Insights of Genius - Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art

Since the Enlightenment, science has been seen as an objective, true method of explanation about the physical and mathematical laws that explain and govern the universe. The 20th Century has shown that science is also a human enterprise, informed by idealogy and other assumptions. In this book, distinguished historian and philosopher of science Arthur Miller examines these and other important questions about what and how we know about the world. Dr. Miller also discusses, in non-technical language, our current ideas about the nature of scientific thought and explanation, its relation to truth, and the relationship between scientific and common sense. Does science, in its historical claim as an exalted endeavor, stand above other human activities?

List of contents

1 Common Sense and Scientific Intuition.- At the Beginning.- The Mindset of Renaissance Scientists.- Galileo's Imagination.- Conceptual Frameworks and Common Sense.- Galileo and Newton Become Common Sense.- The Waviness of Light Waves.- Life on a Moving Platform.- A Problem with Relative Motion.- /Another Way to Think About Relative Motion.- Time and Light.- Concluding Comments.- 2 The Intuition of Atoms.- But Is Light Really a Wave?.- The Visual Imagery of Intuition.- Atoms and Solar Systems.- Atomic Intuition and Visualization.- Visualization Lost, Intuition Redefined.- Intuitivity: The Central Issue.- Another Redefinition of Intuition.- Visualization Regained, in Part.- Extending Intuition: Bohr's Correspondence Principle.- Concluding Comments.- 3 Scientific Methods.- The Verdict of Experiment or Not?.- Data, Data Everywhere....- Unwanted Precision.- Picking and Choosing Data.- Sociology Influences Science.- The Principle of Relativity.- Conservation of Energy.- Heat Is Energy.- Unification of the Sciences.- 4 Faith in an Ordered Universe.- Certainty and/or Knowledge?.- The Sign of the Time.- Carnot's Imaginary Engine.- The Birth of Uncertainty.- A Mal du Siècle Over the Fin de Siècle.- Causality in Quantum Physics.- The Image of Light.- Quantum Effects and the Corsican Brothers.- 5 Speaking Realistically About Science.- Let's Have a Reality Sandwich.- Atoms in Antiquity.- Doubts About Atomic Reality.- Positive Thinking.- A Mach Attack.- Planck Converts to Atomism.- Atomic Vindication.- On Mach's Philosophical Heirs.- Boredom Relieved, Momentarily.- Scientific Realism.- Scientific Antirealism.- The Social Side of Science.- Antirealism and Scientific Practice.- The Chic of Antirealism: Postmodernism/.- The Two Cultures.- Some Very Modern Postmodernists.-Back to Reality.- 6 The Reasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Physics.- Mathematics and Physics.- Pythagoras's Preestablished Harmony.- Newton, Einstein, and Minkowski's Dream.- Kant, Geometry, and the Cognitive Status of Science.- The "Right" Sort of Statement.- Non-Euclidean Geometries and Euclidean Prisons.- Poincaré, The Origins of Geometry, and the Boundaries of Thought.- Testing Geometry.- Twentieth-Century Atomism, The Platonic Turn.- Can Physics Generate Mathematics? Minkowski in Reverse.- 7 Scientific Progress and Metaphors.- The Pervasiveness of Metaphors.- The Interaction View of Metaphor.- Metaphors and Models of Scientific Thought.- Metaphor and the Emergence of Scientific Knowledge.- Meaning and Antirealism.- Language and Realism.- Relativism in Language and Science.- Metaphors, Language, and Realism.- At a Loss for Words.- Metaphors and Analogies in Particle Physics.- Do Scientists Actually Use Metaphors?.- A Platonic Interlude.- Another Nobel Prize Metaphor.- Metaphors and Scientific Progress.- Why Did Physics Develop As It Did?.- How Science Advances.- 8 Visual Imagery in Scientific Thought.- Some Background to Mental Imagery.- Visual Imagery and Computational Psychology: A Study in Architecture.- The Imagery Debate.- A Model of Mental Processing and Its Critics.- Vision.- Gestalt Psychology and Vision.- The Present Status of the Imagery Debate.- The Misuse of Language in Visual Imagery.- Thought Experiments.- Visual Imagery, Cognitive Science, and the History of Scientific Thought.- he History of Science and the Imagery Debate.- 9 Scientific Creativity.- Creativity and Digital Thought.- Creativity and Analog Thought.- A Model for Network Thinking.- Why Poincaré and Einstein?.- Poincar0 and Edouard Toulouse.- Portrait of theMathematician.- The Scientific Creativity of Henri Poincaré.- Poincaré and Creativity Research Circa 1900/Intuition and Logic.- Poincaré on Intuition, Aesthetics, and Mental Imagery.- Poincare Introspects.- Four-Dimensional Aesthetics.- Poincare and Relativity.- Einstein and Max Wertheimer.- A Portrait of the Physicist as a Young Man.- Einstein in Love.- The Creativity of Albert Einstein.- Einstein Introspects on Intuition and Aesthetics.- Aesthetics.- Poincaré's and Einstein's Creative Thinking.- 10 Art, Science, and the History of Ideas.- Aesthetics in Art and Science.- One Person's Aesthetics and Intuition May Not Be Another's.- Science as Aesthetics.- Cubism and Quantum Mechanics.- Physicists Re-Represent.- Feynman Diagrams, Representation, and Gestalt Psychology.- The Deeper Structure of Data.- Art in the Twentieth Century.- Picasso, Geometry, and Cubism: Relations Between Developments in Cubism and Science.- Picasso, Braque, and Space.- Cubism and Relativity.- Figurative to Nonfigurative, Objects Disappear.- Art Theory and Science Theory.- Creativity in Art and Science.- Searching for Reality.- Conclusion: The New Sciences.

About the author

Arthur I. Miller, geboren in New York, ist Physiker und emeritierter Professor für Geschichte und Philosophie der Naturwissenschaften am University College in London. Er veröffentlichte mehrere Bücher über die Relativitätstheorie sowie über Kreativität in Kunst und Naturwissenschaften.

Report

"A book has fallen into my hands which has set me thinking so furiously that I have found it hard to concentrate on other matters... I recommend this book strongly to anyone who is not afraid of hard intellectual work." Paul Johnson, writing in The Spectator

Product details

• Authors: Arthur I Miller, Arthur I. Miller
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 14.04.2014
• EAN: 9781461275237
• ISBN: 978-1-4612-7523-7
• No. of pages: 482
• Dimensions: 155 mm x 236 mm x 26 mm
• Weight: 761 g
• Illustrations: XXII, 482 p. 45 illus.
• Subject: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Mathematics > Miscellaneous