Creativity in Science
When innovating in microbial ecology, Think Like a Microbe™ …
I returned about a week ago from a workshop on Architectural Photography, organized by Joel Tjintjelaar, and Tobi Trumpp in Rome and Milan. I had become first aware of Joel a few years ago for his Artisan plug-in for Photoshop to aid in producing fine art black and white images. When I looked at his photo galleries and read his blog, I realized that he was thinking very deeply about this topic and felt that I could learn a lot about architectural photography from him. That was the case, but the workshop was much more than that. Joel is an intellectual who has thought about the meaning of art and how to express one’s self through that medium. He challenged us to come up with our personal definition of art. This necessitates introspection – his definition is that art is consciousness manifested.
On the plane trip back home, I thought about the relationship of his ideas on art to science. Science is not art, but both are an expression of humans about their world and the highest forms of each values creativity. I arrived home and looked into the nexus between them -- the literature on this is thinner than I had anticipated. Both require a mastery of technical methods and conceptual tools that produce familiarity with norms to creatively question them and advance the discipline.
For both arenas, the word ‘intuition’ popped up. However, the precise meaning of this for science or art felt rather murky. For the filmmaker David Lynch, intuition was an essential tool, which he defined as “knowing when something is not correct and seeing a way to make it correct.” He went on to say that it is a knowingness of feeling and thinking. Whew! I am more comfortable with “insight” than “intuition” as the latter smacks of an innate ability that we may have to varying degrees. If that were the case I should just end this blog post right now. McCrea (2010) distinguished intuition as “the ability to understand immediately without conscious reasoning” whereas insight was the “capacity to gain accurate and a deep understanding of a problem; it is often associated with movement beyond existing paradigms.” On my photography workshop, Joel provided examples and exercises for becoming more introspective and finding one’s voice as an artist. I believe there are analogous activities whereby a scientist can improve their capacity for creativity, insight, and (perhaps) intuition.
Philosophical starting point
I concur with Max Planck who in his 1933 book, Where is Science Going stated:
“…there are two theorems that form together the cardinal hinge on which the whole structure of physical science turns. These theorems are: (1) There is a real outer world which exists independently of our act of knowing and (2) The real outer world is not directly knowable.”
So we as scientists conduct experiments and analyze data to better understand nature. But particularly as biologists, we recognize that each success is not an endpoint but often reveals another, deeper level of sophistication in the mechanism. As microbial ecologists, we deal with nonlinear, dynamic, complex systems in which the ‘rules’ are often not deterministic but depend upon previous histories and future contingencies. And there is the constant assessment whether any material we experiment upon (whether a model system or sample collected from the habitat is ‘real’).
Paths to deeper consciousness
My search included re-reading W. I. B. Beveridge’s 1957 book, The Art of Scientific Investigation. I remember reading it as a young scientist and was really energized by it. Fifty years on some parts are dated but it remains an articulate overview of fundamentals relevant to this topic.
On becoming familiar with norms
Beveridge advises reading the literature on your research topic – but critically not slavishly! In addition, one’s thinking can become so conditioned by the constraints of that literature that it becomes difficult to generate novel ideas. One of the greats in microbial pathogenesis, Stanley Falkow, told me that he only read the literature about once a year to avoid getting too caught up in details that might restrict his thinking.
On the other hand, reading scientific literature from a broader set of related fields may promote novel ways of looking at your research problem. An unanticipated benefit I got from teaching a microbial ecology class to graduate and advanced undergraduate students was that it forced me to look at the broad literature in microbial ecology published since I last taught the course. More often than not, I came upon insights and methods of measurement or experimentation that were useful to my own research program.
In summary, to improve your own creativity the best thing you can do is to experience very widely. Originality often arises from finding analogies between disparate objects or ideas.
Day science and Night Science
Louis Pasteur was observing motility in the bacteria responsible for butyric acid fermentation. When the cells came near the edge of the cover slip, they stopped moving, unlike many other cultures he had examined. He inferred this was due to O2 at the interface and hypothesized that life without O2 was possible.
