotional opposite, so that a priori
one never knows whether a reversible entity is thought of in the dream
with a plus or a minus sign.' [9] When a patient says to the doctor:
'You think that I am now going to say something offensive, but I really
have no intention of doing so,' then, says Freud, 'you can take it for
granted that he did have that intention. Or, the patient will say: "You
are asking me who that person in my dream could be. It is
not
my
mother." We then correct him: "In other words, it's your mother." . . . At
times one can obtain information about unconscious repressed processes
by a very easy method. One asks: "What do you consider to be the most
unlikely aspect of that situation? What was it that you least intended to
do?" If the patient swallows the bait, and tells one what he can believe
least, then he has almost invariably conceded the true answer.' [10]
Freud seemed to believe (following Bain and others) that the reason for
the unconscious tendency to unify opposites is the relativity of all
scales by which attributes are measured: a 'hot' summer-day in London is
'cold' to the visitor from the Sudan, and Gulliver is a 'giant' or a
'dwarf' according to the country he visits. He further refers to the
fact that in some ancient languages pairs of opposites are designated
by the same word: thus
altus
means both 'high' and 'deep', and
sacer
both 'holy' and 'accursed'.
For once, however, Freud did not seem to have probed deep enough; he
did not mention the rites of the Saturnalia and other ancient festivals,
in which the roles of slaves and masters are reversed; nor the constant
affirmation of the unity of opposites in most Oriental religions and
philosophies. It seems indeed that the tendency to stand things, from time
to time, on their head, has its deep, unconscious roots, which probably
reach down into the physiological peculiarities of the nervous system.*
One of its striking manifestations is the reversibility of 'figure' and
'background' in visual perception -- about which below.
I am not at all sure how far these considerations are relevant to a
certain pattern of discovery which recurs with curious insistence in
the biological sciences: we find, over and again, mishaps and minor
laboratory disasters which turn out to be blessings in disguise, and
spoilt experiments which perversely yield the solution -- by brutally
shifting the experimenter's attention from a 'plus' to a 'minus' aspect
of the problem, as it were. One might call this pattern 'discovery
by misadventure'. A classic case is that of the Abbé Haüy
(1743-1822), a humble teacher at the college at Lemoine, whose leisure
hours were devoted to collecting specimens of plants and minerals --
until a small, embarrassing accident suddenly changed the direction of
his interests and his whole life:

One day, when examining some minerals at the house of a friend, he
was clumsy enough to allow a beautiful cluster of prismatic crystals
of calcareous spar to fall on the ground. One of the prisms broke
in such a way as to show at the fracture faces which were no less
smooth than those elsewhere, but presented the appearance of a new
crystal altogether different in form from the prism. Haüy picked
up this fragment and examined the faces with their inclinatious and
angles. To his great surprise, he discovered that they are the same
in rhomboidal spar as in Iceland spar.
He wished to be able to generalize: he broke his own little collection
into pieces; crystals lent by his friends were broken; everywhere he
found a structure which depended upon the same laws. [11]

The result was Haüy's
Traité de Mineralogie
which
made him a member of the French Academy and a pioneer of the science
of crystallography.
Haüy had a favourite pupil, Delafosse, who later became Pasteur's
teacher at the École Normale in Paris. Under his influence Pasteur took
up the study of crystallography; it was in this field that he made his
first important discoveries, which contained the germs of all his later
achievements. The decisive incident was again a laboratory mishap.
Pasteur was studying his favourite mineral, Para-Tartrate, derived from
the red Tartar deposit in the vats of fermented wine. One day one of
his Tartrate solutions became affected by a mould, and spoiled. This
kind of thing frequently happens in warm weather; the normal reaction
of chemists is to pour, with a gentle oath, the turbid liquid down
the drain. Pasteur reversed the logic of the situation: he shifted his
attention to the accidental and irrelevant mould, and turned 'accident'
into 'experiment' by studying the mould's action on the Tartrate. The
result was 'the first link in the chain of arguments which led him
into the study of fermentation, to the recognition that micro-organisms
play an essential role in the economy of nature, and eventually to his
epoch-making discoveries in the field of infectious diseases'.
