The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (15 page)

another's
synthesis then limits our openness. It
defines a specific area that can then no longer be open for us.
Hardness of heart, the refusal to listen sympathetically and
open-mindedly, with its corollary, unbelief, is the stumbling block
which no theoretical system can overcome.
Polanyi claims that "intellectual passions" affirm the scientific
interest and value of certain facts as against lack of such interest
and value in others. Without this selective function science could not
be defined at all. A "vision of reality" serves as the scientific guide
to enquiry. Passion and vision are the "mainsprings of originality." A
new idea may impel a scientist to abandon an accepted framework of
interpretation and commit himself, by the leaping of a logical gap,
to the use of a new framework.
Note how Polanyi's picture fills Bruner's outline for creativity:
the scientist detaches himself from the commonplace assumptions of his
discipline; commits himself to a new construct; his passion gives him
his selective blindness to ignore the contradictions and negatives,
and, by his superior degree of attention, he sees what he needs to see;
his decorum assures the love of form, the etiquette toward the object of
desire, that keeps him in the brotherhood. Having placed his intellectual
and professional life on the line (losing his life that he may find it),
he has the freedom and willingness to be dominated by the object until
the work of creation takes over. Then his life both serves the new work
and is justified by it.
A scientific education does more than develop the skill to handle
scientific ideas. It brings about that change in thinking that determines
the ideas which will be accepted to begin with, the new ideas most likely
to occur to mind, and the phenomena accepted as factual. "Unscientific"
ideas tend to be dismissed, should they even occur, and "unscientific"
facts tend not to be recognized as phenomena.
Claude Bernard admits that "facts" are necessary materials, but points
out that it is their manipulation by experimental reasoning, or theory,
that establishes and builds science. "Ideas given form by facts," was his
expression. The idea is the 'prime movens' of all scientific reasoning.
We point to a "realized fact" that was not a part of former realizations,
and insist that the fact must have always existed. Existed as
what
may
well be asked. The atom did not "exist" for Democritus, or even Dalton,
as it exists for us today. A rich network of explorers had to develop
correspondences to the point where inclusion of the atomic fact would
be, if not observable, at least possible and maybe even necessary to
the resulting framework -- a framework which itself may prove to have
resulted from the acceptance of the idea of atoms. The long-nourished
idea may well have brought about the facts to support the idea. This
does not imply that we can pull a rabbit out of the hat whether or not
there is first a rabbit in the hat. It means that we must question the
nature of rabbits and hats. Perhaps we can breed any number of varieties
of rabbits in the hat, given time, effort, passion, and all the rest of
the triggers for catalytic synthesis.
Bruner wrote of how science postulates empty categories on purely
logical grounds, and then, when appropriate measures have been found,
"discovers" the content needed to fill the category. When the neutron
was disintegrated, its products, the electron and proton, did not behave
according to the law of the conservation of momentum. Something had to
yield; surely it was not going to be the law, on which too much else
depended, so the Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, postulated a third
particle of zero charge and zero mass, which he called the "neutrino"
or littie neutron. The mysterious third particle, without mass, charge,
or much of anything, was finally considered to have a spiral orbit;
several years after its hypothetical beginnings, evidence for it took
on more and more reality aspects until finally it was "discovered."
Discovery of the planet Neptune followed the same pattern. Twenty-three
years separated Bessel's logical conclusions that a trans-Uranian planet
should exist, and the computing by Adams and LeVerrier of the possible
orbits for the undiscovered planet, which finally led to its "discovery."
The elements in the sun were identified through spectroscopic research.
During an eclipse in 1869, the solar spectrum was found to include an
unknown gas which was named helium. Twenty-seven years later the gas
was discovered or at least identified on earth.