August Kekulé (1890): ‘I turned my chair towards the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gambolling … long rows …all twining and twisting in snakelike motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tails. … As if by a flash of lightening I awoke; and this time I also spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis.’
Francois Jacob, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work on the lac operon, coined the terms day science and night science in his autobiography, The Statue Within. Day Science entails rounds of controlled experiments testing and revising one’s hypotheses – Pasteur followed up his observation on the motility of butyric acid bacteria by experimentally demonstrating fermentative organisms proliferated in the absence of O2 and that some were killed by exposure to O2. It is meticulous, orderly and rational.
Night science (such as Kekulé’s dream of the benzene ring) is messier – Jacob writes:“Night science wanders blindly. It hesitates, stumbles, falls back, sweats, wakes with a start. Doubting everything, it feels its way, questions itself, constantly pulls itself back together. It is a sort of workshop of the possible where what will become the building material of science is worked out. Where hypotheses take the form of vague presentiments, hazy sensations. …
“In the endless interior dialogue, among the innumerable suppositions, connections, combinations, associations that constantly pass through the mind, a beam of light sometimes rends the obscurity. Suddenly the landscape shines with blinding light, terrifying, stronger than a thousand suns. After the initial shock begins a hard struggle with habits of thought. A conflict with the universe of concepts that governs our reasoning. One is not yet authorized to say whether the new hypothesis will get beyond its initial form of rough sketch and become refined, perfected. Whether it will withstand the test of logic. Whether it will gain admission to day science.”
A less prosaic analysis identified four stages of how ideas bubbled up in other Nobel Prize winners (by Csikszentmihalyi and Sawyer, cited in McCrea, 2010). Intense reading and research came first. Next was a period of time spent away from the bench and outside distractions, on activities ranging from sleeping to playing a musical instrument. This is where the Jacob’s “beam of light” critically flashed. Stage four was more conscious work on the problem, in fleshing out and elaborating the idea, to the point that it could become ‘day science.’
Those that appear to be particularly good at this are capable of holding many sets of patterns pertaining to a domain of knowledge in their immediate memory, and particularly prize those to which they have had an emotional reaction/vivid memory.
Kekulé (1890): ‘Let us learn to dream … but let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been put to the proof by the waking understanding.’
Discussion as a stimulus to the mind
An important element of that first stage is not just sitting in your office or at your lab bench in isolation, but interacting with colleagues! That helps identify the current norms for the scientific culture you inhabit and provides critical input on your thoughts upon the research problem. Two of the happiest times in my research career were as a postdoc in Tom Brock’s lab at the University of Wisconsin and on sabbatical in Luuc Mur’s workgroup at the University of Amsterdam. In both places, the whole lab ate lunch together. Yes, a certain fraction of time was spent on the fortunes of the Badger hockey team or the Ajax football team but a lot was spent discussing the science we were pursuing. In a number of cases this bled over from lunch to conversations with a smaller number of people that might last another hour or two. Those were not just useful – they were fun.
Chance
Louis Pasteur: “Dans les champs de l’observation, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits prepares”
Don’t underestimate the role of chance in new discoveries. But as Pasteur knew, it takes a ‘prepared mind’ to recognize something unusual and appreciate its significance. This is where ‘day science’ can hold sway for those who actively work at the lab bench or in the field, particularly when deploying novel technical or experimental procedures. But the trick is in not only recognizing but also interpreting the clue and realizing its significance. An open mind to explore unexplained observations, imagination, and that illusive property of ‘intuition’ are of great value here.
Strategy and tactics
“Work, Finish, Publish.” — Michael Faraday (1791-1867)
Beveridge considers scientific research an ‘art’ in that it does not have explicit rules. That is, as with art it should have the freedom to be anything it wants to be, to break the rules. That is certainly easier said than done in the contemporary ‘business’ of research grant funding. A general strategy is to work towards a clear objective but keep alert for and seize unexpected opportunities (for which concentrated mental effort is required to birth new ideas).
