The Act of Creation (30 page)

 

 

But these insights were not gained by the steady advance of science
along a straight line. Mental evolution is a continuation of biological
evolution, and in various respects resembles its crooked ways.

 

 

Evolution is known to be a wasteful, fumbling process characterized
by sudden mutations of unknown cause, by the slow grinding of
selection, and by the dead-ends of over-specialization and loss of
adaptability. "Progress" can by definition never go wrong; evolution
constantly does; and so does the evolution of ideas, including those of
"exact science". New ideas are thrown up spontaneously like mutations;
the vast majority of them are useless, the equivalent of biological freaks
without survival-value. There is a constant struggle for survival between
competing theories in every branch of the history of thought. When we call
ideas "fertile" or "sterile", we are unconsciously guided by biological
analogy . . .

 

 

Moreover, there occur in biological evolution periods of crisis and
transition when there is a rapid, almost explosive, branching out in
all directions, often resulting in a radical change in the dominant
trend of development. After these stages of "adaptative radiations",
when the species is plastic and malleable, there usually follow periods
of stabilization and specialization along the new lines -- which again
often lead into dead ends of rigid over-specialization. [2]

 

 

But there the analogy ends. The branching of the evolutionist's tree of
life is a one-way process; giraffes and whales do not bisociate to give
rise to a new synthesis. The evolution of ideas, on the other hand, is a
tale of ever-repeated differentiation, specialization and reintegrations
on a higher level; a progression from primordial unity through variety
to more complex patterns of unity-in-variety.

 

 

 

Twenty-six Centuries of Science

 

 

If we could take a kind of grandstand view of the history of scientific
thought we would at once be struck by its discontinuity, its abrupt
changes of tempo and rhythm. The record starts in the sixth century
B.C. when we find suddenly, as if sprung from nowhere, a galaxy of
Philosophers of Nature in Milos and Elea and Samos, discussing the
origins and evolution of the universe, its form and substance, its
structure and laws, in terms which have become forever incorporated
into our vocabulary and our matrices of thought. They were searching
for some simple, ultimate principles and primeval substances underlying
all diversity: four elements, four humours, atoms of a single kind,
moving according to fixed laws. The Pythagoreans attempted the first
grand synthesis: they tried to weave the separate threads of religion,
medicine, astronomy, and music into a single carpet with an austere
geometrical design. That carpet is still in the making, but its basic
pattern was laid down in the three centuries of the heroic age of Greek
science between Thales and Aristotle.

 

 

After the Macedonian conquest of Greece there followed a period of
consolidation, orthodoxy, and decline. Aristotle's categories became the
grammar of existence, his animal spirits ruled the world of physics,
everything worth knowing was already known, and everything inventable
already invented. The Heroic Age was guided by the example of Prometheus
stealing the fire of the gods; the philosophers of the Hellenistic period
dwelt in Plato's cave, drawing epicycles on the wall, their backs turned
to the daylight of reality.

 

 

After that there came a period of hibernation lasting for fifteen
centuries. During that time the march of science was not only halted, but
its direction reversed. M. Pyke, a contemporary philosopher of science,
wrote about 'the inability of science to go backwards -- once the neutron
has been discovered it remains discovered'. [3] Does it? In the fifth
century B.C. the educated classes knew that the earth was a spherical body
floating in space and spinning round its axis; a thousand years later
they thought that it was a flat disc, or a rectangle perhaps. Similar,
though less drastic examples of forgetfulness can also be shown to have
occurred in modern science.

 

 

In the twelfth century A.D. we observe the first signs of a thaw, and
during the next hundred years there are hopeful stirrings: it is the
century of Roger Bacon and Peter Peregrine, of the budding universities
at Oxford and Cambridge, Salerno, Bologna, and Paris. But it is also the
century of the fatal mésalliance between Aristotelian physics
and the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. Within a few generations this
'faulty synthesis' was to create a new orthodoxy, which led to another
three centuries of sterility and stagnation.

 

 

Then comes A.D. 1600 -- a landmark second in importance only to 600
B.C. -- which inaugurates the second heroic age of science: the century
of Dr. Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, Pascal, Descartes, Leibniz, Huyghens,
Harvey, and Newton. In the next century, the eighteenth, the speed of
the advance is considerably reduced: it is a period of assimilation,
consolidation, and stock-taking, the age of the popularizers, classifiers,
and systematizers; of Fontanelle, Linnaeus, and Buffon, of the Philosophes
and Encyclopédistes. As Pledge has remarked: 'An observer born early in
the century, and making the Grand Tour, would have been an old-man before
he came across, in the Paris of Lavoisier, anyone worthy of Newton.' [4]

 

 

