Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [194]
So many of his witnesses observed the utter freedom of his flights of thought, yet when Feynman talked about his own methods he emphasized not freedom but constraints. The kind of imagination that takes blank paper, blank staves, or a blank canvas and fills it with something wholly new, wholly free—that, Feynman contended, was not the scientist’s imagination. Nor could one measure imagination as certain psychologists try to do, by displaying a picture and asking what will happen next. For Feynman the essence of the scientific imagination was a powerful and almost painful rule. What scientists create must match reality. It must match what is already known. Scientific creativity, he said, is imagination in a straitjacket. “The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines,” he said. “They overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know… .” This is a conservative principle, implying that the existing framework of science is fundamentally sound, already a fair mirror of reality. Scientists, like the freer-seeming arts, feel the pressure to innovate, but in science the act of making something new contains the seeds of paradox. Innovation comes not through daring steps into unknown space,
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. And so our kind of imagination is quite a difficult game.
Creative artists in modern times have labored under the terrible weight of the demand for novelty. Mozart’s contemporaries expected him to work within a fixed, shared framework, not to break the bonds of convention. The standard forms of the sonata, symphony, and opera were established before his birth and hardly changed in his lifetime; the rules of harmonic progression made a cage as unyielding as the sonnet did for Shakespeare. As unyielding and as liberating—for later critics found the creators’ genius in the counterpoint of structure and freedom, rigor and inventiveness.
For the creative mind of the old school, inventing by pressing against constraints that seem ironclad, subtly bending a rod here or slipping a lock there, science has become the last refuge. The forms and constraints of scientific practice are held in place not just by the grounding in experiment but by the customs of a community more homogeneous and rule-bound than any community of artists. Scientists still speak unashamedly of reality, even in the quantum era, of objective truth, of a world independent of human construction, and they sometimes seem the last members of the intellectual universe to do so. Reality hobbles their imaginations. So does the ever more intricate assemblage of theorems, technologies, laboratory results, and mathematical formalisms that make up the body of known science. How, then, can the genius make a revolution? Feynman said, “Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.”
It was the problem he faced in the gloomiest days of 1946, when he was trying to find his way out of the mire that quantum mechanics had become. “We know so very much,” he wrote to his friend Welton, “and then subsume it into so very few equations that we can say we know very little (except these equations) … Then we think we have the physical picture with which to interpret the equations.” The freedom he found then was a freedom not from the equations but from the physical picture. He refused to let the form of the mathematics lock him into any one route to visualization: “There are so