'What if...?': Creativity in science

Everyone knows the story of Newton and his apple – it is told to all of us as children. Yet how many of us would also admit to being slightly underwhelmed by the tale. What, really, is so impressive about noticing that an apple falls towards the ground? Apples have been falling from trees since well before Newton ever came along, and no doubt will continue to do so for many years more. What exactly was it that struck this young man, sat in his parents’ garden, ‘locked down’ while a pandemic raged all around him; what was the seed which, with many years of nurture and care, would grow into a theory that changed the course of science, and marked the start of the Enlightenment in England?

Newton didn’t merely notice that the apple fell towards the Earth; his intellectual leap really consisted in looking up and asking: ‘What if the same force which pulls this apple towards the Earth also stretches up, far into the sky, beyond our atmosphere even, and holds the moon in its orbit”.

‘What if…’ These two words have heralded every intellectual advance our species has accomplished, as Jacob Bronowski describes in several instances in his excellent book ‘Science and Human Values’. Science is, at its very core, a creative act; it is the search for likenesses, for metaphors and analogies, for hidden unities. For in a sense what Newton had asked was ‘What if this apple and that moon—entirely unalike in their appearances—are really the same.’

For Bronowski, this creativity and the search for hidden unities underlies a deep correspondence between science and the arts. For the pleasure of art also consists in drawing comparisons: a beautiful metaphor is one which reveals a surprising connection between the tenor and vehicle, deepening and enriching our understanding of the former; a painting is successful not when it renders its subject exactly, photographically, but when it when it reveals something new, unexpected, through some unusual technique or juxtaposition.

In the room next door from where I am writing, I have a print on the wall depicting the sun setting on a Tuscan hillside. It is coloured with deep, strong hues, aubergine and garnet where the shade has already fallen, ochre for the fields still catching the last of the dying light, and the avenues of trees are a deep moss. It is abstract, to be sure, but I love this print because it teaches me that these colours are not in fact unnatural – now, whenever I look out at the gathering dusk, I notice the same colours, and I realise I understand better how the world really is. This discovery is itself a kind of science.

In the rest of the book, Bronowski advances the idea that a kind of scientific method might apply not only to our understanding of our physical world, but also to our ethics, our social world. To my mind, the argument is not entirely convincing, but nevertheless deserves deep consideration, for his premise is undeniable, that while science has advanced so successfully thanks to its acceptance of empirical testing, ethics has no such standard of proof. Yet what I return to again is this idea of creativity.

One final example from the book: Bronowski quotes the account of Eric Shipton, describing his 1953 attempt on Everest. Shipton recounts how his Sherpa guide, Angtarkay, who had lived all his life in one of the valleys next to the mountain, nevertheless did not recognise the peaks and saddles of the mountain from the other side. He recognised both faces of the mountain perfectly well on their own, but simply hadn’t made the connection that the features he was looking at were one and the same. This connection, this stitching together of a map in his mind, allowed Angtarkay a better understanding of the mountain in front of him.

All scientific discoveries are creations of this kind. We recognise that two things are really one, and this recognition gives greater order and stability to our world. And it is because of this creativity that science is not simply a mechanical process, a cataloguing of facts, but a human activity – a quest of the imagination, always asking ourselves ‘What if…?’.