What human qualities are needed to make scientific discoveries, and which to make great art? Many would point to 'imagination' and 'creativity' in the second case but not the first. This book challenges the assumption that doing science is in any sense less creative than art, music or fictional writing and poetry, and treads a historical and contemporary path through common territories of the creative process. The methodological process called the 'scientific method' tells us how to test ideas when we have had them, but not how to arrive at hypotheses in the first place. Hearing the stories that scientists and artists tell about their projects reveals commonalities: the desire for a goal, the experience of frustration and failure, the incubation of the problem, moments of sudden insight, and the experience of the beautiful or sublime.
Selected themes weave the practice of science and art together: visual thinking and metaphor, the transcendence of music and mathematics, the contemporary rise of the English novel and experimental science, and the role of aesthetics and desire in the creative process. Artists and scientists make salient comparisons: Defoe and Boyle; Emmerson and Humboldt, Monet and Einstein, Schumann and Hadamard. The book draws on medieval philosophy at many points as the product of the last age that spent time in inner contemplation of the mystery of how something is mentally brought out from nothing. Taking the phenomenon of the rainbow as an example, the principles of creativity within constraint point to the scientific imagination as a parallel of poetry.
Author(s): Tom McLeish
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 384
City: Oxford
Cover
The Poetry and Music of Science Comparing Creativity in Science and Art
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Contents
Plate
1: Introduction: Creativity and Constraint
2: Creative Inspiration in Science
A private moment of discovery
Entangling thoughts
The strangeness of star-shaped molecules
Underground rivers of the mind
The Creativity of the New—and doing biology in a physics lab
A conversation about creativity in science
3: Seeing the Unseen: Visual Imagination and the Unconscious
The visual metaphor within the scientific imagination
Mathematical theory-painting
The ancient aesthetic of active seeing
The creativity and constraint of a visual project
A scientific experience of a visual idea
Conversations on creativity with visual artists
The great cosmological model and the visual imagination
The visual imagination and astronomy today
The excited imagination of the impression
An artistic theory of music
4: Experimental Science and the Art of the Novel
A shared early history
The orbits of the early novel and science
Newton and Milton—Paradise and procession
The art of the probable and the hermeneutic stance of Robert Boyle
The arts of fiction and science
Ideation
Incubation
Illumination
Verification and the constraint of form
Entanglements of science and literature
Humboldt, Emerson, Wordsworth, and the Romantic scientific aesthetic
Émile Zola, Claude Bernard, and the ‘experimental novel’
Creativity and constraint in the novel of the twentieth century—The Paris Reviews and a Nobel lecture
Scientific discovery and the novel
5: Music and Mathematics—Creating the Sublime
The numerical threads of music
Music—the medieval mathematical art
Augustine on music
Robert Schumann—creative tension, form, and genre
A musical close-reading: The Konzertstück for Four Horns and Orchestra (1849)
From music to mathematics
A mathematician’s mind
A mathematical close-reading and a beautiful connection—the fluctuation–dissipation theorem
An electrical analogy—Johnson–Nyquist Noise
A universal truth
Music, mathematics, and wordless creation
6: Emotion and Reason in Scientific Creation
Early modern echoes
Scientific testimony to the emotion of ideas
Putting out fire with fire: a case study in creative scientific affect
David Bohm on creativity
Picasso and Guernica—a documented journey of aspectus, affectus, and art
7: The End of Creation
An ur-narrative of creative experience
Telling stories of creativity and creation through theological lenses
All the colours of the rainbow
The end of creativity
Modern minding of the gap
Bibliography
Index
