The Eye of the Beholder: A Critical Examination of Some Cultural Aspects of Scientific Creativity

Abstract

I. In the Galleria dell'Accademia of Florence, there may be seen, unfinished as he left them, the four Captives by Michelangelo. These massive figures, struggling to free themselves from envelopments of marble illustrate that artist's conception of the sculptor's task: literally to dis-cover the statue hidden in a block of stone by chipping away its concealing shell [1]. This use, by Michelangelo, of the verb 'to discover' comes as a surprise to most moderns, for it blurs a customary distinction between science and the arts. He used the term because he accepted a neoPlatonic view of beauty as absolute reality in the mind of God, which the artist strained to perceive and reveal. A few subsequent artists-poets, painters, musicians-may also have adopted this notion, but the concept of artistic discovery has gradually disappeared, except as a metaphor. The artist, we say, creates his works, as a personalized response to subjective experience, and no one would suggest that Mozart discovered his Clarinet Quintet or Walt Whitman his Leaves of Grass, as Kepler had discovered the laws of planetary motion or Newton that of universal gravitation. For scientists are denied the gift of creativity. Constrained by the actuality of the universe they study, scientists discover laws and facts of nature, previously unrecognized, in an objective world of phenomena. It is to this perceived difference in the nature of their achievements that your attention is invited, for in that presumed