Saturday, November 22, 2008

Discovery and Creation

At least in natural sciences, I would say, it is not clear, how to distinguish these 2 concepts. Discovery of a phenomenon is one thing, that surely can happen by accident, but then to "create" a working framework with a predictive theory out of a mere "monkey" discovery is a far more creative work that always will need a deductive mind. Often this "discovery" is also not much more than an extrapolation of known models to a bigger parameter space, as seen so many a times with electro-magnetic waves (accidental x-ray discovery, accidental infrared-discovery). But on the other hand, there are also some discoveries made in astrophysics that were done by a thorough search for predicted phenomena, worked out on a purely theoretical basis. This, I would name a tad more creative than the aforementioned accidental discoveries. I think I would conclude that answering the question, if discovery and creation are the same in science, it really depends on what you see as a "useful" discovery? As it wouldn't have helped the world at all, when the Curie couple, at the discovery of x-rays, just would have stopped to research it, saying: "Hey we found some invisible stuff that is black-ending photographic plates"! But they put hard work in it, and even paid with their life’s (though unknowingly) to understand why that was happening. So, actually, I dare to make my own conclusion: in science there is no discovery without creation or vice versa.

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