I have a free afternoon session today – no lab work to take care of and no students came with some bothering questions! So, I decided to post what Harshini’s Fine Man says about scientific imagination – which had fired my imagination for sure!
“Let us try to imagine electric and magnetic fields; you may say, “Professor, All this business of electric and magnetic fields is pretty abstract! What is actually happening? Why can’t you explain it? Please give us an approximate description of the electromagnetic waves, even though it may be slightly inaccurate, so that I too can “see” them!” I am sorry – I can’t do that for you. I don’t know how. I have no picture of this electromagnetic field that is in any sense accurate. The only sensible question is, “what is the most appropriate way to look at their effects?” Some people prefer to represent them as field lines and feel that writing vector E and vector B is too abstract! The field lines, however, are only a crude way of describing a field. Field lines cannot efficiently describe superposition of electromagnetic waves. From the mathematical stand point, on the other hand, superposition is easy – we simply add two vectors to get another vector. The field lines have some advantage in giving a vivid picture, but they also have some disadvantages. So, the best way is to use the abstract field idea. That it is abstract is UNFORTUNATE but NECESSARY!
Our science makes terrific demands on the imagination. It appears that scientific imagination requires mathematical view and then its experimental verification. Now, what is a mathematical view?
For example, from a mathematical view, there IS an electric field vector and magnetic field vector at every point in space. This concept is abstract – true, but in some sense the fields are real, because after we are all finished fiddling around with mathematical equations, we can still make the instruments detect electromagnetic signals.
The whole question of imagination is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines. They try to test our imagination in the following way. If someone asks me: “Here is a picture of some people in a situation. What do you imagine will happen next?” I would say “I can’t imagine (because I don’t have enough facts”. So, people think that I have a weak imagination. They overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with EVERYTHING else we know.
The electric and magnetic fields we talk about are not just some happy thoughts which we are free to make as we wish, but ideas which must be consistent with all the laws of Physics we know. We can’t allow ourselves to seriously imagine things, which are obviously in contradiction to the known laws of nature. One has to have the imagination to think of something that has never been seen before, never been heard before. But creating something new, has to be consistent with everything, which has been seen before, is extremely difficult and requires scientific imagination.”
So, tell me if this caught your imagination (poetic – if not scientific) too!
Wonderful to have you here !
ReplyDeleteWhat yo are saying is very correct and interesting. Made me think :)
However something came to my mind when I read this(sorry I may be talking of something totally different):
In Indian philosophy there is a lot of discussion about the state of being awake and sleeping.
In the night when we dream, everything makes sense and feels perfect just like reality. It is only when we wake up we realize we are "out of it" and it no loner sounds real.
Because we define reality as the waking state and not the dreaming state.
But as in themselves thinking while being awake and dreaming while asleep both are self consistent(internally consistent) but not consistent with each other.
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Chinese story : A man slept and had a dream in which he became a butterfly.
So was he a butterfly, who slept and had a dream of being a man or was he man who slept and dreamed of being a butterfly ?
Satyajit, I feel that scientific imagination links two different states of physical reality -- one well established and the other, yet to be discovered. "Dreaming state" too happens to lie between two waking states -- but I am not sure if "dreaming" is always connected with "creativity" -- in the scientific sense!
ReplyDeleteMa'm, I believe it is proper to say that scientific "understanding" and an outlook requires A Mathematical View.
ReplyDeleteKarthik, I feel that scientific understanding is a "necessary" requirement to proceed further -- but it is not "sufficient" for scientific invention. So, I would like to term "scientific imagination" as some holistic feature which is "necessary and sufficient" for scientific invention.
ReplyDeleteAs to what satyajith says, I have something to add. You see, I think there is too less of a giving in this statement,A man slept and had a dream in which he became a butterfly.
ReplyDeleteWe have been wired to believe that there is a starting point, an awareness of existence, and the ultimatum. Now the mere statement plays "tricks" on our logical table. It doesn't give us a starting point nor an end point.
So if you ask whether he is "really" a man or a butterfly, I'm compelled to say that there are no "enough" inputs. It's like the film Inception's idea of a dream within a dream within .......there's no end, so you infer that there's no starting point also. So you don't know what is "real"
On the other hand the argument becomes a matter of semantics if you believe that what "really" exists is the "true" state of awareness in contrast to the material existence.
Also I believe that reality is defined{ if we are able to comprehend it}in a much more deeper sense than the mere waking state. The dual world of waking state and the dreaming state happens to spring from a single state of true awareness{read "not this", "not this"---what our upanishads say}. Singularity is the ultimatum. We happen to break this symmetry and create a dual world {read conscious and the sub conscious}
So, in reality there is no duality!!!
Sorry for the length of the "discourse"
Nice post ma'am, it really got me thinking about the nature of abstraction.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think the fact "...that it is abstract..." is actually a good thing rather than being an unfortunate thing. Abstraction is what provides one with the freedom to imagine models and mathematical structures to describe something. It is a good thing as far as learning and creativity is concerned,and may be not when it comes to knowing things the way they are. Which is why I think abstraction became more prominent after the aristotelian era, when people started trying to find out things that couldn't be directly observed. And hence "scientific imagination" became more necessary.
Abstraction is what separates physics from being just natural philosophy...
Beautiful post ma'am
ReplyDeleteRaunaq abstraction might be a good thing according to you but to the minds yet developing a scientific way of looking at things-rather to get the scientific imagination abstraction poses as a big obstacle towards understanding how nature works. I faced this problem myself (and even now do at times)
Once i tried explaining to a 12 year old about what are E and B fields. What that kid imagined as soon as i mentioned the word field was a cricket ground! To accept that which is not there and yet makes its presence felt is what i think most people have a problem. No wonder scientists are looked at as what Harshini has said as 'boring'. Their imagination can't really reach out to the others though in a community of like minded people its absolutely acceptable
I guess this what is called 'giant leaps of imagination'. As Usha ma'am put it to create something that has never been seen before and never been heard before is extremely difficult. We accept the abstractions given to us by those before us because they are consistent with the laws of nature.
ReplyDeleteTo my mind comes five geniuses who had these giant leaps of imagination - Einstein, Bohr, de Broglie, Dirac and Feynman. There are others as well but these guys were 'out of our imagination' :)
I think in the example that you gave, the problem is more with the language and communication rather than the problem with abstraction.
ReplyDeleteYou might as well have continued with the students way of thinking and told him to imagine a player at every point in the cricket ground, and that the player was told to throw the ball in a particular way.
Ofcourse this is a scientists way of doing it ( by anology). Whereas a mathematician will explain a mathematical structure purely by using cold definitions and proofs. For them there is no option other than pure abstraction. It's what they do. And my point is that it is due to this very abstraction that physics is where it is and is able to answer some of the fundamental questions about nature.
And it is the lack of this very abstraction that has left the field of Biology(and the likes) a step behind in coming up with good theories that explain an underlying structure. And a good theory is always required when we want to make some predictions out of it and hence helps science progress.