Finally, in the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth,
we have an explosive development of ever-increasing momentum. The
nineteenth century was the age of the most spectacular syntheses in the
history of thought -- of royal marriages between previously unrelated
and often hostile dynasties. The science of electricity merged with
that of magnetism.* Then electro-magnetic radiations were discovered to
account for light, colour, radiant heat, Hertzian waves. Chemistry was
swallowed up by atomic physics. The control of the body by nerves and
glands was seen to rely on electro-chemical processes. The previously
independent 'effluvia' or 'powers of nature' which had been known as
'heat', 'light', 'electric fire', 'mechanical motion', 'magnetic flux'
were recognized to be all convertible one into another, and to be merely
different forms of 'energy', whose total amount contained in the universe
always remained the same. Soon afterwards, the various forms of matter,
the 'elements' of chemistry, suffered the same fate, as they were all
found to be constructed out of the same building blocks in different
combinations. And lastly, these building blocks themselves seemed to be
nothing but parcels of compressed energy, packed and patterned according
to certain mathematical formulae.
The Pythagorean aspiration, to reduce 'all things to numbers', seemed to
be at last on the point of fulfilment. The advance of science in the last
century offers the panorama of a majestic river-delta, where the various
branches first separate and diverge, then follow more or less parallel
courses, in a complex pattern of cross-connections and reunifications,
as they approach their ultimate confluence in the sea.
Creative Anarchy
Even this short and breathless gallop through the twenty-six centuries
since the dawn of scientific thought, ought to be sufficient to show that
the progress of science is neither gradual nor continuous. Each basic
advance was effected by a more or less abrupt and dramatic change: the
breaking down of frontiers between related territories, the amalgamation
of previously separate frames of reference or experimental techniques;
the sudden falling into pattern of previously disjointed data. Let
me illustrate this process by a few further examples -- no longer of
individual discoveries, but of episodes in the evolution of the collective
matrices of science.
In the recurrent cycle described in the previous section I mentioned
periods of crisis and creative anarchy (corresponding to the individual's
'period of incubation'), which precede the new synthesis. The first such
crisis occurred at the very beginning of our story when the ritualized
worship of the Olympian gods and demi-gods could no longer provide answers
to the ultimate questions after the meaning of existence. Mythology
had become a 'blocked matrix'; from the whims of Vulcan and Poseidon,
man's interest turned to the nature of fire and water; from the chariot
of Helios to the motions of the sun along the ecliptic; from the antics
of Zeus and Athena to the natural causes of physical events. The result
was intoxicating. To quote Burnet: 'No sooner did an Ionian philosopher
learn half a dozen geometrical propositions and hear that the phenomena
of the heavens recur in cycles than he set to work to look for law
everywhere in nature and with an audacity mounting to
hubris
to construct a system of the universe.' [5]
The same audacity and hubris characterized the early seventeenth century,
when the stranglehold of the Aristotelian Schoolmen was broken, and the
solid, walled-in universe of the Middle Ages lay in shambles, exposed
to the speculative depradatious of hosts of Paracelsians, Gilbertians,
Copernicans, and Galileans. ' 'Tis all in pieces, all cohesion gone',
lamented John Donne; it must have been an intoxicating age to live in.
Lastly, since the discoveries of the 1920s, theoretical physics, and with
it our picture of sub-atomic and extra-galactic reality, of substance
and causality, have again reverted to a state of creative anarchy. And
so the cycle keeps repeating itself:

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said let Newton be, and all was light . . .

But alas:

It did not last: the Devil howling 'Ho!
Let Einstein be!' restored the status quo.' [5a]

'Connect, Always Connect ...'
Out of the creative anarchy emerges the new synthesis.
I have given in previous chapters a series of examples to show how
new syntheses arise in the brains of original thinkers through the
bisociation of previously unconnected matrices. The parallel process on
the collective plane -- on the map of history -- is the confluence of two
branches of science which had developed independently, and did not seem
to have anything in common. 'The progress of science', Bronowski wrote,
'is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what
had long seemed unlike.'*
The new synthesis in the mind of the thinker may emerge suddenly,
triggered by a single 'link'; or gradually, by an accumulation of
linkages. On the map of history the 'links' are the discoveries of
individuals; and here again the process of integration may be sudden, or
the result of a series of discoveries by several people. The unification
of arithmetic and geometry -- analytical geometry -- was a one-man show,
accomplished by the formidable Descartes. The unification of electricity
and magnetism, on the other hand, took a hundred years -- from 1820,
when Hans Christian Oersted discovered by chance that an electric current
flowing through a wire deflected a compass needle which happened to lie
on the table, to 1921, when O. W. Richardson explained ferro-magnetism
in terms of electron-spin; and it needed a whole series of original
discoveries by Ampere, Faraday, Maxwell, and others to act as links and
bring the crowning synthesis about (see
Appendix
I
).

 

 

All decisive advances in the history of scientific thought can be
described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different
disciplines. Some of these historic bisociatious appear, even in
retrospect, as surprising and far-fetched as the combination of cabbages
and kings. What lesson, for instance, could one expect neurophysiology
to derive from astronomy? And yet, here it is. In 1796 a minor scandal
occurred at the Greenwich Observatory: Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal,
dismissed one of his assistants because the latter's observations differed
from his own by half a second to a whole second. Ten years later the
German astronomer Bessel read about this incident in a history of the
Greenwich Observatory. Bessel, who combined a highly original mind with
meticulous precision in his observations, was puzzled by the frequent
occurrence of similar timing mistakes by astronomers. It was a typical
case of a 'shift of attention' from the nuisance aspect of a trivial
phenomenon to the investigation of its causes.

 

 

After ten years of comparing his own records with those of several other
astronomers, Bessel was able to prove that there existed systematic
and consistent differences between the speed with which each of them
reacted to observed events; and he also succeeded in establishing the
characteristic reaction-time -- called 'the personal equation' -- of
several of his colleagues.

 

 

These studies were continued by other astronomers over the next thirty
years, in the course of which the development of more precise, automatic
recording instruments made it possible to arrive at 'absolute personal
equations'. Finally, fifty years after Bessel's discovery, von Helmholtz
published a paper showing that the rate of conduction of impulses in
nerves was of a definite, measurable order -- and not, as had previously
been assumed, practically instantaneous. Helmholtz was well acquainted
with the work that astronomers had done on personal equations, and his
experiments on the propagation of impulses in motor and sensory nerves
followed their procedure and techniques. Helmholtz's discovery inaugurated
the era of 'mental chronometry', and was a decisive step in the progress
of neurophysiology and experimental psychology.

 

 

In a similar manner the basic advances in our knowledge of infectious
diseases were mostly due to the importation of experimental techniques
which had been developed for quite different purposes -- such as the
use of filtering procedures, microscopic techniques, tissue-cultures
and the statistical methods employed in genetics.