wozeree wrote:
I used to really hate science until I was well into middle age. One thing that surprised me about it is that it is very creative! Sometimes I think you have to be as creative as an artist. Think about it, how could Darwin (as an example), figure out Evolution without having the imagination to see it. He didn't even know about genetics (although he also was able to imagine and make guesses about that). Think about scientists who build things that have never been built or who look at a spider web and think, I wonder if we could use that to create a super strong material.
I guess I'm saying that I disagree with the article.
To be able to really stand out in science, you have to be creative (or extremely lucky). Many of the best scientists were imaginative "dreamers" as kids and refined that trait into adulthood. It is possible to be a scientist without the creativity, but they will mostly likely become laboratory workers for someone else, not the main discoverer of the research. I know some of them like that. They obtained their PhD or Masters and are now just working in a lab doing analytical tests for quality control. If that is what they wanted, then power to them, that is not for me.
I see many things in the scientific literature that get my mind automatically fitting them together to make something else. My specialty is finding gaps in the chemical knowledge and putting the missing pieces together. For instance, I created about thirty new synthetic compounds (and then analyzed them for a specific use) for my PhD research project. I saw a missing gap in the literature on them and wanted to see if they could be designed to fill a purpose that I had for them. (One of them worked exactly how I wanted it to.) Everyone else thought I was crazy to make so many of them as they could not see the big picture that I could see that I wanted put together. All that research work was done in less than three years time, including the writing/defending stages.
My take on this is simple: Without creativity and imagination, you get no innovation in whatever you do. Be it science, art, mathematics, history, engineering, etc...