The Eye of the Beholder: A Critical Examination of Some Cultural Aspects of Scientific Creativity

Leonardo, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 133-137, 1983 Printed in Great Britain 0024-094X/83%3.00+0.00 Pergamon Press Ltd. THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF SOME CULTURAL ASPECTS OF SCIENTIFIC CREATIVITY* Robert E. Schofield’” I. In the Galleria dell’Accademia of Florence, there may be seen, unfinished as he left them, the four Captives by Michelangelo. These massive figures, struggling to free themselves from envelopments of marble illustrate that artist’s conception ofthe sculptor’s task: literally to dis-cover the statuehidden in a block of stone by chipping away its concealing shell [I]. This use, by Michelangelo, of the verb ‘to discover’ comes as a surprise to most moderns, for it blurs a customary distinction between science andthe arts. Heused the term because he accepted a neoPlatonic view o f beauty as absolute reality in the mind o f God, which the artist strained to perceive and reveal. A few subsequent artists-poets, painters, musicians-may also have adopted this notion, but the concept of artistic discovery has gradually disappeared, except as a metaphor. The artist, wesay, creates his works, as a personalized response to subjective experience, and no one would suggest that Mozart discovered his Clarinet Quintet or Walt Whitman his Leaves of Grass, as Kepler had discovered the laws of planetary motion or Newton that of universal gravitation. For scientists are denied the gift of creativity. Constrained by the actuality of the universe they study, scientists discover laws and facts of nature, previously unrecognized, in an objective world of phenomena. It is to this perceived difference in the nature of their achievements that your attention isinvited, for in that presumed difference lies a false dichotomy of science and the arts. Examine, for a moment, the ‘discoveries’ of Kepler, the three laws of planetary motion: (1) planets move in elliptical paths, with the sun at one focus; (2) the radius vector from the sun to planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times; and (3)the ratios of the squares of planetary periods to the cubes of their mean orbital diameters equal a constant. In what sense are these discoveries? They do not, in fact, represent agreement with existent phenomena, for ellipses, angular velocities and periods are all distorted by perturbing influences of otherplanets. But if these laws are not true by virtue of agreement with observation, how can they have been ‘discovered’? One might argue that the laws were consistent with observations availableto Kepler at the time of their ‘discovery’-yet ‘discovery’ is not true if falsification is possible. Moreover, the nature of the factual incorrectness of the laws became, in fact, the guarantee of their actual correctness. For Kepler’s laws of planetary motion were not based solely on some perceived (or mis-perceived) fit with physical phenomena; they were based on a view of the universe as Divine idea imperfectly manifest in material substance. The laws were true because they conformed to the design of that universe. Thus Kepler, like his near-contemporary, Michel- *Abridgmentof a lecture delivered under the auspices of Sigma Xi (1978-79, 1979-80) and of Mid-America StateUniversities Association (1981-82). **Professor of the History of Technology and Science, Dept of History, Ross Hall, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 5001I, U.S.A. angelo, was a neo-Platonist and his ‘discoveries’, like the artistic creations of Michelangelo, relate to an idealized world-view. For the three laws of planetary motion we must create a category of contingent truth. A good Platonist might say, Kepler’s laws are true, save for the accidents of their realization. They were true also because they led, in some arguable fashion, to the discovery by Newton of the law of universal gravitation, and their factual deviation from phenomenal confirmation became a major positive argument for the truth of Newton’s discovery. But now our scenario becomes more complicated still, for Newton’s ‘discovery’, we know since the work of Einstein, does not really exist. And if it doesn’t exist, it also cannot have been discovered. Hence, Newton also created a contingent truth, based, in part, on a previously created contingent truth. Something has gone wrong with our...