The Act of Creation

by Arthur Koestler

  I think I have said enough to show that 'scientific evidence' is a rather elastic term, and that 'verification' is always a relative affair. The criteria of truth differ from the criteria of beauty in that the former refer to cognitive, the latter to emotive processes; but neither of them are absolute. 'The evidence proves' is a statement which is supposed to confer on science a privileged intimacy with truth which an can never hope to attain. But 'the evidence proves' that the statement in quotes is always based on an act of faith. To quote K. R. Popper:

  The old scientific ideal of epistêmê -- of absolutely certain, demonstrable knowledge -- has proved to be an idol. The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative for ever. It may indeed be corroborated, but every corroboration is relative to other statements which, again, are tentative. Only in our subjective experiences of conviction, in our subjective faith, can we be 'absolutely certain'. [18]

  Fashions in Science

  Controversy is the yeast which keeps science in lively fermentation. But its progress is also beset with pseudo-controversies which appear to reflect differences of opinion, whereas in reality they only reflect differences of emphasis on single aspects of a complex process at the expense of others. Nature and nurture are evidently complementary factors in shaping an individual's appearance and character; yet a whole library could be filled with the disputes between proponents of 'heredity is all' and 'environment is all'. Quantitative measurements were virtually ignored in pre-Newtonian physics; today even psychology is obsessed with quantity, and presumes to measure human minds by I.Q. ratings and character-parameters. Often a branch of science assumes a 'new look' because its pundits have put on, not a new type of thinking cap but a fashionable hat. We find in the history of science as many fashions, crazes, and 'schools' as in the history of literature or interior decoration. The Ionians loved discussing whether the basic stuff of the universe was water, air, or fire; the alchemists were hypnotized by the properties of sulphur, salt, and mercury; the invention of the Leyden jar threw scientists all over the world into such excitement that to die by electric stroke appeared an enviable fate. In medicine, fads, fashions, and fancies chase one another tirelessly, from the barber's horror-shop to the serene citadels in Harley Street. They have always been an easy target for satire; the difficulty in this disturbed border-province is to distinguish between the quack who consciously deludes the patient, and the sincere fanatic who deludes himself into believing that one particular aspect, organ, or function represents the whole, and that a partial remedy is an all-cure.

  A more positive aspect of the changes of fashion is that its pendular motions from one extreme to another occasionally result in establishing a more balanced view. One of the remarkable achievements of Pasteur was that, having established against considerable opposition the germ-theory of disease and made the medical profession 'microbe-conscious', he changed the emphasis in his writings from 'figure' to 'background', from the microbe itself to the environment in which the microbe operates. As Dubos puts it:

  Far from being hypnotized with the idea that micro-organisms are the only factors of importance in medicine, Pasteur knew that men as well as animals, in health or in disease, must always be considered as a whole and in relation to their environment. . . . In all his publiccations . . . he repeatedly stated the thesis -- almost as an obsession -- that the activities of micro-organisms can be controlled, not only by acting on them directly, but also by modifying the environment in which they operate. [19]

  'Environment' to Pasteur meant the whole range of conditions from proper sanitation, through aseptic surgery, to the patient's bodily and mental state. Much of this has become a fashionable truism today, but it was not in the days of Victorian medicine; and even today the lesson has not sunk in sufficiently, otherwise the mass-production of 'super-hygienic' food in sterilized wrappings would be recognized as detrimental to man's internal environment -- by depriving it of the immunizing effect of ingesting a healthy amount of muck and bugs.

  I have talked more about physics than the other sciences, because it is regarded -- both by its practitioners and the awe-stricken lay public, as the paragon of objectivity. In the sciences of life the subjective, and indeed emotive factor, is of course much more in evidence. When it comes to psychology, fashion seems to be almost the dominant factor which determines into which channels the research efforts of thousands of hopeful graduates in the universities of the world will be directed. It seems doubtful whether the doctrines of the hostile schools of analytical psychotherapy differ as fundamentally as their practitioners believe, or mainly by accent and emphasis; and it is becoming increasingly obvious that the therapist's personality is a more decisive factor than the school to which he belongs. But even on the apparently firmer ground of Experimental Psychology and Learning Theory, the history of the last fifty years shows a bewildering succession of changing fashions in experimental design, technical jargon, and field of interest. English associanism; the Würzburg school with its emphasis on introspection; Watsonian Behaviourism which declared introspection a heresy; Gestalt-theory stressing holism and insight; Neo-Behaviourism in its more sophisticated guise -- none of them can claim to represent a comprehensive theory of the phenomenon Man -- or the phenomenon Rat, Cat, Ape, for that matter. Rather it looks as if each school had focussed its gaze, or collective squint, on a single aspect or slice of human nature, designed its experiments and formulated its questions in such a way that other aspects never had a chance to enter the picture. If one goes on sowing cabbage seeds, one cannot expect them to grow into mimosas -- but that hardly gives one a right to denounce belief in the existence of mimosas as a superstition; and if one puts a creature into a Skinner Box, it will behave as one expects a creature in a Skinner Box to behave -- with certain quantitative variations which are gratifyingly measurable, but still refer to behaviour in a Skinner Box.

