Read The Act of Creation Online
Authors: Arthur Koestler
The Act of Creation (31 page)
Thinking -- An Experimental and Social Study
(1958), gave a series of similar illustrations. The conclusions at
which he arrived seem to paraphrase the thesis of the present theory
that bisociation is the essence of creative activity:
As experimental science has gained wider and wider fields, and won
increasing recognition, it has often happened that critical stages for
advance are reached when what has been called one body of knowledge
can be brought into close and effective relationship with what has
been treated as a different, and a largely or wholly independent,
scientific discipline.
. . . The alert experimenter is always on the lookout for points and
areas of overlap, between things and processes which natural and unaided
observations has tended to treat merely, or chiefly, as different. . . .
One of the most important features of these turning points in
experimental development is that they very often introduce methods
and instrumentation new to the field of research involved, but already
developed in some other region of investigation. . . .
The winding progress of any branch of experimental science is made
up essentially by a relatively small number of original inquiries,
which may be widely separated, followed, as a rule, by a very large
number of routine inquiries. The most important feature of original
experimental thinking is the discovery of overlap and agreement where
formerly only isolation and difference were recognized. This usually
means that when any experimental science is ripe for marked advance,
a mass of routine thinking belonging to an immediately preceding phase
has come near to wearing itself out by exploiting a limited range of
techniques to establish more and more minute and specialized detail. A
stage has been reached in which finding out further details adds little
or nothing to what is known already. . . .
However, at the same time, perhaps in some other branch of science,
and perhaps in some hitherto disconnected part of what is treated as the
same branch, there are other techniques generating their own problems,
opening up their own gaps. An original mind, never wholly contained
in any one conventionally enclosed field of interest, now seizes upon
the possibility that there may be some unsuspected overlap, takes the
risk whether there is or not, and gives the old subject-matter a new
look. Routine starts again. . . .
The conditions for original thinking are when two or more streams
of research begin to offer evidence that they may converge and so in
some manner be combined. It is the combination which can generate new
directions of research, and through these it may be found that basic
units and activities may have properties not before suspected which
open up a lot of new questions for experimental study. [6]
matter of borrowing, so to speak, an existing technique or laboratory
equipment from a neighbouring science (as in most of Bartlett's
examples), the integration of matrices is not a simple operation of adding
together. It is a process of mutual interference and cross-fertilization,
in the course of which both matrices are transformed in various ways
and degrees. Hidden axioms, implied in the old codes, suddenly stand
revealed and are subsequently dropped; the rules of the game are revised
before they enter as sub-rules into the composite game. When Einstein
bisociated energy and matter, both acquired a new look in the process.
aspects of experience which make familiar phenomena appear in a new,
revealing light, seen through spectacles of a different colour. At the
decisive turning points in the history of science, all the data in the
field, unchanged in themselves, may fall into a new pattern, and be
given a new interpretation, a new theoretical frame.
interpretation
(or
reinterpretation) of facts, I may have given the impression of
underestimating the importance of
collecting
facts, of having
emphasized the value of theory-making at the expense of the empirical
aspect of science -- an unforgivable heresy in the eyes of Positivists,
Behaviourists, and other theorists of the anti-theory school. Needless
to say, only a fool could belittle the importance of observation and
experiment -- or wish to revert to Aristotelian physics which was
all speculation and no experiment. But the collecting of data is a
discriminating activity, like the picking of flowers, and unlike the
action of a lawn-mower; and the selection of flowers considered worth
picking, as well as their arrangement into a bouquet, are ultimately
matters of personal taste. As T. H. Huxley has said in an oft-quoted
passage:
Those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone
who has studied the history of science knows that almost every step
therein has been made by . . . the invention of a hypothesis which,
though verifiable, often had little foundation to start with. . . .
his own father -- for their joint work on analysing crystal structures
by means of X-rays, doubtless an eminently factual preoccupation, which
took two lifetimes. Yet in his book on
The History of Science
he too concluded that the essence of science 'lies not in discovering
facts, but in discovering new ways of thinking about them'. [7]
search in a definite direction, based on theoretical considerations --
as Galle discovered the planet Neptune, which nobody had seen before,
by directing his telescope at the celestial region which Leverrier's
calculations had indicated.* This is admittedly an extreme case of
observation guided by theory; but it remains nevertheless true that it
is not enough for the scientist to keep his eyes open unless he has an
idea of what he is looking for.
