Text A. Vision in Science

“Where there is no vision, the people perish,” a wise man once said. Creative scientists usually have the ability both to lift up their eyes and look into the future, and to look with penetrating insight into the present.

Galileo was a man of vision, and one of the fathers of science. Using a telescope, he noticed that the shadows of the mountains on the moon were similar to those on the earth; and proposed that the laws of shadowing behaved the same on the moon and on the earth. Although this may seem rather obvious, in Galileo’s time it was a significant scientific step forward to relate a law of nature found on the earth with that elsewhere in the universe.

One of the greatest scientists of all time, Sir Issak Newton, was a man of enormous vision. Extending Galileo’s observation that shadows on the moon were similar to those on the earth, he proposed that the force which made an apple fall to the ground on our planet earth operated throughout the universe and hence the force on the apple was the very same force of gravity that holds all the planets in their orbits. Today, it is difficult for us to realize the enormous leap in the imagination Newton required to recognize the unity of the laws of mechanics on earth and in the heavens. Newton was a great creative scientist, primarily because he was a man of vision.

It is said that only dead fish swim with the stream. To be truly creative, it is often necessary to look at what other scientists are doing, and then do something different! In 1924 De Broglie (a French physicist) proposed that the same wave-particle duality, which occurred in light could also occur in matter, a concept that appeared at the time to be nonsensical to most scientists. De Broglie won a Nobel prize for his theoretical work on the wave properties of particles, which forms the basis of a fundamental new area of science: quantum mechanics. In 1927, using beams of electrons, Thomson in the UK, and Davisson and Germer in the USA, produced electron diffraction patterns from crystalline materials, which looked identical to the known X-ray diffraction patterns from the same materials, thus demonstrating that the electron has wave properties.

An important feature of unconventionality is to question accepted scientific theories, mechanisms, textbooks and papers. Such questioning also helps us to understand science better. Although many scientific theories are well established and probably correct, some current scientific theories will be shown to be wrong in the future.

It is necessary for a creative scientist not only to have a new idea, but also develop this idea, perform experiments and demonstrate that the concept is true. Consequently, persistence is necessary if creativity in science is to be recognized by others.

For example, Newton did not just tell the world that he believed the laws of mechanics were the same everywhere in the universe. He went on to calculate the orbits of the planets as inferred from the effects of gravity observed on earth, and then he compared his calculated orbits with experimentally observed orbits. It was the excellent agreement of this new theory with his experiments that persuaded scientists that

Newton was right.

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