Bode's Law of 1772 offers a fascinaling example. Bode found that if
you took the simple sequence; 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, and so on (each
number doubling the previous one), and added to each member the number
4, then producing: 4, 7, 10, 16, 28, 52, 100, and so on, you obtained
approximately the proportionate distances from the sun of Mercury, Venus,
Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn -- but, disturbingly enough, with a blank
for the number 28. The numbers game gave rise to a great search for
the missing planet (so great our faith in numbers). In 1801 Guiseppe
Piazze of Palermo found at the required distance a very small planet,
only a fourth as big as our moon, which he named Ceres. The attention of
all astronomers then focussed on this orbit and in time over a thousand
of these "asteroids" or pieces of planet were found. The lapse between
postulate and discovery was twenty-nine years.
David Bohm notes that the evolution of scientific concept has been
due more to scientific experience than to observations of everyday
experience. Imaginative analysis of the experimental and theoretical
results of the science of mechanics has given rise to our concepts of the
motions of bodies. Observing and measuring actual bodies in motion has
not played much part. Mathematics in general, (justifying Roger Bacon's
thirteenth-century observation), and differential calculus in particular,
Bohm says, have played the key role in guiding the development of a
clear concept of accelerating motion, just as our concept of wave motion
comes from theoretical and experimental studies of the interference and
propagation of waves in the various sciences such as optics and acoustics,
not from watching water waves themselves.
The physicist Pauli wrote that intuition and the direction of attention
far transcend mere experience in the erection of a system of natural law.
Polanyi went to great length to show that true discovery, in its
scientific sense, is irreversible. That is, the procedure cannot be
traced back stepwise to its beginnings and repeated 'ad lib.' any number
of times. True discovery is not logical in its performance. Polanyi
describes the obstacle to be overcome by any new idea as a "logical
gap." 'Illumination' was his term for the leap by which the logical
gap is crossed. The scientist stakes his life on his leaps, and science
grows and changes thereby.
Gerald Feinberg spoke of James Clerk Maxwell's desire for a mechanical
model of the electromagnetic field, and Albert Einstein's desire for
a deterministic substratum of quantum phenomena. The world, Feinberg
sighs, is not so simple. The proper understanding of matter requires,
he says, the imagination to
invent
entities not apparent in everyday
phenomena. It is the enduring miracle of creative thought, he wrote,
that the mind is equal to the task.
William Blake considered our capacity for imagination to be our "divine
genius." Jesus was Blake's most truly imaginative man, since he could
bridge the logical gaps. In his marginalia to Reynolds, Blake claimed
that our truest self was in our innate ideas with which we are born. He
did not mean this in the Platonic sense, but as the capacity for creative
and original thinking, independent of mechanical information from a
world. Biological and economic necessities as formative devices were
denied by Blake. "The eternal body of man is the Imagination, that is,
God himself . . . It manifests itself in his works of art (in Eternity
all is Vision). Man is all Imagination; God is Man and exists in us and
we in Him."
What Blake's vision releases on earth is released in heaven. If an
imaginative seed, the gist of an idea, can be planted, even though
contrary to existent evidence, the seed can still grow and sooner or later
produce confirmation. Data can be found to bolster the conviction. The
desire for conviction can produce its own data, its own metaphoric
mutation, even to its visual demonstration.
A system is outlandish only to opposing systems. How great must be the
pressure before a new idea succumbs depends on the "correspondence gap"
and the tenacity of the believers. Even if the gap is great, even if
there is no evidence at all, even if the bulk of current belief would
have to be sacrificed to give the new idea grounds for growth, a tenacious
adherence in spite of all the contrary evidence will nevertheless slowly
build up the possibility for the needs of the new idea to be met. It
may take more than one lifetime for the new evidence to accumulate,
establish correspondences, and bring about a new seeing.
Jean Ladrier wondered about the mysterious connection between our own
potentials, the power for action we bear within us, and the potentials
of the world. In the same vein, the physicist Pauli asks about the
nature of the bridge between sense perceptions and concepts. Logic,
Pauli notes, has been incapable of constructing the link. Pauli feels it
satisfactory, however, and to him necessary, to postulate a "cosmic order"
independent of our choice, and "distinct from the world of phenomena."