The telescope is, of course, the supreme eye-opener and fact-finder in
astronomy; but it is rarely appreciated that the Copernican revolution
came
before
the invention of the telescope -- and so did Kepler's
New Astronomy
. The instruments which Copernicus used for observing
the stars were less precise than those of the Alexadrian astronomers
Hypparchus and Ptolemy, on whose data Copernicus built his theory; and
he knew no more about the actual motions of stars and planets than they
had known:
Insofar as actual knowledge is concerned, Copernicus was no better off,Similarly, Harvey's revolutionary discoveries were made before the
and in some respects worse off, than the Greek astronomers of Alexandria
who lived in the time of Jesns Christ. They had the same data, the same
instruments, the same know-how in geometry, as he did. They were giants
of 'exact science'; yet they failed to see what Copernicus saw after,
and Aristarchus had seen before them: that the planets' motions were
obviously governed by the sun. [8]
microscope was developed into a serviceable tool; and Einstein formulated
his 'Special Theory of Relativity' in 1905 based on data which, as I
have already said, were by no means new. Poincaré, for instance,
Einstein's senior by twenty-five years, had held all the loose threads
in his hands, and the reasons for his failure to tie them together are
still a matter of speculation among scientists. To quote Taton:
Poincaré, who had so much wider a mathematical backgroundWithout the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or
than Einstein, then a young assistant in the Federal Patents Office
of Berne, knew all the elements required for such a synthesis,
of which he had felt the urgent need and for which he had laid
the first foundations. Nevertheless, he did not dare to explain
his thoughts, and to derive all the consequences, thus missing the
decisive step separating him from the real discovery of the principle
of relativity. [9]
'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so
much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you
arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them. 'We shall find',
wrote Butterfield on the opening page of his history of the Scientific
Revolution, 'that in both celestial and terrestrial physics -- which hold
the strategic place in the whole movement -- change is brought about,
not by new observations or additional evidence in the first instance,
but by transpositions that were taking place inside the minds of the
scientists themselves. . . . Of all forms of mental activity, the most
difficult to induce even in the minds of the young, who may be presumed
not to have lost their flexibility, is the art of handling the same
bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations
with one another by giving them a different framework, all of which
virtually means putting on a different kind of thinking-cap for the
moment. It is easy to teach anybody a new fact about Richelieu, but it
needs light from heaven to enable a teacher to break the old framework
in which the student has been accustomed to seeing his Richelieu.' [10]
Once more we are facing the stubborn powers of habit, and the antithesis
of habit and originality. New facts alone do not make a new theory;
and new facts alone do not destroy an outlived theory. In both cases
it requires creative originality to achieve the task. The facts which
proved that the planetary motions depended on the sun have been staring
into the face of astronomers throughout the ages -- but they preferred
to look away.
The Pathology of Thought
I have discussed 'snowblindness' and faulty integrations on the individual
level. In the evolution of the collective matrices of science, similar
aberrations occur on an historic scale, and are transmitted from one
generation to the next -- sometimes over a number of centuries. Indeed,
some of the most important discoveries consisted in the elimination of
psychological road-blocks -- in uncovering what had always been there.
The classic example of a mental road-block, extending over two millennia,
is one to which I have repeatedly alluded before. If one had to sum up
the history of scientific ideas about the universe in a single sentence,
one could only say that up to the seventeenth century our vision was
Aristotelian, after that Newtonian. It would, of course, be naïve to
blame the giant figure of the Stagyrite for crystallizing trends in Greek
thought which were originated by others, and reflected the intellectual
mood of Greece at the disastrous period before and immediately after
the Macedonian conquest. The reasons why his absurd theory of physics
acquired such a firm hold over medieval Europe I have discussed elsewhere;
[10a] they do not enter into our present context.
The central postulate of the theory was that a moving body will
immediately revert to immobility when it ceases to be pushed or pulled
along by a second body, its 'mover'. Now an ox-cart on a muddy road will
indeed come to a halt when its movers, the oxen, are unyoked. But an arrow
will fly through the air once the initial impulse has been imparted to
it -- whereas, according to Aristotelian physics, it should have dropped
to earth the very instant it parted from the bow, its mover. The answer
to this objection was that the initial motion of the arrow, while still
on the bow, created a disturbance in the air, a kind of vortex, which
now became the arrow's 'mover', and pulled it along its course. Not
before the fourteenth century was the further objection raised that if
the arrow (or spear, or catapulted stone) was pulled by an air-current,
it could never fly against the wind.
This inability to perceive that a moving body tends to persist in its
course was the psychological road-block which prevented the emergence of
a true science of physics from the fourth century B.C. to the seventeenth
century A.D. Yet every soldier who threw a spear
felt
that the
thing had a momentum of its own -- and so, of course, did the victim whom
it hit; and every traveller in a post-coach which came to an abrupt halt,
had experienced to his sorrow that his motion continued after the mover's
had stopped. The experience, the bodily 'feel' of inertial momentum
is as old as mankind -- but it was prevented from becoming conscious
and explicit knowledge by the mental block built into the collective
matrix. Even Galileo saw only part of the truth: he thought that a moving
body, left to itself in empty space, would persist not in straight,
but in circular motion. Such are the difficulties of clearing away the
man-made heaps of rubble under which some simple truth lies buried.
