The Act of Creation

by Arthur Koestler

  Helen Keller's dramatic moment of truth is quite unlike the gradual dawn of the name-relation in normal children, and much closer to the sudden insight in discoveries of the type of Pasteur's. The normal child' s naming discovery could be likened to the process known in logic as empirical induction: 'some things have names ergo I assume that all things have names'. (Needless to say, I do not mean to impute any conscious reasoning of this kind to the babe in its cradle.) The chick episode, on the other hand, which made Pasteur jump to his conclusion and establish the general principle of immunization, could be called 'induction from a single case' -- a procedure usually illustrated in primers on logic by the example 'all French waiters have red hair'. For a detailed discussion of the relations of gradual learning to sudden discovery I must refer the reader to Book Two.

  Summary

  New integrations arise by various processes which can be arranged in a series. It ranges from faulty or premature integrations, through partial blindness towards the meaning and significance of one's own discoveries, to the gradual blending of matrices by dint of repetitive experiences, which increase the number of links between them. Finally, there is the sudden illumination of 'spontaneous' discoveries, sparked off by an unconscious intuition, or a chance observation, or a combination of both.

  X

  THE EVOLUTION OF IDEAS

  There is a theory, put forward by Henry Sarton, and held to be self-evident by many scientists, which says, broadly speaking, that the history of science is the only history which displays a cumulative progress of knowledge; that, accordingly, the progress of science is the only yardstick by which we can measure the progress of mankind; and moreover, that the word 'progress' itself has no clearly defined meaning in any field of activity -- except the field of science.

  This is the kind of pronouncement where it is advisable to hold one's breath and count to ten before expressing indignant protest or smug agreement, according to one's allegiance to eggheads or engineers. Personally I believe that there is a grain of truth in Sarton's proposition -- but no more than that.

  Separations and Reintegrations

  There are certain analogies between the characteristic stages in the history of an individual discovery, and the historical development of a branch of science as a whole. Thus a 'blocked matrix' in the individual mind reflects some kind of impasse into which a science has manoeuvred itself. The 'period of incubation', with its frustrations, tensions, random tries, and false inspirations, corresponds to the critical periods of 'fertile anarchy' which recur, from time to time, in the history of every science. These crises have, as we saw, a destructive and a constructive aspect. In the case of the individual scientist, they involve a temporary retreat to some more primitive form of ideation -- innocence regained through the sacrifice of hard-won intellectual positions and established beliefs; in the case of a branch of science taken as a whole, the crisis manifests itself in a relaxation of the rigid rules of the game, a thawing of the collective matrix, the breakdown of mental habits and absolute frontiers -- a process of "reruler pour mieux sauter" on an historic scale. The Eureka act proper, the moment of truth experienced by the creative individual, is parallaled on the collective plane by the emergence, out of the scattered fragments, of a new synthesis, brought about by a quick succession of individual discoveries -- where, characteristically, the same discovery is often made by several individuals, at the same time (cf. p. 110 f).

  The last stage -- verification, elaboration, consolidation -- is by far the least spectacular, the most exacting, and occupies the longest periods of time both in the life of the individual and in the historical evolution of science. Copernicus picked up the ancient Pythagorean teaching of the sun as the centre of all planetary motions when he was a student in Renaissance Italy (where the idea was much discussed at the me), and spent the rest of his life elaborating it into a system. Darwin hit on the idea of evolution by natural selection at the age of twenty-nine; the remaining forty-four years of his life were devoted to its corroboration and exposition. Pasteur's life reads like a story divided into several chapters. Each chapter represents a period which he devoted to one field of research; at the beginning of each period stands the publication of a short preliminary note which contained the basic discovery in a nutshell; then followed ten or fifteen years of elaboration, consolidation, clarification.

  The collective advances of science as a whole, and of each of its specialized branches, show the same alternation between relatively brief eruptions which lead to the conquest of new frontiers, and long periods of consolidation. In the case of the individual, this protracted chore has its natural limits at three score years and ten, or thereabouts; but on the historical stage, the assimilation, consolidation, interpretation, and elaboration of a once revolutionary discovery may go on for generations, and even centuries. The new territory opened up by the impetuous advance of a few geniuses, acting as a spearhead, is subsequently occupied by the solid phalanxes of mediocrity; and soon the revolution turns into a new orthodoxy, with its unavoidable symptoms of one-sidedness, over-specialization, loss of contact with other provinces of knowledge, and ultimately, estrangement from reality. We see this happening -- unavoidably, it seems -- at various times in the history of various sciences. The emergent orthodoxy hardens into a 'closed system' of thought, unwilling or unable to assimilate new empirical data or to adjust itself to significant changes in other fields of knowledge; sooner or later the matrix is blocked, a new crisis arises, leading to a new synthesis, and the cycle starts again.

