Archives - Chemistry: Page 26
Author: amparo enriquez (Mon Jun 20, 2005 3:03 am)
Title: Creativity in Physics and Chemistry - Karl Alex Müller
CREATIVITY IN PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY
In 1987 the physicist Karl Alex Müller and George Bednorz received the nobel prize for physics because of their discovery of the first high temperature superconductors.
In an article of American Scientist (July-August, 1996), Halton, Chang and Jurkowitz took on the challenge to explain the nature of this great discovery; their main questions were:
1.How does “curiosity-driven”, or basic, science interact
with “strategic” research and engineering?
2.How important are both planning and serendipity in discovery?
3.What laboratory culture makes success more likely?
4.How deeply are the roots of crucial ideas and apparatus buried in the
soil of history?
5.How important is the practice of borrowing across traditions and
disciplines?
6.What role do the private style and presuppositions of the individual play
in research?
Among the factors that motivated and gave base to Müllers research one can find interdisciplinary borrowing that can be identify by tracing citations in published articles. However, in this case, some of the most stimulating ideas came from outside of the scientific framework. Müllers insight came from the highly symmetrical crystal structure that proved essential to the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity, and that to him, had the affective power of a mandala, the highly symmetrical visual symbol of the universe used in Hinduism and Buddhism as a guide to meditation. Müller later chose the Dharmaraja mandala as his source of inspiration.
According to Müller he first became fascinated with this highly symmetrical structure in 1952, when he was working on his doctorate. Wolfgang Pauli (the nobel prize winner), was one of Müller’s professors, had just published an essay on the influence of archetypal conceptions in the work of the astronomer Johannes Kepler in a book coauthored with psychoanalyst Carl Jung (Pauli 1952). Much impressed by that essay, Müller started to read Kepler avidly, thus encountering Kepler’s deep commitment to the guidance of three-dimensional structures of high symmetry-the five Platonic solids-in his work on planetary motion.
It is really baffling the amount of factors that contribute to a discovery of the magnitude of high temperature superconductors, but even more incredible is the fact that some of the ones involved, those that increase considerably the creative contribution, appeared to come from a world outside of physics. I believe that more research need to be done in this area of epistemology (in physics and chemistry) to get to know better what now appear to be obscure elements that are part of knowledge integration and that need to be better understood.
In Chemistry we need to recognize the value of all factors involve in the creative process in order to better enhance and nurture the quality of new ideas coming from our students.