In his later life Pasteur performed the same kind of mental head-stand
on at least two more momentous occasions. One I have already mentioned:
the discovery of immunization by vaccines, which grew out of a spoilt
culture of chicken cholera. The other was the 'domestication' of
micro-organisms, their transformation from enemies into allies of
man, which led to industrial micro-biology and, eventually, to the
antibiotics: microbes destroying microbes. 'In the inferior organisms,'
he wrote, 'still more than in the big animal and vegetable species,
life hinders life.' It sounds simple. But what a long way it was from
the enunciation of the principle to the discovery of penicillin! It took
more than half a century; and it was again due to an almost ludicrous
series of misadventures. They started in 1922, when Alexander Fleming
caught a cold. A drip from his nose fell into a dish in his laboratory
at St. Mary's Hospital; the nasal slime killed off the bacilli in the
culture; Fleming isolated the active agent in the mucus, which was also
present in tears, and called it lysozyme. That was the first step; but
lysozyme was not powerful enough as a germ-killer, and another seven
years had to pass until a gust of wind blew through the lab window a
spore of the mould penicillium notatum, which happened to settle in a
culture dish of staphylococci. But Fleming had been waiting for that
stroke of luck for fifteen years; and when it came, he was ready for
it. As Lenin has said somewhere: 'If you think of Revolution, dream of
Revolution, sleep with Revolution for thirty years, you are bound to
achieve a Revolution one day.'
I shall have to return to Fleming in a different context. The examples of
'discovery by misadventure', which I have just given, were taken from
biology; but the same kind of perverse- or reverse-logic can also be
found operating in other branches of science and art.
In 1821 Faraday invented the electric motor, and constructed a crude
model of it. For more than fifty years no attention was paid to his
invention. In 1831 he also invented (independently from, and roughly
simultaneously with Joseph Henry) the electrical dynamo. A motor converts
electric current into mechanical motion; a dynamo converts mechanical
motion into electricity. But, curiously, the reciprocal nature of the two
machines was not realized until 1873. By that time huge dynamo machines,
driven by steam power, were in use to generate electrial current; but
Faraday's earlier invention had been forgotten, and electric
motors
did not exist.
In 1873, at an exhibition in Vienna, several dynamo machines of an
improved type were displayed. In the happy-go-lucky manner of the
Austrians, one of the technicians mistakenly connected a dynamo, driven
by a steam-engine, with a second dynamo which was at rest. The current
fed into the resting dynamo promptly set it into motion -- and thus the
electrical motor came into existence. Electric trains, the electrical
trammission of power, one of the foundations of modern technology,
originates in the accidental reversal of the function of a single machine.
The history of photography and the early history of radiography seem to
hinge on fluorescent screens and photographic plates which showed effects
they were not supposed to show, and vice versa. Daguerre put an exposed
plate into an untidy cupboard full of various bottles of chemicals --
including some mercury. The next morning he found to his surprise that
a perfect image had developed on the plate. He repeated the experiment,
systematically eliminating one chemical after another in the cupboard --
until he knew that it was mercury vapour which had done the trick. Prior
to the discovery of mercury as an ideal developer of latent images,
Daguerre had written: 'The time required to procure a photographic
copy of a landscape is from seven to eight hours; but single monuments,
when strongly lighted by the sun, or which are themselves very bright,
can be taken in about three hours.' [12] After the discovery, the time
of exposure was shortened to between three and thirty minutes.
In 1895 Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen, Professor of Physics at the
University of Würzburg, noticed by accident that a paper-screen
covered with barium platinocyanide became fluorescent without any apparent
cause. He had at the time a cathode-ray tube going -- an apparatus used to
study the conduction of electricity through gases -- which was enclosed
in a box of black cardboard. But in those days there was no radiation
known hard enough to penetrate black cardboard, and such a thing was in
fact considered to be impossible. Röntgen immediately accepted the
impossible as true: the fluorescent glow which he saw on the screen must
be caused by rays of an unknown kind, emitted by the tube, and capable
of traversing the black cardboard. Within a few weeks he had demonstrated
that the rays were equally capable of traversing human flesh and showing
the outline of the bones as shadows cast upon the luminous screen. He
called them X-rays.
