The poetry and music of science : comparing creativity in science and art / Tom McLeish.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McLeish, Tom, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Creative ability.

Creative thinking.

Science and the humanities.

Science--Poetry.

Science.

Science--Songs and music.

Genre:

Poetry.

Songs and music.

Physical Description:

xv, 355 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 22 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2019.

Summary:

What human qualities are needed to make scientific discoveries, and which to make great art? Many would point to 'imagination' and 'creativity' in the second case but not the first. This book challenges the assumption that doing science is in any sense less creative than art, music or fictional writing and poetry, and treads a historical and contemporary path through common territories of the creative process. The methodological process called the 'scientific method' tells us how to test ideas when we have had them, but not how to arrive at hypotheses in the first place. Hearing the stories that scientists and artists tell about their projects reveals commonalities: the desire for a goal, the experience of frustration and failure, the incubation of the problem, moments of sudden insight, and the experience of the beautiful or sublime. 0Selected themes weave the practice of science and art together: visual thinking and metaphor, the transcendence of music and mathematics, the contemporary rise of the English novel and experimental science, and the role of aesthetics and desire in the creative process. Artists and scientists make salient comparisons: Defoe and Boyle; Emmerson and Humboldt, Monet and Einstein, Schumann and Hadamard. The book draws on medieval philosophy at many points as the product of the last age that spent time in inner contemplation of the mystery of how something is mentally brought out from nothing. Taking the phenomenon of the rainbow as an example, the principles of creativity within constraint point to the scientific imagination as a parallel of poetry.

Contents:

1 Introduction: Creativity and Constraint p. 1

2 Creative Inspiration in Science p. 29

A private moment of discovery p. 32

Entangling thoughts p. 39

The strangeness of star-shaped molecules p. 46

Underground rivers of the mind p. 52

The Creativity of the New-and doing biology in a physics lab p. 58

A conversation about creativity in science p. 65

3 Seeing the Unseen: Visual Imagination and the Unconscious p. 72

The visual metaphor within the scientific imagination p. 78

Mathematical theory-painting p. 80

The ancient aesthetic of active seeing p. 83

The creativity and constraint of a visual project p. 90

A scientific experience of a visual idea p. 93

Conversations on creativity with visual artists p. 99

The great cosmological model and the visual imagination p. 103

The visual imagination and astronomy today p. 113

The excited imagination of the impression p. 117

An artistic theory of music p. 124

4 Experimental Science and the Art of the Novel p. 128

A shared early history p. 134

The orbits of the early novel and science p. 137

Newton and Milton-Paradise and procession p. 140

The art of the probable and the hermeneutic stance of Robert Royle p. 143

The arts of fiction and science p. 150

Ideation p. 152

Incubation p. 154

Illumination p. 157

Verification and the constraint of form p. 162

Entanglements of science and literature p. 168

Humboldt, Emerson, Wordsworth, and the Romantic scientific aesthetic p. 170

Emile Zola, Claude Bernard, and the 'experimental novel' p. 178

Creativity and constraint in the novel of the twentieth century-The Paris Reviews and a Nobel lecture p. 181

Scientific discovery and the novel p. 187

5 Music and Mathematics-Creating the Sublime p. 191

The numerical threads of music p. 195

Music-the medieval mathematical art p. 200

Augustine on music p. 204

Robert Schumann-creative tension, form, and genre p. 208

A musical close-reading: The Konzertstück for Four Horns and Orchestra (1849) p. 219

From music to mathematics p. 233

A mathematician's mind p. 237

A mathematical close-reading and a beautiful connection-the fluctuation-dissipation theorem p. 244

An electrical analogy-Johnson-Nyquist Noise p. 250

A universal truth p. 253

Music, mathematics, and wordless creation p. 259

6 Emotion and Reason in Scientific Creation p. 261

Early modern echoes p. 274

Scientific testimony to the emotion of ideas p. 280

Putting out fire with fire; a case study in creative scientific affect p. 287

David Bohm on creativity p. 295

Picasso and Guernica-a documented journey of aspectus, affectus, and art p. 297

7 The End of Creation p. 301

An ur-narrative of creative experience p. 303

Telling stories of creativity and creation through theological lenses p. 312

All the colours of the rainbow p. 315

The end of creativity p. 323

Modern minding of the gap p. 333.

Notes:

Includes bibliography and index.

Other Format:

Electronic version: McLeish, Tom. Poetry and music of science.

ISBN:

0198797990

9780198797999

OCLC:

1049824938