Abstract
WHAT ARE THE ORIGINS of scientific concepts? How are scientific concepts transformed as science progresses? What is the role of mental imagery in scientific research? How do scientists invent or discover theories? Because these problems go right to the heart of the age-old inquiry of how we construct knowledge through interacting with the world we live in, they have long occupied scientists and philosophers and, more recently, historians of science and cognitive psychologists.
Laws of thought have evolved according to the same laws of evolution as the optical apparatus of the eye, the acoustic machinery of the ear and the pumping device of the heart . . . . We must not aspire to derive nature from our concepts, but must adapt the latter to the former.
L. Boltzmann (1904)
Mr. Russell will tell me no doubt that it is not a question of psychology, but of logic and epistemology; and I shall be led to answer that there is no logic and epistemology independent of psychology.
H. Poincaré (1909)
Scientific thought is a development of pre-scientific thought.
A. Einstein (1934a)
Indeed, we find ourselves here on the very path taken by Einstein of adapting our modes of perception borrowed from the sensations to the gradually deepening knowledge of the laws of Nature. The hindrances met on this path originate above all in the fact that, so to say, every word in the language refers to our ordinary perception.
N. Bohr (1928)
According to our customary intuition [we attributed to electrons the] same sort of reality as the objects of our daily world . . . . In the course of time this representation has proved to be false [because the] electron and the atom possess not any degree of direct physical reality as the objects of daily experience.
W. Heisenberg (1926b)
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Notes
An early statistical survey of scientists’ thinking is contained in a book by the founder of eugenics, Francis Galton (1883). Among the criticisms of Galton’s work, Hadamard’s is pertinent to the theme of this book. Although only about 10 percent of Galton’s respondents to his “breakfast-table survey” considered them– selves to be nonimagists, most of them were successful academics and scientists, so Galton concluded that the “visualizing facility” was inferior to the “higher intellectual operations.” Galton was surprised at this result because he considered himself to be a visual thinker. Hadamard (1954) differs with Galton’s conclusion. In particular, Hadamard notes that in the face of Galton’s statistical study, Galton did not give precise percentages of those who thought in images rather than words; this may have been due to Galton’s realization that he needed a larger sample to distinguish between creative thinking and the imageless “tense thought” that sometimes accompanies routine problem solving and which is also the predominant mode of thought in the average person.
For example, Beveridge (1950) writes, “Most mathematicians are the speculative type . . . . Scientists may be divided broadly into two types according to their method of thinking. At one extreme is the speculative worker [who tries] to arrive at the solution by use of imagination and intuition . . . . The other extreme is the systematic worker who progresses slowly by carefully reasoned stages and who collects most of the data before arriving at the solution. Research commonly progresses in spurts . . . .”
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© 1984 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Miller, A.I. (1984). Introduction. In: Imagery in Scientific Thought Creating 20th-Century Physics. Birkhäuser, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-0545-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-0545-3_1
Publisher Name: Birkhäuser, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4684-0547-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4684-0545-3
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