If a stranger were to approach you with a box of crayons and ask you to draw a clown, how would you respond? Would you pluck out a crayon at random and draw a stick figure, adding only a few wholesale gestures meant to indicate in the laziest, most basic way possible that what you have drawn is a clown—large circular feet, the hurried scribble of a fright wig? Or, worse, would you scorn the exercise altogether? Would you roll your eyes, as if to suggest that drawing a clown is beneath you, that your veiy inability to perform such a task stands as proof that you have dedicated yourself to far worthier, far more challenging pursuits? If either of these reactions seems plausible to you or correct, then you are not a scientist. Nor is it likely that you will ever become one.
However, if, despite the fact that you are not a gifted artist, you try to draw a clown with enthusiasm, if you ask the stranger with his box of crayons to be patient while you carefully determine which colors you will use, if you approach the absurd names of the crayons—Antique Brass, Aztec Gold, Electric Lime, Jazzberry Jam, Smokey Topaz—not as examples of obscene cutesiness but as units of a true and exhaustive taxonomy, signifying fundamental components of expression which will need to be deliberately selected and arranged so as to achieve the perfect image of CLOWN, if you manage to come up with a handful of cx eative flourishes—the distinctive head of a seltzer bottle, a bright pair of button suspenders, a certain, waggish look on the clown’s face— which, despite your aforementioned lack of artistic talent, not only evoke the viewers concept of CLOWN but enrich that concept—then you are most definitely a scientist. Congratulations.
To pursue a career in science, the level of reflexive creativity described above must be the foundation of your personality. The reason for this is that science does not take place in the physical world but in the framework of your mind.
Example: You are watching a combination of chemicals sputter and foam in a dish. As you do so, you are confronted with a mental image of a floating placard upon which is written the formula for the chemical reaction that is just now taking place in the dish. This formula is either written in the penmanship of a long-forgotten teacher as it was first
glimpsed on a chalkboard years ago or else simply in the indescribable scrawl of your own thoughts. Whatever the case, it is this placard, containing that formula, which helps you to distinguish the sputtering taking place in that dish from all other sputterings.
What’s more, all the sensoiy details attached to this chemical reaction— the bright white foam, the sound of a gentle crackling, the pinched, acrid smell—are not taking place in the physical world, which cannot see or hear or smell. All these things are taking place in your mind. So the act of observing the contents of this dish involves interplay between at least two abstractions: 1.) The floating placard and 2.) Your minds interpretation of the physical world.
It is for this reason that science depends on creativity, because grasping the relationship between abstractions is essentially a creative act. Such mental dexterity depends on the same imaginative leaps of faith as art, the same lightning-strike intuition, the same ability to draw connections between dissonant quantities.
“That’s all well and good,” one might say, “but do you mean to suggest from this that when approached by a strange man and asked to draw a clown, I must automatically submit myself to his whim?” Yes! You must! It is not enough that scientists be creative only when it suits them. Unlike the artist, whose creativity is narrow and self-interested, a scientist’s creativity must be all-consuming. Childlike tasks must be immediately appealing, because the way in which a scientist approaches the world must be the result of a sense of wonder that is intrinsically childlike.
When you take a young boy to the zoo, he wants to know everything. Looking at the gorilla, he asks you what kind of things the gorilla eats. But before you can answer, he asks you who is responsible for feeding the gorilla. What’s more, he asks you if that person has a family, and, if so, where do they live. The boy wants to know if there are any children his age in this family and where do they go to school. Also, he asks, who made the gorilla’s cage? How did the people who made the cage know that it would be able to withstand a gorilla? Does the gorilla like it here? Why am I a little boy and not a gorilla? When you inevitably lose your patience with the boy and tell him to stop asking you these questions that you perceive to be pointless, the silence that follows will be loaded and urgent as he does his best to hold back his unyielding necessity to look at the world and ask how and for what reason. Likewise, a scientist must confront the world with questions hanging off questions hanging off questions.
Now, draw a clown: