I am very interested in the article that Lamberto García del Cid wrote in February 2003 about the origin of the phenomenon of inspiration in scientists in which he debates whether the ideas of these geniuses are the product of chance or rather the deserving prize fruit of the hours laborious work. I have thought about this fascinating question at times and I am convinced that in the process of pure inspiration these geniuses are “channeling”. Trendy phenomenon today in spirituality. What does this mean? According to the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, CANALIZAR is among others (1) open channels, (2) Collect streams of opinion, initiatives, aspirations, activities, etc. and guide them effectively, channel them. In spiritual circles, we refer to the action of "bringing a divine message." Undoubtedly, for a person to “channel” you have to obtain and generate a lot of energy in the field of study: constantly activate the thought / emotion and constantly insist on the area under study because being a holographic field, the more you look, observe and deepen more capable you will be to reach the All or Unity. And at the same time, in this way new channels are opened from the unified field? All that IS?
There is a directly proportional relationship between the effort and research and the obtaining of the Truth. Our dear friend Dr. Goswami would tell us that being seeds whose ground is consciousness, the more you expand the radius of your own potential, the greater awareness you will get. However, many of the anecdotes García del Cid tells us about the “peak moments” of inspiration of the geniuses he cites did not occur during the hours of increased conscious activity, but while they were sleeping, or in a sleepwalking state or when mental activity - cerebral- or conscious is under minimum … And now the inspiring article:
“Creation is the vision, also sudden,
From an unprecedented perspective.
(A. Blay Fontcuberta)
How are scientists inspired? Where do these ideas that form new paradigms in science arise, that change our vision of the cosmos? Do these ideas arise with method and dedication or do they suddenly emerge as a sort of geyser of thought? There are those who believe that inspiration, in its creative aspect, has to do with the layout of new neurological routes, understood as processes associated with personal encounter and astonishment. Here inspiration, identified with creativity, is understood as the ability to give answers, develop or invent original, valuable productions or to question and solve problems in an unusual way. A. Blay Fontcuberta believes that in order to achieve this perspective, it was necessary to place oneself on a different level than usual, abandon the old, the beaten, stop spinning, even if only for a moment, around the known data. Something that, according to Fontcuberta, requires training. Sometimes it is anomalous situations that catalyze inspiration, as Albert Einstein believed, who confessed that the main ideas about his theory came to him when he was ill. He added that there was no logical path to these elementary laws. What seems to be agreed is that inspiration, the touch of genius, the amazing idea that appears in the mind of a researcher needs planting and care, much care. The perceiving mind must be prepared, it must "deserve it."
And to deserve it nothing like work and dedication. What usually happens is that during the strain of intellectual effort, the muscles of intuition are seized, inspiration resists, and when the struggling scientist relaxes, he takes a breath, this brilliant intuition emerges by chance (in the absence of better word) among the reflections of the lucky one. The mind of this thinking being, elastic and prepared to detect any unusual nuance, receives a small flash or faint flash that then, after the corresponding works, gives birth to the brilliant conception. The most paradigmatic cases, those that belong to the popular heritage, are the cases of Newton, who comes up with his theory of gravity when he sees an apple fall from a tree, and Archimedes, who, submerged in a bathtub, discovered the principle That bears his name.
One could extend on the subject, since the matter gives of itself, but it is preferable that the scientists themselves tell us their cases of sudden inspiration. A few of these examples will instruct us better than twenty treatises on creativity psychology.
August Kekulé, the chemist who unraveled the complicated structure of benzene, claimed that the circular shape of the structure came over him during a stubborn head that was cast while preparing a chemistry manual in front of the fireplace. He began to dream about a dance of atoms that gradually turned into snakes and one of them, suddenly, bit his tail forming a ring. Kekulé woke up at that moment and spent the night trying to arrange the carbon and hydrogen atoms following the figure of the coiled snake.
Einstein had a good day sitting in the Bern patent office, where he worked, when a sudden thought came to his mind: "If a person falls freely, he would not feel his weight." The idea caused him a peculiar uneasiness, a strange excitement, an immense impression that finally led him to the vision that the gravitational mass of an object and its inertial mass are really the same thing. This vision of Einstein came to him in 1907, and was the basis of his well-known Theory of Relativity.
Fred Hoyle, a British physicist, says that on one occasion he got the inspiration driving his car on the way to Scotland. He compared such a revelation with what happened to St. Paul on the road to Damascus. At the end of the 60s, Hoyle and his collaborator Jayant Narlikar had been working on the cosmological theory of electromagnetism, a theory that used very complex mathematics. One day, while trying to solve a complicated integral, Hoyle decided to take a vacation. The researcher left Cambridge to go to Scotland, where he planned to meet with colleagues and go on excursions. It was on the road to Scotland, at the height of Bowes Moore, when suddenly he was inspired. An unusual mathematical understanding enlightened his mind and provided him with the solution of the problem that brought him wrong to bring. The lighting effect, according to his testimony, lasted only five seconds, but it was intense enough that he could store in his memory the essential steps of the plausible solution. Hoyle was so convinced of the certainty of such a revelation that he did not consider it necessary to stop to write it down on paper. When he returned to Cambridge ten days later, he had no difficulty in developing the mathematical steps that allowed him to solve the problem at hand.
