Briggs+text

“Gerald Holton has discerned that the work of scientific creativity is shaped by clusters of presuppositions and ‘gut’ assumptions which each scientist has about the universe. He calls these gut assumptions ‘themata’: themes. For the most part themata are aesthetic qualities like the assumption that the universe is basically symmetrical, or the opposite assumption that it is asymmetrical. [...]

Holton says, ‘My guess is that there’s a focusing of these ideas fairly early, in childhood. What is impressive is the stability they show over many years. Once the scientist has committed himself to one particular set of presuppositions, the set doesn’t change very much.’ The themata are central to scientific process because they are imposed ‘on your observations and they often tell you which kinds of experiments to try or not to try.

Holton’s themata sound like abstractions but they aren’t abstractions in the usual sense. They’re a concrete feel for the surrounding world. ‘Quite a few of the themata have a visual component,’ Holton says, ‘very often they are not even conscious.’ Though he terms them thematic ideas, they might also be called thematic perceptions, for convictions about symmetry or complexity, simplicity, even formalism are convictions about the way things ‘look’ or should look. [...]

Holton believes that that ‘direction’ Einstein felt, his vision, had something to do with the compass story and a very early commitment to the theme of the ‘continuum’ or ‘field’. This sense that the ‘something deeply hidden’ in reality must be a form of continuum, like the magnetic continuum that held the compass needle, guided Einstein in his later work as a physicist. But that wasn’t all. For, as the boy had gazed at the amazing instrument that his father had brought to his sickbed, another primitive presupposition must also have been awakened, Holton believes. Perhaps the constancy of the needle that always points north convinced Einstein that there must be a fundamental ‘invariance’ in nature. Significantly, Einstein first called his theory of special relativity ‘Invarianten Theory,’ [...]

Themata are never resolved. Depending on the problems being confronted at any given period of history, some themes may produce real insights into nature and others will not. One could reasonably speculate that great scientists have a much higher commitment to the pursuit of their idiosyncratic ensembles of themes than their less creative colleagues. Colleagues may ignore, even suppress some of their own subliminal thematic perception because they are not perceptions that people around them acknowledge.”

Source: Briggs, J. (1990) //Fire in the Crucible: The Self-Creation of Creativity and Genius.// Los Angeles: Tarcher, pp. 26, 32.

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