  Boundaries of Science

  I have emphasized, at the risk of repetitiveness, the irrational factors in scientific thought, first in their positive aspect: the intuitive leap, the reculer pour mieux sauter, then in their negative aspects: snowblindness, closed systems, faulty integrations.

  These features are reflected, on a magnified scale, in the evolution of every science as a corporate body. Their histories refute the naive belief that progress in science is an orderly, rational affair, represented by a continuous curve which approaches the ultimate truth by ever closer approximations; or -- as we are often told -- that our wisdom increases in a cumulative manner, like the steady rise of the water-level in a reservoir.

  In reality progress is neither continuous nor cumulative in the strict sense. If it were continuous, there would be no 'revolutionary' discoveries, no discarding of discredited theories and sudden changes of direction -- a continuous curve has no abrupt brakes, it is not a zig-zag line.

  Nor is progress cumulative in a simple and direct way. The walls of the reservoir -- the frame of reference into which new data are poured -- are periodically changing their shape: narrowing, expanding, curving this way or that; pipes are built to connect with other reservoirs of knowledge, while rusty connections are sealed off. Moreover, the reservoir is leaky and wasteful: gallons of knowledge are forgotten, discoveries 'stillborn or smothered at birth'.*

  It is also asserted that science moves in progressively closer approximations to truth, like a curve approaching its asymptote, even though it will reach it only in infinity. But this statement is rather ambiguous and leads to the frequent confusion between progress in exactitude of observations and measurements, with progress in the explanatory power of theories -- which is an altogether different affair. Tycho de Brahe's observations of the motions of the planets represent a definite advance in so far as precision is concerned. Yet his theory of the solar system was not an advance, but a retreat from Coperuicus. Einstein's formula of gravity looks like a small adjustment to Newton's approximation, but it implies a radically diff
erent conception of the universe.

  The bubble chamber is a kind of aquarium window into the subatomic world. It provides us with photographs of the condensation trails, like jet trails in the sky, of what we take to be the elementary particles of matter: electrons, neutrons, mesons, muons, etc., of some forty different varieties. But the particles themselves can of course never be seen, their inferred lifespan often amounts to no more than a millionth of a millionth second, they ceaselessly transform themselves into different kinds of particles, and the physicists ask us to renounce thinking of them in terms of identity, causality, tangibility, or shape -- in a word, to renounce thinking in intelligible terms, and to confine it to mathematical symbols. The rapid, continuous increase in the precision and power of our methods for exploring and exploiting nature is so impressive that we are apt to forget the discontinuity and periodic upheavals in the formation of explanatory theories.

  No doubt the modern scientist knows more than Archimedes; and no doubt the modern novelist has a wider range of experience than Homer, and more precise tools to analyse human thoughts and emotions. But neither of them arrived at their present station by the shortest way; and though both of them have solved many riddles and attained to important part-truths, neither of them is sure whether the present direction of his zig-zag course leads him towards a 'closer approximation'. Nor is the scientist in a much better position to ascertain the correctness of his course. He, too, must ultimately rely on his intuitions, and the interpretation which he puts on his bundle of data will remain open to controversy.

  In the symbolic year 1899 the foremost German biologist Ernst Haeckel published a best-selling book The Riddles of the Universe , which became the bible of my youth. Haeckel was the first propagandist of Darwin in Germany, and the first to draw up a geneological tree of the various orders of animals. Like Spencer and Huxley in England, he was a typical representative of the buoyant and arrogant optimism of the nineteenth century. His book enumerated seven Great Riddles of the Universe, of which six were 'definitely solved' -- including the Structure of Matter and the Origin of Life; the seventh was man's experience of freedom of choice. However, this was not really a riddle but 'a pure dogma, based on an illusion and having no real existence' -- so there were no more riddles left. Science was 'dizzy with success' -- as Stalin has said in a famous speech calebrating the triumphs of rural collectivization on the eve of the great famine of 1932.

  Other ages have been similarly dizzy with success, convinced that they stood on the doorstep of the Temple of Truth. The Pythagoreans believed it, before they stumbled into the 'Unspeakable Numbers' and the Temple vanished in the mist. Again, in the seventeenth century, intoxicated by the vista which the scientific Revolution had opened up, most of its pioneers thought that it would take only one or possibly two generations until they wrested its last secret from nature. 'Give me matter and motion, and I will construct the world', wrote Descartes. 'The particular phenomena of the arts and sciences are really but a handful,' wrote Francis Bacon, 'the invention of all causes and all sciences would be a labour of but a few years.'

  Within a generation after Haeckel had proclaimed that the Riddles of the Universe had been solved, nearly all the solutions turned out to be spurious. In 1925 Whitehead wrote that the physical theory of matter 'got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus'; in the lifetime of the next generation it became a welter of paradoxa, compared to which the universe of rotating crystal spheres had been a model of sanity.

