Scientific Creativity

Abstract

Creative experiences like those of Archimedes (stepping up into his bathtub), Poincaré (stepping up into a coach), Charles Darwin (reading Malthus), Marcel Proust (biting into a piece of toast), Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Mark Rothko (describing their most creative ideas as appearing with no conscious forethought), and so many others, seem to avoid discrete rational reasoning. Their irrational insights led to startlingly new representations of nature. The seminal ideas emerge not in any real-time sequence but in an explosion of thought. Analog processes do just this because they seem to produce their output in a single explosive step without any resemblance to discrete and purposeful rational reasoning.