The prestigious physicist Roger Penrose proved in 1965 that the singularities (infinite quantities that appear in the main physical and cosmolytic formulas) are a consequence of the equations of general relativity and are found present in most of the solutions that can describe the real universe. But what interests us here is how Penrose achieved such great intuition. He spent an afternoon talking with a friend and while crossing a street he had a thought that he immediately forgot to resume the conversation with his companion. That night, at home, he felt happy and content, but he did not know why. It was by reviewing what had happened to him that extraordinary day, that he remembered that sudden thought he had when crossing the street, namely, that the singularities should They were to be found in all solutions that met a number of reasonable conditions, and that there was a way to prove it.
In early 1927 Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and other eminent physicists discussed problems posed by the latest atomic physics, particularly the wave-particle duality of reality Physical Why were there two completely different and at the same time equivalent descriptions of physical reality? So, Bohr decided to take a four-week vacation to go skiing to Norway. In one of his alpine descents, Bohr saw it all suddenly clear: physics was not about nature, but about our knowledge about nature. These two contradictory images, wave and particle, did not describe the same phenomena of the physical world, but rather were concepts with whose help we were limited to communicate the experiences carried out under different experimental conditions.
The naturalist Louis Agassiz, a Swiss nationalized American, struggled for weeks in vain to determine which species belonged to a fossilized fish whose contours were barely noticeable. One night, while he was sleeping, the animal suddenly appeared in full detail. In the morning he remembered the dream, but he had forgotten some important details. The next night, the dream was repeated, but he couldn't remember everything when he woke up. Then, the next night at bedtime, Professor Agassiz put paper and pen within reach of his bed. He woke up several times, but without remembering anything. Towards dawn, the fish suddenly appeared in a dream. Half asleep, in the gloom of the bedroom, Agassiz drew his contours as well as he could. In the morning he found the sketch on the bedside table, and with it he hurriedly went to the Jardin des Plantes - he was then studying in Paris - in whose Museum of natural history the fossil was preserved. With a chisel he discovered the still hidden parts of the fish. Amazed, he discovered that the drawing sketched in dreams corresponded exactly to the shape of the animal.
Igor Sikorsky, the inventor of the helicopter, was ten years old when he saw himself in dreams sitting in a huge walnut-paneled apparatus that flew through the air. Three decades later, in American shipyards, he supervised the construction of a four-engine Clipper designed by him. When the last touches were taking place inside the device, Sikorsky climbed aboard and noticed, astonished, that it was the same interior he saw in his childhood dream.
The invention of the sewing machine by Elias Howe also has its origin in a dream, as did Otto Loewis' experiments on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses, which in 1936 earned him the Nobel Prize. Mathematicians are also inspired:
“Every night I thought I did it, but
when scratching again the dawn discovered instantly
the error of the results he had obtained the day before.
On the seventh day, finally, the walls collapsed.
( Laurent Schwartz, mathematician)
Being a profession related to science, and constituting the subject of its disclosures, the main tool that scientists use, I present below curious cases of inspiration from some mathematicians. The processes of these inspirations, so similar to those exposed so far, will allow us to get a more complete idea of inspiration as a creative phenomenon. These are the cases:
Carl Gauss spent years struggling with a problem related to whole numbers. One day, suddenly, the solution came to mind. The eminent mathematician said he did not know the threads that led him from the thoughts that occupied his mind at that time to the solution he was looking for. He only knew that the understanding of the problem came to him unexpectedly, like lightning.
Henri Poncairé had devoted countless efforts and time to an intricate problem of mathematical functions. One day, about to embark on a geological excursion, at the time of setting foot on the bus, the solution of the problem that so arduously and fruitlessly had been looking for came to mind. Ensures Poncair that none of the thoughts that then occupied his mind, was related to the calculations in question. And he was so sure that he had reached the solution to his problem, that he stored it in the back of his memory and continued chatting about other matters. When he returned from the excursion, already calm at home, it was no effort to verify that the solution that suddenly came upon him was correct.
The mathematician Hamilton also recounts the process that led him to discover the Quaternions: “They came to life, or saw the light, fully mature, on October 16, 1843, when he was walking with Mrs. Hamilton to Dublin, just as he reached the Brougham bridge. There, and at that moment, I felt that the galvanic circuit of thought was closing and the sparks that jumped from it were the fundamental equations that link i, j, k [the new numbers that play the role of i within complex numbers], exactly the same as I have always used them since then ... I felt that at that moment a problem had been solved, that an intellectual need that had persecuted me for more than fifteen years had been satisfied. ”
The Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan claimed that a Hindu goddess passed him the ideas while he slept. If so, the goddess was not infallible, because Ramanujan committed the odd slip. But yes prodigal, according to the many formula notebooks that the ill-fated Indian genius bequeathed us.
María Agnesi, also a mathematician, said she produced her best results while walking sleepwalking.
Serve the previous collection of anecdotes, without epistemological pretensions, for us to reflect on inspiration and, if possible, for that same reflection to inspire us. So be it.
About the Author
Lamberto García was born in Portugalete (Vizcaya) in 1951. He has a degree in Economics from the University of Bilbao and has written numerous articles related to literature and scientific dissemination. He has finished several novels, a math book and many essays pending publication. ”
SOURCE:
http://zeteticismo.blogspot.com/
http://medicinacuantica.net/?p=1608
