The Aha! Moment: A Scientist's Take on Creativity

14 Literary Information

201 14 Literary Information Ihave been writing all my life; indeed, my nineteen hundred Daedalus columns are a major oeuvre in themselves. I have written lots of bigger articles too. So I have a deep feeling for the language. I am especially sensitive to writing style. The bare text may reveal the author’s ObserverReasoner , but the style says something about the unconscious mind behind it. A perceptive critic might even guess at the author. I’d hate to try it, especially on a scientific topic. Scientific papers are almost deliberately complex and difficult. But even a scientist sometimes uses the language appealingly.Thus J. E. Gordon, on how wood creeps under load, says“the rather badly stuck hydroxyls take advantage of the changes in moisture and temperature to shuffle away from their responsibilities.”1 I wish I could write like that! Gordon’s style is widely renowned. Literary Styles Without scientific constraints, language can be much freer. For one professional paper I tried to be more open—that was my scientific paper on the theory of the bicycle (see chapter 5). As a chemist, I felt able to write more freely in a physics journal. And readers seemed to like it. It was even reprinted—the only scientific paper I know to have been thus honored! At least three times I have been asked to translate the scientific diction of some medical diagnosis or pronouncement, so that it made sense to those concerned. On another occasion I translated a scientific paper into ordinary language.2 I caused a lot of fuss. (That paper was about handedness. It began,“It is common knowledge that contemporary 202 The Aha! Moment man prefers to use his right hand when performing unimanual tasks.” My translation was “Most people nowadays are right-handed.” And so on.) Freeman Dyson of The Physical Review has denied that complex scientific prose merely reflects the subject.3 He says that The Physical Review rejects most papers because it is possible to understand them. “Those which are impossible to understand are usually published.” A scientist depends for his career on getting his papers published. He writes even if he has no skill in the art and is unable to put his findings into a style that editors can accept. Many scientific eccentrics use the language very badly. Stefan Marinov, for example, could not even get his papers published. He used to buy space in New Scientist or Nature , for example, and put forward his views of physics in the form of paid advertisements.4 This freed him from editorial control but denied him a place in the scientific literature. Advertisements seldom have a page number to refer to and do not go in the bound library volumes of a journal. Yet even a scientific advertisement should hope to convince its readers. Marinov’s wild diatribes tended instead to antagonize them. He would denounce his opponents as jellyfish or blockheads, give findings without experimental detail, and claim that his arguments were obvious to any child. I have met many scientific eccentrics, in potential papers, in correspondence , and even in person. Speculations in Science and Technology was a copious source—I was on its Editorial Board. William Honig, the editor, has written about the crazy papers it received.5 And in just one of those papers I found a good argument—the idea that random ideas arise in the brain as a result of the decay of radioactive atoms.6 In the moment of decay these put out high-speed electrons, and sometimes fire a neuron. Is such an unpredictable event part of mental creativity? If so, it has a place in this book. I have asked astronauts if they have had any sudden idea in space, triggered perhaps by spatial cosmic rays, or the Van Allen radiation belts. (They said no.) But during an x-ray brain scan I once had a sudden unprovoked memory. Did an x-ray photon trigger a cell in my brain? Daedalus has used this notion.7 Underwood Dudley’s paper“What to Do When the Trisector Comes” deals with those who claim to be able to trisect an angle with ruler and compass only (something it is easy to show is mathematically impossible ).8 His book explains how to calm such cranks or at least get rid of Literary Information 203 them and their letters.9 My own experience has been with...