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

5 Creativity in Scientific Papers

81 5 Creativity in Scientific Papers P robably every scientific achievement has a troubled human story behind it. The researcher is in it to achieve some RIG ambition, or one of his or her boss, or perhaps to sort out some puzzle. The final results, presented in a clear and believable publication, come much later. Most of the time, the worker is puzzled. Thus the great physicist John Wheeler said that the secret of effective research is to make the mistakes as fast as possible. Sometimes I waited years to reach a believable story. Two such cases are an interesting inversion of many of the stories in this book. The data were there for years. But the RIG ideas that made sense of them came very late. I do not regret that wait. A good scientist is not just in the business of presenting results; he should believe his story. A Chemical “Garden” in Space In 1988 I met Ulrich Walter, an astronaut for the German Space Agency. He invited me to suggest a “pocket experiment” for the D2 mission —the second German launch of the Space Shuttle, then targeted for 1991. I agreed at once. I recalled going to the chemistry department at University of California, Berkeley, where George Pimentel showed me their huge machine shop. “This is where we built the spectrometer that went to Mars,” he said. Wow! What a lovely boast! I began to dream up space experiments. The absence of gravity seemed the central challenge. What would happen, for example, to a bubble growing electrochemically on an electrode ? I built an apparatus for Ulrich to try on the “vomit comet” (see 82 The Aha! Moment chapter 16) but got ambiguous results.A second idea of mine was to blow a soap bubble in zero gravity. I imagined an apparatus to do it—and later worked out what it would do (or so I thought). The D2 committee for space experiments accepted yet another idea. It was for a chemical garden in space. If you drop a crystal of a metal salt (such as cobalt chloride) into sodium silicate solution, a sort of “tree” of insoluble metal silicate grows up from it, against gravity (fig. 5.1). If there are several different metal salts, a “garden” of plantlike objects forms. What shape would such a garden take in zero gravity? I played with this reaction and failed to make any firm prediction. So it seemed a good space experiment to try. I began to imagine an apparatus to grow a chemical garden in the Shuttle. I still have many of my designs—the naivety of the earlier ones shows how far my ideas advanced as I developed the equipment. But several of my early decisions turned out to be vital. First, we would build three units. Two would fly in space, and I would work one on the ground, as a sort of control. Each unit would have two injectors in it, so that it could grow two chemical gardens; if the gardens in a space unit met, the collision could be interesting. We also agreed that Ulrich would record the gardens photographically—the electronic video download of the D2 mission was saturated already. So I began to look at the chemistry. I played with a vast number of metal salts and sodium silicate solutions, seeking the fastest-growing and most interesting chemical gardens. I also played with crystals that had been dusted with magnetic powders, so that I could divert chemical gardens from their vertical growth with a magnet. My good friend Fred Peacock, who had been a student with me at Imperial College, was now head of chemical research at Berol (a pen company). He sent me lots of dyes. In the course of all this chemical play, I invented a strong solution of a metal salt, thickened to a paste with fumed silica (a light dust that had long been one of my favorite solids). I can only thank the physical intuition of my unconscious mind for such a brilliant invention. That paste did not emerge from any sudden burst of enlightenment but just came out of my chemical play. In normal gravity, it grew an interesting chemical garden and provided a totally new way of growing one in space—quite a different challenge from the one I had been wrestling with, that of injecting a solid crystal into a silicate [18.118.0.240] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 12:56 GMT...