Science: A Creative Endeavour
by Tatty-Anton Smith
The essence of creativity is often interpreted as the moment of insight. For instance, Archimedes’ Eureka moment when he worked out how to classify gold as pure or fake for the king’s crown. However, creativity comes from the Latin ‘creare’ and ‘crescere’ meaning arise, bring forth, to make grow. I interpret the word to therefore mean harvesting and growing an idea. For example, a scientist doing many experiments to finally come to the right conclusion, like Thomas Edison creating a lightbulb on the 1001th go - a lightbulb moment. Or a chef who uses many ingredients and ways of cooking to finally come to the right recipe, an artist who has many sketches and layers of paint underneath his topcoat.
The behind the scenes is what you don’t often see in life. People omit the hard work gone into something and will instead present the pristine and polished final product. Yet what is intriguing are the thoughts, calculations and preparation that goes into making an oeuvre. Aside from calculations, sometimes discoveries can arise spontaneously, for example the famous discovery of Penicillin by Alexander Fleming, where he found a mould growing on a staphylococcus plate, which later enabled doctors and scientists to treat many illnesses.
Or equally the discovery of helicobacter pylori causing acute gastritis and stomach ulcers, in which Barry Marshall self-experimented by ingesting beef extract and bacteria from a petri dish. Another famous self-experiment was the discovery of LSD by Albert Hoffman in 1938 (lysergic acid diethylamide, first isolated from a fungus that grows on rye). He accidentally ingested the substance in 1943 and spoke of everything being filled with light, as the connectivity in his brain depending on serotonin 2A receptor activation was altered, leading to a state called ‘ego-dissolution’. These risk takers created experiments and opportunities that some wouldn’t dare pioneer, yet these discoveries would not have occurred without their leap of faith.
The word science comes from the Latin ‘scientia’, meaning knowledge or expertise, possibly also from the verb ‘scire’ or even ‘scrindere’ and the Greek ‘skhizein’, meaning to separate one thing from another or distinguish. Scientists must come up with a hypothesis, design an experiment and then interpret the results. Yet as the saying goes, “good artists copy, great artists steal”, many scientific discoveries have been plagiarised. One of the biggest scandals was Watson and Crick getting the Nobel Prize for the revelation of DNA, when it was actually down to many scientists before, namely Friedrich Miescher and Rosalind Franklin, the unsung heroes. Many neglect the years of work put in by the scientists that came before them, the giants' shoulders upon which they stand.
Scientists are expected to be systematic, analytical; words that seem to be completely opposite to creative and arty. But I implore you to see the similarities between the two - ingenuity, inventiveness, originality. It is possible that our view on the arts and sciences are due to our experience of them at school - science supposed to be rigorous and ‘difficult’, with specific answers and little room for original thought. Perhaps this expected wealth of knowledge has been associated with a lack of creativity, yet at its very core, science depends upon imagination and innovation. As Einstein said, “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.” Therefore, the idea that science is a creative endeavour is undeniably true.
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