Science, Order and Creativity

I suspect I am not alone in feeling that David Bohm has some extremely interesting ideas that I would like to understand, but also in finding his actual works frustratingly impenetrable when I actually try to read them. I was relieved to find that in this joint work, David Peat and David Bohm are rather more accessible. This book is an interesting exploration of the important question of Creativity in science, society and life, and the meaning and implications of order. The aim of the book is "to throw light on the nature of creativity how it can be fostered, not only in science but in society and in the life of each individual". Although it doesn't attempt to address every aspect of this important question, it does bring some interesting insights. The early chapters discuss Creativity in Science. Bohm started by becoming interested in the relationship between individual and collective behaviour when doing research on plasma. This is an example of organised collective behaviour, in which there is almost complete individual freedom of movement of individual electrons. Bohm and Peat gently tease out the parallels with a healthy creative society. For example, although in science it is only practical to subdivide knowledge into different specialisations, this fragmentation can block the evolution of creative insights unless the areas and categories are allowed to evolve dynamically. They comment that some scientists spend their lives in a narrow discipline and never come into contact with the wider knowledge. Molecular biology uses techniques from physics, but has itself become separated from the rest of animal biology. Scientists should be alert to contradictions showing something is wrong, but often they are not. For example, a great deal of experimental evidence had accumulated during the middle ages that there was no fundamental difference between heavenly and earthly matter, but this knowledge tended to be kept separate in scientist's minds from the idea that heaven and earth are separate. It took Newton's courage, energy and passion to break away from the habitual commonly accepted mode of thought, and see that actually the moon was in the process of falling. This tendency to ignore contradictions is in part due to the tendency to hold onto what is familiar, group pressure not to rock the boat, the defence mechanism of denying that its relevant to explore the ideas, or an overemphasis on the separation between the problem area and others, which in turn leads to more fragmentation. The mind strongly defends its tacitly held ideas and assumptions, so the creation of new ideas requires courage energy and passion. As modern science emphasises the importance of falsifiability, this makes it hard for new ideas to be held in parallel with others. Bohm and Peat suggest that a better solution would be to allow a plurality of basic concepts and creative free play between them. The discussion then moves on to consider the links between Creativity and communication and with Bohm's ideas of generative and implicate order. The word 'order' is used to imply the deepest, tacit beliefs about the nature of the world. This is illustrated by the breakdown in communication between Bohr and Einstein over their subtly different notions of order. Their differences came to a head over the question of whether the movement of a particle could be ambiguous or not, and this difference is reflected in the distance between relativity and quantum mechanics to this day. The discussion of "what is order?" and the different types of order occupy in total nearly 100 pages. This is a somewhat more challenging section of the book, but nevertheless includes interesting ideas. For example they point out that our notions of order relate to our ability to perceive similarities and differences, and this human tendency to categorisation is a fundamental issue for creativity. Indeed, the word "intelligence" derives from 'intellegere' which carries the sense of 'to gather in between'. A system can also appear to be random in one context and ordered in another, for example, once one understands that a string of apparently random numbers have been produced by a computer's algorithm for random number generation, or are actually insurance statistics. The concept of generative order is used to refer to the deep inward type of order, out of which the manifest form of things can emerge creatively, in the same way that the operation of a simple formulae can generate a complex fractal pattern. Similarly, an artist works from a generative source idea, out of which the work of art develops. The generative order is not limited to the artist alone, however, as the way in which the resulting work is perceived by the public is influenced by the accepted artistic conventions of the time. The artist and the viewer can become rigid in their responses, in the same way that scientists can develop fixed habits of mind. However, the great artist maybe has sufficient passion and skill to perceive the world in new ways, and create fresh orders within the painting. Equally the passionate and sensitive viewer will be able to explore new generative orders within the mind, and respond to the marks on the canvas. Even if one finds a need to skip some of the detailed discussions in the middle of this book this book contains a wealth of ideas, in an important area.