On the Art of Scientific Imagination

Abstract

Holton itself.That is why Pericles began his famous oration by explaining that he would try to find "a proper sense of balance" to avoid repeating things to those who "know the facts" and yet not lose all the others.His solution, as Thucydides quotes him, was to focus on what he called "the fairest gift of love," namely the courageous deeds done on behalf of their society and their splendidly monumented city.Pericles added: "What I prefer is that you look at the greatness of the city, and should fall in love with her."This is also my theme today, transposed to the republic of science and its monuments.I want to focus on the question of how scientists, devoting themselves to some of the most difficult prob lems, can succeed at all.The physicist Eugene Wigner coined the phrase, "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences."But we must wonder about the unreasonable effective ness of science itself, especially in the early, nascent phase of an individual's research.One can call that phase "Private Science," before the results are cleaned up and, as Louis Pasteur put it, are made to look inevitable-that is, before they become science in that other sense, namely "Public Science," in which the profession's organized skepticism and other norms dominate.Of course, the primary tools of the trade, which a scientist can be taught to use, are indispensable: perseverance, the use of one's rational faculties while forming and testing hypotheses, mathemat ics and instrumentation, judicious modeling, looking skeptically for flaws or disconfirmations, etc.But in truth, all these are not sufficient to explain the daring and risky leaps of speculation that are often the crucial ingredient, or even the initial impetus, for a project.There must be a second, complementary set of forces at work-an art of the imagination.Most scientists are reluctant to talk about it, perhaps because that art is idiosyncratic, seemingly inaccessible, and varies among fields; in any case, by keeping one's personal struggle out of the literature, one makes it easier to reach consensus about the final results.But there are a few hints.In a famous speech of 1918, Albert Einstein suggested that the elusive, additional element needed This content downloaded from 140.247.

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