  This does not mean, of course, that science does not advance; only that it advances in a jerky, unpredictable, 'unscientific' way. Although 'in the year 1500 Europe knew less than Archimedes who died in the year 212 B.C.',[1] it would nevertheless be foolish to deny that today we know considerably more than Archimedes. And I mean by that not only the fantastic and threatening achievements of applied science which have transformed this planet to a point where it is becoming increasingly uninhabitable; but that we also know more than Archimedes in other, more worthwhile ways, by having gained deeper insights into the structure of the universe, from the spiral nebulae to the acid molecules which govern heredity.

  But these insights were not gained by the steady advance of science along a straight line. Mental evolution is a continuation of biological evolution, and in various respects resembles its crooked ways.

  Evolution is known to be a wasteful, fumbling process characterized by sudden mutations of unknown cause, by the slow grinding of selection, and by the dead-ends of over-specialization and loss of adaptability. "Progress" can by definition never go wrong; evolution constantly does; and so does the evolution of ideas, including those of "exact science". New ideas are thrown up spontaneously like mutations; the vast majority of them are useless, the equivalent of biological freaks without survival-value. There is a constant struggle for survival between competing theories in every branch of the history of thought. When we call ideas "fertile" or "sterile", we are unconsciously guided by biological analogy . . .

  Moreover, there occur in biological evolution periods of crisis and transition when there is a rapid, almost explosive, branching out in all directions, often resulting in a radical change in the dominant trend of development. After these stages of "adaptative radiations", when the species is plastic and malleable, there usually follow periods of stabilization and specialization along the new lines -- which again often lead into dead ends of rigid over-specialization. [2]

  But there the analogy ends. The branching of the evolutionist's tree of life is a one-way process; giraffes and whales do not bisociate to give rise to a new synthesis. The evolution of ideas, on the other hand, is a tale of ever-repeated differentiation, specialization and reintegrations on a higher level; a progression from primordial unity through variety to more complex patterns of unity-in-variety.

  Twenty-six Centuries of Science

  If we could take a kind of grandstand view of the history of scientific thought we
would at once be struck by its discontinuity, its abrupt changes of tempo and rhythm. The record starts in the sixth century B.C. when we find suddenly, as if sprung from nowhere, a galaxy of Philosophers of Nature in Milos and Elea and Samos, discussing the origins and evolution of the universe, its form and substance, its structure and laws, in terms which have become forever incorporated into our vocabulary and our matrices of thought. They were searching for some simple, ultimate principles and primeval substances underlying all diversity: four elements, four humours, atoms of a single kind, moving according to fixed laws. The Pythagoreans attempted the first grand synthesis: they tried to weave the separate threads of religion, medicine, astronomy, and music into a single carpet with an austere geometrical design. That carpet is still in the making, but its basic pattern was laid down in the three centuries of the heroic age of Greek science between Thales and Aristotle.

  After the Macedonian conquest of Greece there followed a period of consolidation, orthodoxy, and decline. Aristotle's categories became the grammar of existence, his animal spirits ruled the world of physics, everything worth knowing was already known, and everything inventable already invented. The Heroic Age was guided by the example of Prometheus stealing the fire of the gods; the philosophers of the Hellenistic period dwelt in Plato's cave, drawing epicycles on the wall, their backs turned to the daylight of reality.

  After that there came a period of hibernation lasting for fifteen centuries. During that time the march of science was not only halted, but its direction reversed. M. Pyke, a contemporary philosopher of science, wrote about 'the inability of science to go backwards -- once the neutron has been discovered it remains discovered'. [3] Does it? In the fifth century B.C. the educated classes knew that the earth was a spherical body floating in space and spinning round its axis; a thousand years later they thought that it was a flat disc, or a rectangle perhaps. Similar, though less drastic examples of forgetfulness can also be shown to have occurred in modern science.

  In the twelfth century A.D. we observe the first signs of a thaw, and during the next hundred years there are hopeful stirrings: it is the century of Roger Bacon and Peter Peregrine, of the budding universities at Oxford and Cambridge, Salerno, Bologna, and Paris. But it is also the century of the fatal mésalliance between Aristotelian physics and the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. Within a few generations this 'faulty synthesis' was to create a new orthodoxy, which led to another three centuries of sterility and stagnation.

  Then comes A.D. 1600 -- a landmark second in importance only to 600 B.C. -- which inaugurates the second heroic age of science: the century of Dr. Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, Pascal, Descartes, Leibniz, Huyghens, Harvey, and Newton. In the next century, the eighteenth, the speed of the advance is considerably reduced: it is a period of assimilation, consolidation, and stock-taking, the age of the popularizers, classifiers, and systematizers; of Fontanelle, Linnaeus, and Buffon, of the Philosophes and Encyclopédistes. As Pledge has remarked: 'An observer born early in the century, and making the Grand Tour, would have been an old-man before he came across, in the Paris of Lavoisier, anyone worthy of Newton.' [4]

  Finally, in the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth, we have an explosive development of ever-increasing momentum. The nineteenth century was the age of the most spectacular syntheses in the history of thought -- of royal marriages between previously unrelated and often hostile dynasties. The science of electricity merged with that of magnetism.* Then electro-magnetic radiations were discovered to account for light, colour, radiant heat, Hertzian waves. Chemistry was swallowed up by atomic physics. The control of the body by nerves and glands was seen to rely on electro-chemical processes. The previously independent 'effluvia' or 'powers of nature' which had been known as 'heat', 'light', 'electric fire', 'mechanical motion', 'magnetic flux' were recognized to be all convertible one into another, and to be merely different forms of 'energy', whose total amount contained in the universe always remained the same. Soon afterwards, the various forms of matter, the 'elements' of chemistry, suffered the same fate, as they were all found to be constructed out of the same building blocks in different combinations. And lastly, these building blocks themselves seemed to be nothing but parcels of compressed energy, packed and patterned according to certain mathematical formulae.