The necessity for every moving body to be constantly accompanied and
pushed along by a 'mover' also applied to the stars; it created a
'universe in which unseen hands had to be in constant operation'. [11]
The planets had to be rolled along their orbits, like beer-barrels, by
a host of angels; even Kepler needed a heavenly broomstick, wielded by
the sun, to sweep them round their path. Yet here again, the knowledge
of centrifugal force has always existed, ever since children swung
stones round at the end of a string; and this knowledge had even been
explicitly formulated in antiquity. In his treatise
On the Face in the
Disc of the Moon
, Plutarch, who took a great interest in science and
particularly in astronomy, wrote that the moon was of solid stuff, like
the earth; and that the reason why it did not fall down on the earth,
in spite of its weight, was as follows:
. . . The moon has a security against falling in her very motionThe translation is by Heath, who remarks: 'This is practically Newton's
and the swing of her revolutions, just as objects put in slings are
prevented from falling by the circular whirl; for everything is
carried along by the motion natural to it if it is not deflected by
anything else. Thus the moon is not carried down by her weight
because her natural tendency is frustrated by her revolution. [12]
(my italics)
first Law of Motion.' It is curious that this passage has aroused so
little comment.
Perhaps the most disastrous feature of the Aristotelian system was its
denial that the whole universe was made out of the same basic stuff (as
Parmenides and the Atomists had asserted before him) and to split the
world into two parts, divided by a kind of metaphysical iron curtain. The
'sublunary' region (the earth and its vicinity) was made of four unstable
elements, the skies of a fifth, permanent ether; the sublunary region was
infected with the vice of change -- an abominable slum where generation,
corruption, and decay never stopped, whereas on the other side of the
curtain, fifty-five celestial intelligences were spinning round as
many pure, crystalline spheres, carrying the planets and stars in their
unchanging circular orbits.
It was the most dramatic splitting operation the world had seen since
Lucifer was expelled from heaven; and it was unavoidably followed by
a series of divorces and remarriages between incompatible partners.
Celestial mechanics became dissociated from sublunary physics and married
to theology when Aristotle's 'first mover' became identified with God,
and his star-spinning spirits with the hierarchy of angels. Terrestrial
physics, in its turn, was divorced from mathematics, and married to
animism. The most striking fact about pre-Renaissance science is indeed
its complete indifference to quantitative measurements and numerical
relations -- not to mention experiment and observation; and its obsession
with ascribing animate powers to inanimate objects. Stones fell to
earth because it was their natural home, as flames rose upward because
their home was in the sky; and the stone accelerated its fall because
it was hurrying home as horses hurry to their stable. All motion, all
change, was due to a purposeful striving of objects to realize what was
potentially inherent in their nature, to move 'from potency to act' --
a principle derived by specious analogy from embryonic development. It
took about three centuries (from Occam to Newton) to undo the tangled
mess which these divorces and mésalliances had brought about.
In the healthy evolution of a science, we observe a branching out of
specialized, relatively autonomous lines of research; and a parallel
process of confluences and integrations mediated by the discovery of
universal principles underlying variety. But we also find pathological
developments of a rather drastic and persistent kind in the history
of scientific thought -- collective mental blockages which keep
apart what belongs together, and lead to the segregation of 'closed
systems'. The healthy periods in the growth of a science remind one
of the differentiation of structure and integration of function in
organic development. In the unhealthy periods, on the other hand, we
find dissociation instead of differentiation, and faulty integrations.
Some of the latter were the result of shotgun-marriages, as it were --
imposed from outside, by religions or political pressures. Medieval
astronomy had to embrace theology, Soviet biology was wedded to a crude
form of Lamarckism. The development of science cannot be isolated from
its historic context, from the climate of a given age or civilization;
it influences and is influenced by its philosophy, religion, art, social
organization, economic needs. But scientific thinking nevertheless enjoys
a considerable amount of autonomy; its tortuous progress is unpredictable,
its victories and defeats are of its own making. The reason why Copernicus
postponed the publication of his theory till the end of his life was not
fear of the Catholic Church (which encouraged and protected him) but the
fear of ridicule from his fellow astronomers. Galileo's conflict with
the Church could have probably been avoided if he had been endowed with
less passion and more diplomacy; but long before that conflict started,
he had incurred the implacable hostility of the orthodox Aristotelians who
held key positions at the Italian universities. Religious and political
oppression play only an incidental part in the history of science; its
erratic course and recurrent crises are caused by internal factors. [13]
One of the conspicuous handicaps is the conservatism of the scientific
mind in its corporate aspect. The collective matrix of a science at a
given time is determined by a kind of establishment, which includes
universities, learned societies, and, more recently, the editorial
offices of technical journals. Like other establishments, they are
consciously or unconsciously bent on preserving the status quo -- partly
because unorthodox innovations are a threat to their authority, but also
because of the deeper fear that their laboriously erected intellectual
edifice might collapse under the impact. Corporate orthodoxy has been
the curse of genius from Aristarchus to Galileo, to Harvey, Darwin, and
Freud; throughout the centuries its phalanxes have sturdily defended
habit against originality. The uses of hypnotism in dental surgery,
child-birth, etc., are regarded as a modern discovery. In fact, Esdaile,
who lived from 1808 to 1859, carried out three hundred major operations
under 'Mesmeric trance'; but since Mesmer had been declared an impostor,
medical journals refused to print Esdaile's papers. In 1842 Ward amputated
a leg painlessly under hypnotic trance and made a Report to the Royal
Medical and Chirurgical society. The society refused to believe him. One
of its most eminent members argued that the patient had merely pretended
not to feel the pain, and the note of the paper having been read was
struck from the minutes of the Society.
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