English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

The subject of this paper is a singularly appropriate one for this journal. We are all experts on the topic of scientific discovery, invention, and development. Members are elected to the National Academy of Sciences because they have been adjudged to have done some creative thinking that led to one or more significant discoveries, inventions, or applications of scientific ideas. But the fact that a person sometimes does creative things does not mean that he understands the creative process. To imagine that a scientist can give a full scientific account of his own thought processes is no more reasonable than putting a Geiger counter on the podium at an American Physical Society meeting and expecting it to deliver a lecture on the theory of radiation. In building a theory of scientific discovery or invention, a scientist's behaviors are the data-the phenomena we seek to explain-not the direct source of theory. Much of what goes on when we are thinking is inaccessible to our conscious awareness. We use such terms as "judgement, "intuition," and "creative insight" to name and label those phenomena that occur without awareness. But labels are not explanations; contrary to the view of Moliere's physician, opium's sleep-inducing power is not explained by attributing to it a dormitive property. Many scientists and philosophers have doubted whether a scientific explanation of discovery is possible or whether there is even something describable as a method of discovery. Einstein himself is quoted as saying, "There is no logical path leading to [scientific] laws. They can only be reached by intuition, based upon something like an intellectual love [Einfuehlung] of the objects of experience." If Einstein meant by "logical path" a deductive route to discovery, he was surely right. If he meant to say that there is not method in the madness of discovery, we might question-and investigate empirically-whether his pessimism was justified. The fact that many books and articles have been written on the subjects of invention, discovery, and creativity, suggests that we believe that at least some significant aspects of these processes are amenable to investigation and description. Until recent times, most of our knowledge about them has derived from the experience and observations of thoughtful practitioners. In this case, the Geiger counter does indeed have something to say about the theory of radiation. But creative processes are also now the objects of direct scientific investigation. In the past dozen years, some psychologists have sought to build and test theories about the processes, both conscious and unconscious, that go on in the human brain when discovery and invention are taking place. Here, I am going to say a little about this psychological research, but mainly, I am going to consider what we know about these matters from the information that is available to us more directly in our practice of science and engineering.

Discovery, invention, and development: human creative thinking.