  The Pythagorean aspiration, to reduce 'all things to numbers', seemed to be at last on the point of fulfilment. The advance of science in the last century offers the panorama of a majestic river-delta, where the various branches first separate and diverge, then follow more or less parallel courses, in a complex pattern of cross-connections and reunifications, as they approach their ultimate confluence in the sea.

  Creative Anarchy

  Even this short and breathless gallop through the twenty-six centuries since the dawn of scientific thought, ought to be sufficient to show that the progress of science is neither gradual nor continuous. Each basic advance was effected by a more or less abrupt and dramatic change: the breaking down of frontiers between related territories, the amalgamation of previously separate frames of reference or experimental techniques; the sudden falling into pattern of previously disjointed data. Let me illustrate this process by a few further examples -- no longer of individual discoveries, but of episodes in the evolution of the collective matrices of science.

  In the recurrent cycle described in the previous section I mentioned periods of crisis and creative anarchy (corresponding to the individual's 'period of incubation'), which precede the new synthesis. The first such crisis occurred at the very beginning of our story when the ritualized worship of the Olympian gods and demi-gods could no longer provide answers to the ultimate questions after the meaning of existence. Mythology had become a 'blocked matrix'; from the whims of Vulcan and Poseidon, man's interest turned to the nature of fire and water; from the chariot of Helios to the motions of the sun along the ecliptic; from the antics of Zeus and Athena to the natural causes of physical events. The result was intoxicating. To quote Burnet: 'No sooner did an Ionian philosopher learn half a dozen geometrical propositions and hear that the phenomena of the heavens recur in cycles than he set to work to look for law everywhere in nature and with an audacity mounting to hubris to construct a system of the universe.' [5]

  The same audacity and hubris characterized the early seventeenth century, when the stranglehold of the Aristotelian Schoolmen was broken, and the solid, walled-in universe of the Middle Ages lay in shambles, exposed to the speculative depradatious of hosts of Paracelsians, Gilbertians, Copernicans, and Galileans. ' 'Tis all in pieces, all cohesion gone', lamented John Donne; it must have been an intoxicating age to live in.

  Lastly, since the discoveries of the 1920s, theoretical physics, and with it our picture of sub-atomic and extra-galactic reality, of substance and causality, have again reverted to a state of creative anarchy. And so the cycle keeps repeating itself:

  Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said let Newton be, and all was light . . .

  But alas:

  It did not last: the Devil howling 'Ho! Let Einstein be!' restored the status quo.' [5a]

  'Connect, Always Connect ...'

  Out of the creative anarchy emerges the new synthesis.

  I have given in previous chapters a series of examples to show how new syntheses arise in the brains of original thinkers through the bisociation of previously unconnected matrices. The parallel process on the collective plane -- on the map of history -- is the confluence of two branches of science which had developed independently, and did not seem to have anything in common. 'The progress of science', Bronowski wrote, 'is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had long seemed unlike.'*

  The new synthesis in the mind of the thinker may emerge suddenly, triggered by a single 'link'; or gradually, by an accumulation of linkages. On the map of history the 'links' are the discoveries of individuals; and here again the process of integration may be sudden, or the result of a series of
discoveries by several people. The unification of arithmetic and geometry -- analytical geometry -- was a one-man show, accomplished by the formidable Descartes. The unification of electricity and magnetism, on the other hand, took a hundred years -- from 1820, when Hans Christian Oersted discovered by chance that an electric current flowing through a wire deflected a compass needle which happened to lie on the table, to 1921, when O. W. Richardson explained ferro-magnetism in terms of electron-spin; and it needed a whole series of original discoveries by Ampere, Faraday, Maxwell, and others to act as links and bring the crowning synthesis about (see Appendix I).

  All decisive advances in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines. Some of these historic bisociatious appear, even in retrospect, as surprising and far-fetched as the combination of cabbages and kings. What lesson, for instance, could one expect neurophysiology to derive from astronomy? And yet, here it is. In 1796 a minor scandal occurred at the Greenwich Observatory: Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, dismissed one of his assistants because the latter's observations differed from his own by half a second to a whole second. Ten years later the German astronomer Bessel read about this incident in a history of the Greenwich Observatory. Bessel, who combined a highly original mind with meticulous precision in his observations, was puzzled by the frequent occurrence of similar timing mistakes by astronomers. It was a typical case of a 'shift of attention' from the nuisance aspect of a trivial phenomenon to the investigation of its causes.