  I have written elsewhere about the great vanishing act which accompanied the process of unification in science. It started when Galileo discarded colour, sound, smell, and taste as illusions of the senses which could all be reduced to the 'primary qualities' of physics, to matter and motion. But one after another these 'ultimate and irreducible' entities vanished to the tune of the 'Ten Little Nigger Boys'. First the indivisible atom went up in fireworks, then the atomic nucleus, then the 'elementary particles' in the nucleus; matter evaporated in the physicists' hands, and its ultimate constituents joined electricity, magnetism, and gravity as manifestations of excited states of 'fields' which could be described only in mathematical terms. Theoretical physics is no longer concerned with things, but with the mathematical relations between abstractions which are the residue of the vanished things. To quote Russell: 'Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.'

  For three centuries the reduction of qualifies to quantities has been spectacularly successful, and it was reasonable to hope that within a generation or two the supreme synthesis which would enable us to reduce all phenomena in the physical world to a few basic mathematical formulae -- something of the nature of the Unified Field Theory on which Einstein worked, unsuccessfully, throughout the second half of his life. It is still not unlikely that this hope was well founded, that in the foreseeable future subatomic physics will strike rock bottom as it were, and obtain the answers to the questions it has asked. But it is becoming increasingly evident that both the questions and the answers of contemporary physics are couched in an elusive symbol-language which has only a very indirect bearing on reality, and has little to offer to satisfy man's craving for glimpses of the ultimate truth. Eddington realized long ago that these symbols 'have as much resemblance to the real qualities of the material world . . . as a telephone number has to a subscriber'. And two centuries before him, in the jubilant days which followed the unveiling of Newton's universe, Swift, the passionate sceptic, had this prophetic intuition:

  He said, that new Systems of Nature were but new Fashions, which would vary in every Age; and even those who pretend to demonstrate them from Mathematical Principles, would flourish but a short Period of Time, and be out of Vogue when that was determined. [20]

  Perhaps that saturation point is not far away, and perhaps science will then start asking a new type of question. One branch after another of chemistry, physics, and cosmology has merged in the majestic river as it approaches the estuary -- to be swallowed up by the ocean, lose its identity, and evaporate into the clouds; the final act of the great vanishing process, and the beginning, one hopes, of a new cycle. It has been said that we know more and more about less and less. It seems that the more universal the 'laws' which we discover, the more elusive they become, and that the ultimate consummation of all rivers of knowledge is in the cloud of unknowing.

  Thus, contrary to appearances and beliefs, science, like poetry or architecture or painting, has its genres, 'movements', schools, theories which it pursues with increasing perfection until the level of saturation is reached where all is done and said -- and then embarks on a new approach, based on a different type of curiosity, a different scale of values. Not only Newton, but Leonardo, Mozart, and Flaubert saw further because they too stood on the shoulders of giants; and Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of science is not in a truth 'more absolute' than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is biassed by the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period, as a Rembrandt nude differs from a nude by Manet.

  Summary

  The history of science shows recurrent cycles of differentiation and specialization followed by reintegrations on a higher level; from unity to variety to more generalized patterns of unity-in-variety. The process also has certain analogies with biological evolution -- such as wastefulness, sudden mutations, the struggle for survival between competing theories.

  The various phases in the historic cycle correspond to the characteristic stages of individual discovery: the periods of creative anarchy to the period of incubation; the emergence of the new synthesis to the bisociative act. It may emerge suddenly, sparked off by a single individual disco
very; or gradually, as in the history of electro-magnetism, where a series of individual discoveries acted as 'links'. Each revolutionary historic advance has a constructive and a destructive aspect: the thaw of orthodox doctrines and the resulting fertile chaos correspond to the regressive phase of the individual reculer-pour-mieux-sauter phenomenon. Lastly, the process of verification and elaboration of individual discoveries is reflected on the map of history as the consolidation of the new frontier -- followed by the development of a new orthodoxy, a hardening of the collective matrix -- until it gets blocked and the cycle starts again.

  The decisive phase in the historic cycle, the dawn of the new synthesis, appears as the confluence of previously separate branches of science, or a cross-fertilization between different mental disciplines or experimental techniques. The collection of new empirical data is of essential importance, but both the collection and interpretation of the data are selective processes guided by theoretical considerations. The history of every science proves that observations and experiments which prima facie seem to contradict a theory do not necessarily lead to its abandonment; and vice versa, successful theories (such as the heliocentric system or Special Relativity) have been built on data which had been available for a long time, by rearranging the mosaic of hard facts into a different pattern.

  'Snowblindness', faulty integrations, and other forms of the individual pathology of thought, are reflected on a vastly magnified scale in the history of science; and the power of habit over the individual mind is reflected in the conservatism of scientific bodies and schools -- which has impeded progress for periods ranging from years to centuries.