The two essential attributes for a scientific researcher are love of science and insatiable curiosity. [tenacity in the face of failure is a close third]
Tactical planning is better done by the operative in the field, not by an administrative committee.
Scientific advances tend to proceed by stages – the gathering of new information leads to a pause for synthesis/interpretation/refining of hypotheses prior to further data collection.
Courses of action at the frontier of knowledge may depend more on personal judgment based upon insights or ‘intuition’ than purely objective and rational ‘science.’
The extremes of scientific minds are: speculative [hypotheses in advance of facts] vs systematic [accumulate data until the hypothesis is clear]
According to Mees, scientific discovery has three different methods of working and each requires a different kind of mind: Theoretical synthesis / Observation and experiment/ Invention
Biological discoveries are often first recognized as qualitative phenomena, but the aim should be to refine them to a quantitative basis and to discern the mechanisms that underlie them.
I had covered “mechanism” in one of my early posts. As part of my preparation for writing this post, I read In Search of Mechanisms – Discoveries across the Life Sciences by Carl Craver and Lindley Darden. There are enough interesting ideas there that I will make my reactions to their book the subject of my next post.
Bibliography
Beveridge WIB (1957) The Art of Scientific Investigation. WW Norton and Company, New York.
Csikszentmihalyi M, Sawyer K. (1995) Creative insight: The social dimension of a solitary moment. In: Sternberg RJ, Davidson JE, editors. The Nature of Insight. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. p. 329–363.
Lehmann, J., Gaskins, B. (2019) Learning scientific creativity from the arts. Palgrave Commun 5, 96. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0308-8
McCrea, S. M. (2010). Intuition, insight, and the right hemisphere: Emergence of higher sociocognitive functions. Psychology Research and Behavior Management, 3, 1–39. https://doi.org/10.2147/prbm.s7935
Quotes
“With accurate experiment and observation to work upon, imagination becomes the architect of physical theory.” — John Tyndall (1820-1893)
“The really valuable factor is intuition.” — Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
“When you have at last arrived at certainty, your joy is one of the greatest that can be felt by a human soul.” – Louis Pasteur
“One word characterizes the most strenuous of the efforts for the advancement of science that I have made perseveringly during 55 years: that word is failure.” – Lord Kelvin
Even with such men in whom the hypothesis birth-rate is excessively high, it only just manages to exceed the hypothesis death-rate by a narrow margin. – WH George
“One of the first things which the beginner must grasp is that statistics needs to be taken into account when the experiment is being planned, or else the work may not be worth treating statistically”
“ It is essential to realize the impossibility of obtaining exactly similar groups. The difficulty must be met by estimating the variability …” – WIB Beveridge
“Discovery should come as an adventure rather than as the result of a logical process of thought. Sharp, prolonged thinking is necessary that we may keep on the chosen road, but it does not necessarily lead to discovery.” — Theobald Smith (1859-1934)
“Research is fundamentally a state of mind involving continual re-examination of doctrines and axioms upon which current thought … are based.” — Theobald Smith (1859-1934)
“In science the primary duty of ideas is to be useful and interesting even more than to be ‘true’.” — Wilfred Trotter (1872-1939)
“The dispassionate intellect, the open mind, the unprejudiced observer exist … only exists in a sort of intellectualist folk-lore.” — Wilfred Trotter (1872-1939)
“But the great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact—which is so constantly being enacted under the eyes of philosophers …” – TH Huxley
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer” —Albert Einstein
Your Moment of Zen
I returned a week ago from a workshop on architectural photography held in Rome and Milan, Italy. I got there a day early so visited the Vatican Museums. With respect to the topic at hand, perhaps the most appropriate thing I saw was Raphael’s fresco, the School of Athens.
