Originally published 7 March 2000
“There’s nothing creative about science,” someone recently said to me. “The world’s out there and science tries to know it. Scientists create nothing; they merely describe.”
It is a common misconception that art is creative and science is not. There is something called the “scientific method,” so the story goes, that leads us with a kind of blind inevitability to a knowledge of nature’s secrets. Gather facts, make hypotheses, test hypotheses. It is all rather mechanical; a machine could do it. And, in many of our science lab classes, especially in high school, we guide students through the drill. No wonder science is so widely imagined as an activity for white-coated drones.
This “Baconian” idea of scientific method is closely allied to an ultra-realist view of the world. The world is out there waiting to be discovered, like dinosaur bones in the earth waiting to be dug up. By this account, scientists are mere excavators, and there is nothing particularly creative about wielding a shovel.
These misconceptions about science are reinforced by the use of computers in data analysis. In areas of research such as genetics, high-energy particle physics, and observational astronomy, data is pouring in faster than anyone knows what to do with it. Increasingly, the solution is to pump the raw data into computers and let the computers look for patterns. If computers can do it, then where’s the creativity?
But of course computers can’t do it. Computers are tools, like a microbalance or a Bunsen burner. Think of the human creativity implicit in the very idea of a programmable multipurpose digital computer. Or in the idea of the DNA double helix. Or quarks. Or quasars. It would take a book to elucidate all of the human inventions that are embodied in any one branch of science.
In fact, there is no such thing as the automatic truth-generating machine so often attributed to Francis Bacon. As biologist Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in a recent essay in Science, Bacon himself understood that science is, in Gould’s words, “a quintessential human activity, inevitably emerging from the guts of our mental habits and social practices, and inexorably intertwined with foibles of human nature and contingencies of human history.”
Which is not to say that science is an arbitrary social fabrication. In Bacon’s own words, scientific understanding “is extracted…not only out of the secret closets of the mind, but out of the very entrails of Nature.”
Science springs from a creative tension between the “closets of the mind” and “the entrails of Nature.”
Yes, scientific theories are severely constrained by data dredged up from nature, but this does not disqualify science as a creative activity. Understanding empirical data means searching the closets of the mind for suitable metaphors, analogies and patterns of meaning, and what we find suitable is culturally (perhaps genetically) determined to a greater extent than the ultra-realists and champions of the so-called “Baconian” method are sometimes willing to admit.
An acceptable scientific idea must be consistent with ever-more finely contrived observations of nature, but consistency with the data is not a guarantee of truth. Ptolemy’s Earth-centered system of astronomy explained the data with exquisite accuracy; Copernicus’s heliocentric system did no better with the data (at first), but it had a compelling elegance that swept all before it. If you want to look for the real origins of Copernican astronomy, look into the closets of Copernicus’s mind, and not to any newly gathered evidence of the senses.
The constraints of data might actually promote scientific creativity.
Robert Frost famously said that writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. He understood that creativity in art is enhanced, rather than frustrated, by the requirement that the artist work within certain formal constraints. The best poets often impose complex structural restrictions upon their work — rhyme schemes, sound patterns, syllabication, and so on. We think no less of Robert Frost’s creativity because he chose to write in rhyme, or of the poetry of a Marianne Moore, say, because her stanzas are contrived within elaborate patterns of order.
Aspiring young poets sometimes believe that by merely emptying the closet of their mind onto paper in broken lines, they have created poetry. It’s not poetry and it’s not creativity. Poetry is language in resonant tension with the world. In the same way, scientific creativity is sharpened, not dulled, by continually rubbing against the whetstone of reality.
Science works itself out somewhere between pure excavation and pure invention. Reality constrains our creativity but does not force our inventiveness along inevitable tracks. It is for us as it was for the singer in a poem by Wallace Stevens:
"Even if what she sang was what she heard…
There never was a world for her
Except the one she sang, and singing made."
