Question

Do you think creativity can contribute to scientific inquiry and investigation? Provide an example and explain your answer.

Answer 1

I think, scientific inquiry comes from a very simple mind who sees all the familiar things around him as the unfamiliar, that's why he gets so much questions in his head. For example, you don't have to be a PhD just to feel curious about the green color of trees. Creativity may contribute for answering difficult question with out-of-the-box paradigm, and in this case, helping scientific investigation.

Answer 2

If something becomes make sense, it wouldn't be called research - PhDcomics.com ;)

Answer 3

No. Science has nothing to do with creativity. Science is a way of winnowing out the good ideas from the mountain of plausible garbage that comes out of creativity. Everybody has a theory for why anything happens. Neanderthals had a theory for what makes thunder, 14th century monks had a theory for what causes disease, and my five-year-old has a theory for where rain comes from. Human beings are endlessly creative when it comes to explanations.

However, sad experience shows that almost all of the brilliant and imaginative theories the human mind comes up with are nonsense. Not necessarily because they fail the test of logic -- they may be quite logical and persuasive, and usually are. But because they simply don't correspond to reality. It turns out that there are essentially an infinite number of logical ways to explain why things happen the way they do. But only one correct way. Science is a way of getting rid of all the logical but wrong theories. and it rests on the principals of empirical verification -- that you must test, by experiment, every single step of your theory, and every key partial conclusion. By doing this, it turns out you can greatly reduce the amount of brilliant but erroneous conclusions you draw.

The best scientists are certainly creative, in the same way that the best artists or salesmen or businessmen are creative. Creativity is the sine qua non of human success: if you are entirely uncreative, you can't succeed. But scientists are not significantly more creative than other professions. What distinguishes a superb scientist from just a creative person is his remorseless and disciplined way of testing every single aspect of his theories. It's a strange form of profound self-doubt, where you question everything, most especially what you yourself think to be true.

Feymann once described it roughly this way: he said doing good science means you think up an idea about how things might work. This is just the first step, and isn't that hard. Then, however, you go and think up every possible way in which your idea might be wrong, and you test that -- either by experiment, or, if you are very good -- and this is what makes a good scientist! -- by thinking about how your idea conflicts with known experiment already. Only if you try your level best, and you simply cannot disprove your theory, no matter how hard you try, do you begin to think it might have some truth to it.

And what make the best scientist is that he can disprove his own theories extremely quickly -- because he is very familiar with the experimental facts, because he can quickly imagine fast and easy experimental tests for key aspects of his ideas, because he has the peculiar self-discipline required to subject his own ideas to brutal skepticism -- and that means he can sort out his good ideas from the much larger quantity of his bad ideas very fast. He doesn't necessarily have good ideas any more often than the mediocre scientists. He can just reject the bad ones faster, and get to the good ones faster.