Under the Microscope You won't get anywhere in science if you don't use reason and logic. Indeed, many people think that reason and logic plus hard work are the only attributes necessary to do good science. They are wrong.
You cannot be a research scientist of the first order unless you are also equipped with a creative capacity additional to conventional intelligence, ie good imagination, keen intuition, appreciation of aesthetics and the ability to wonder at the mysterious. A streak of good fortune will also greatly help.
Creative intelligence is the wellspring of science, generating the basic flow on which everything else depends.
The river downstream of this source can be reliably harnessed to do useful things, like powering the rotation of wheels, but we must never forget that the entire river system only flows while the source remains strong.
We must resist the temptation to concentrate all our attention on turning wheels downstream while neglecting to maintain the wellspring.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) is the pre-eminent icon of 20th-century science. The implications of his revolutionary discoveries in physics are still being worked through by physicists today. Einstein believed that imagination, intuition and a sense of wonder in the face of the mysterious are critically important attributes of a first-class scientist. The following two quotations from his writings illustrate his thinking:
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it, and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead . . ."
Einstein deliberately set aside time every day to let his imagination roam. On one famous occasion he imagined what the universe would look like if he rode through it sitting on a beam of light.
Everyone who has tried to do significant scientific research knows that the most difficult part is to generate a fruitful idea (hypothesis) to pursue. This is largely where creativity plays its part, generating ideas that have not been formulated before. The fruits of a hypothesis are harvested after many cycles of experimentation and refinement of the hypothesis.
Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961), the Nobel prize-winning Austrian physicist, while working at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, was once approached by a frustrated postgraduate student who asked the great man to throw him a good idea he might work on. Schrödinger replied - "If I had such an idea, I would work on it myself".
We take in and process information about the world in many ways. One vitally important way is observation and processing of the observed data through reason and logic. But we also gather and process information through our intuition, insight, imagination, and so on. However, we tend to downplay the importance of these latter capacities.
Many years ago, when attending a scientific meeting, I met a man who appeared to be one of the nicest people I had ever come across. His manner was very polite, gentle and tolerant. He was a good listener and seemed very accommodating.
Yet, something inside me whispered that this man's appearance was merely a veneer - that in reality he was quite different to what he appeared. I later got to know him well and my premonitions were all confirmed.
Einstein was greatly intrigued by the comprehensibility of the world. This is a subtle but powerful point that has intrigued many great scientists. The natural world is comprehensible through mathematics, and mathematics is a pure product of the human mind and imagination - patterns formed by the mind. But, when we look out into the universe we find these same patterns there. As the Anglican theologian-scientist John Polkinghorne puts it, it's as though the universe is "shot through with mind".
An appreciation of beauty is important in science, not least because it encourages the scientist to persevere when things are not going smoothly.
The mechanisms of the natural world are elegant and beautiful. Contemplation of a new mechanism of nature is a source of intense pleasure to the scientist who unveiled it. Elegance and beauty are present even in the mathematical equations that describe the world, like E = MC2. Inelegant, clumsy equations are almost invariably wrong.
To keep the river of science strong we must tend the wellspring and it is at the wellspring, which is mostly basic non-applied research, that the qualities of intuition, imagination and wonder are most critical. Harnessing the river downstream is where short-term economic benefit lies, but these benefits persist for only as long as the flow from the source remains strong. When funding science we must resist the temptation to direct almost all the funding downstream of the source.
Einstein left us with a mine of quotable sayings. I will finish with two: "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mystery of eternity, of life, of the marvellous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery everyday. Never lose a holy curiosity.
"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."
• William Reville is associate professor of biochemistry and public awareness of science officer at UCC - http://understandingscience.ucc.ie