Some few weeks later, Henri Becquerel saw a demonstration of Röntgen's
X-rays at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences. Becquerel's father
and grandfather had also been professors of physics and members of the
Academy; they had taken a special interest in the fluorescent glow which
certain substances -- among them uranium compounds -- emit, when exposed
to light. He therefore immediately formed the -- wrong -- theory that
X-rays were a normal accompaniment of the fluorescent glow, and he set
out to prove this theory by experiment. He wrapped a photographic plate
into heavy black paper to screen it from ordinary light. On top of the
paper-wrapping he laid some crystals of the uranium compound; between
the crystals and the wrapping he placed a bit of metal with holes in
it. Then he placed this whole arrangement outside his window so that the
sun's rays should set the uranium aglow with fluorescence, and thereby
set the X-rays going across the wrapper. This worked admirably: when he
developed his plates the rays had penetrated the wrapping and produced
a photograph of the holes in the metal. It was a wonderful example of
an experiment confirming a prediction based on a false hypothesis.
No sooner had he communicated his results to the Academy, when the sky
clouded over, and Becquerel put his plates and the uranium into a dark
drawer. Here the crystals were shut off from the sunlight; hence there
was no fluorescent glow; hence there could be no X-rays to blacken the
photographic plate. But when he took them out of the drawer, the plates
were blackened nevertheless. Once more the impossible had happened; and
once more a reversal of logic brought the solution. The fluorescent glow
had been caused by the X-rays -- and not the other way round. Becquerel
now tried non-fluorescent uranium compounds and found that they, too,
produced rays. He tried other fluorescent materials which did not contain
uranium, and found that they did not produce the rays. That clinched the
matter: the source of the rays, the radio-active agent, was the uranium
itself. It was from here that the Curies took over.
Perhaps the prettiest example of reasoning in reverse gear is the
invention of the phonograph.
As a young man Edison worked as a telegraphist. His main job was the
taking of messages from the Morse-ticker by ear; if the line was bad,
the ticking became blurred, and he had to rely on guessing. This annoyed
him all the more as, owing to an earlier accident, Edison was partially
deaf. So the young telegraphist invented a simple Morse-signal-recording
apparatus. It consisted mainly of a paper disc, which was made to rotate
like the gramophone disc of the future; on the disc the incoming dots and
dashes were recorded as indentations. But from the telegraph company's
point of view transcribing from the record instead of doing it directly
by ear from the ticker was a sheer waste of time; Edison, then seventeen,
lost his job.
Eleven years later, in the first laboratory of his own, he was working
on about fifty inventions simultaneously -- among them the typewriter
and an improved telegraph-recorder, on which the incoming dots and dashes
were embossed by a needle. When the message was to be sent on to another
station, the paper disc was placed on a transmitting machine with a
contact lever which moved up and down according to the indentations
on the disc. It was a gadget with the sole purpose of recording and
transmitting electrical impulses, and had nothing whatsoever to do with
the production of sounds. Yet it
did
produce purely accidental
sounds -- because the lever, while tracing the embossed dots and dashes,
was apt to rattle; and when the disc was rotated very quickly this rattle
became a hum, then something like a musical sound. A sudden reversal of
logic and the phonograph was born.
The rest was a matter of elaboration. Instead of a paper disc, Edison
proposed to use a cylinder covered with soft tin-foil; instead of
attaching the needie to a Morse-telegraph, he attached it to a membrane
set into vibration by the waves of sound. He made a sketch of the
machine, and gave it to one of his workmen, a certain John Kruesi. It
cost altogether eighteen dollars to build it, but Kruesi had no idea what
the contraption was for. When it was finished Edison shouted at it: 'Mary
had a little lamb.' Then he turned the handle of the recording cylinder:
'The machine reproduced perfectly. Everybody was astonished. . . . '
And that was that. To quote once more the jargon of communication
engineering: the background 'noise' of the vibrating lever had been
turned into 'information'.
We have met the same kind of logical mirror-writing in humour -- 'a
sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist', 'operation successful,
patent dead'. All jokes based on a turning-the-tables technique show the
same pattern (for instance, the Prince and the Retainer story on