The relation of sense perception and idea remains predicated, he claims,
on the fact that perceiver and perceived are subject to an order thought
to be objective.
Pauli's notion is a commonly held one, but questionable. We are prone to
resort to a 'deus ex machina' when forced into a corner. We are always
plagued with the idea that "out there" is a great, eternal, and a priori
state of truth. That the "realness" of our lives might hinge on
our
choice is disquieting. All postulates, systems, and accepted facts tend
to be superseded by future systems, however, as even today the inevitable
margin of error grows in the Einsteinian system. Desire frets always at
the boundaries.
David Bohm rejects "eternal forms" as well as randomness or strict
causal laws. He holds that all things are interconnected and influenced
by contingencies with all other things, traceable to so remote an
interrelation that they may be considered chance for all practical
purposes. To associative causes and contingencies Bohm adds the element
of satisfying
necessary relationships
. Opposing and contradictory
motions are the rule throughout the universe, he believes, an essential
aspect of the very mode of things. The existence of anything is made
possible by a balancing of contingent and opposing processes. These
very processes will tend to change a thing in various directions, and
eventually always will change it.
In Bohm's "Natural Law" there is no limit to the new kinds of things that
can come into being, to the number of transformations, both qualitative
and quantitative that can occur. This echoes Whitehead's "structure of
evolving processes," and brings to mind Carington's theory that an idea
tends to realize itself in any way it can unless inhibited by opposing
ideas.
Teilhard spoke of a "biological change of state" terminating in thought,
a comparatively recent development in evolution, and affecting life
itself in its "organic totality" on the entire planet. I think, too,
of Jung whose "unconscious contents" were always in a process of new
combinations and syntheses.
Bohm's "natural law" is of a "nature" shot through and through with
the mind of man. Thinking is the most important of all the "necessary
relations" that must be satisfied. Singer mused that the philosophical
method might have a share in determining the nature of change.
An energetic focus of thought weighs heavily as a determinant among the
contingencies in any context. To focus is to narrow to a specific, to
agree on a single aspect in an infinitely contingent possibility. The
wider the agreement, the wider the context influenced. In oder to
achieve focused agreement there must be a nucleus of ideas around which
the participants -- and possibilities -- can organize. The ideas come
first. The mythos leads the logos.
Bohm writes that scientific history is full of examples in which it was
fruitful to assume that certain objects or elements might be real long
before any procedures were known that would permit them to be observed
directly. The atomic theory, a subject very near to our lives, is the
best example.
According to tradition, Leucippus and Democritus first proposed an
atomic theory, some two thousand years ago, though Singer says
they
got the idea from the Pythagoreans. Though abandoned in that great
"failure of nerve" suffered in those waning years of antiquity, the
notion never completely died. Atomic views were coming to the fore
again in Galileo's day, stimulated by discoveries of the microscope. A
considerable philosophical literature on the subject grew, now largely
forgotten since it led to nothing dramatic, but the curiosity it aroused
had a decided influence in "directing the biological observation" of
the generations that followed.
Newton incorporated atoms in Question 31 of his
Optiks
. The whole
subject was very much in the common domain before Dalton moved the
idea directly to the fore of tangibles by postulating the existence of
individual atoms to explain the various large-scale regularities, such
as the laws of chemical combination, the gas laws, and so on. Dalton
gave the old idea new life by drawing up a hypothetical table of atomic
weights, treating the imaginary things as actualities and giving them
a real place in the sun. Putting things on paper, backing them with
mathematical correlations, relating them to the basic stuff of the world,
proves to be a strong catalytic tonic.
It was possible to treat these large-scale regularities of gasses directly
in terms of macroscopic concepts alone, without the introduction of
new notions. Certain nineteenth century positivists, notably Mach,
insisted on purely philosophical grounds that the concept of atoms was
meaningless and nonsensical because it was not then possible to observe
them as such -- and, indeed, by their very nature they could never be
observed. Nevertheless, Bohm points out, evidence for the existence
of individual atoms was eventually discovered by people who took the
atomic hypothesis