Insights of Genius

"A book has fallen into my hands which has set me thinking so furiously that I have found it hard to concentrate on other matters... I recommend this book strongly to anyone who is not afraid of hard intellectual work." Paul Johnson, writing in The Spectator

• 1 Common Sense and Scientific Intuition.- At the Beginning.- The Mindset of Renaissance Scientists.- Galileo’s Imagination.- Conceptual Frameworks and Common Sense.- Galileo and Newton Become Common Sense.- The Waviness of Light Waves.- Life on a Moving Platform.- A Problem with Relative Motion.- /Another Way to Think About Relative Motion.- Time and Light.- Concluding Comments.- 2 The Intuition of Atoms.- But Is Light Really a Wave?.- The Visual Imagery of Intuition.- Atoms and Solar Systems.- Atomic Intuition and Visualization.- Visualization Lost, Intuition Redefined.- Intuitivity: The Central Issue.- Another Redefinition of Intuition.- Visualization Regained, in Part.- Extending Intuition: Bohr’s Correspondence Principle.- Concluding Comments.- 3 Scientific Methods.- The Verdict of Experiment or Not?.- Data, Data Everywhere….- Unwanted Precision.- Picking and Choosing Data.- Sociology Influences Science.- The Principle of Relativity.- Conservation of Energy.- Heat Is Energy.- Unification of the Sciences.- 4 Faith in an Ordered Universe.- Certainty and/or Knowledge?.- The Sign of the Time.- Carnot’s Imaginary Engine.- The Birth of Uncertainty.- A Mal du Siècle Over the Fin de Siècle.- Causality in Quantum Physics.- The Image of Light.- Quantum Effects and the Corsican Brothers.- 5 Speaking Realistically About Science.- Let’s Have a Reality Sandwich.- Atoms in Antiquity.- Doubts About Atomic Reality.- Positive Thinking.- A Mach Attack.- Planck Converts to Atomism.- Atomic Vindication.- On Mach’s Philosophical Heirs.- Boredom Relieved, Momentarily.- Scientific Realism.- Scientific Antirealism.- The Social Side of Science.- Antirealism and Scientific Practice.- The Chic of Antirealism: Postmodernism/.- The Two Cultures.- Some Very Modern Postmodernists.-Back to Reality.- 6 The Reasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Physics.- Mathematics and Physics.- Pythagoras’s Preestablished Harmony.- Newton, Einstein, and Minkowski’s Dream.- Kant, Geometry, and the Cognitive Status of Science.- The “Right” Sort of Statement.- Non-Euclidean Geometries and Euclidean Prisons.- Poincaré, The Origins of Geometry, and the Boundaries of Thought.- Testing Geometry.- Twentieth-Century Atomism, The Platonic Turn.- Can Physics Generate Mathematics? Minkowski in Reverse.- 7 Scientific Progress and Metaphors.- The Pervasiveness of Metaphors.- The Interaction View of Metaphor.- Metaphors and Models of Scientific Thought.- Metaphor and the Emergence of Scientific Knowledge.- Meaning and Antirealism.- Language and Realism.- Relativism in Language and Science.- Metaphors, Language, and Realism.- At a Loss for Words.- Metaphors and Analogies in Particle Physics.- Do Scientists Actually Use Metaphors?.- A Platonic Interlude.- Another Nobel Prize Metaphor.- Metaphors and Scientific Progress.- Why Did Physics Develop As It Did?.- How Science Advances.- 8 Visual Imagery in Scientific Thought.- Some Background to Mental Imagery.- Visual Imagery and Computational Psychology: A Study in Architecture.- The Imagery Debate.- A Model of Mental Processing and Its Critics.- Vision.- Gestalt Psychology and Vision.- The Present Status of the Imagery Debate.- The Misuse of Language in Visual Imagery.- Thought Experiments.- Visual Imagery, Cognitive Science, and the History of Scientific Thought.- he History of Science and the Imagery Debate.- 9 Scientific Creativity.- Creativity and Digital Thought.- Creativity and Analog Thought.- A Model for Network Thinking.- Why Poincaré and Einstein?.- Poincar0 and Edouard Toulouse.- Portrait of theMathematician.- The Scientific Creativity of Henri Poincaré.- Poincaré and Creativity Research Circa 1900/Intuition and Logic.- Poincaré on Intuition, Aesthetics, and Mental Imagery.- Poincare Introspects.- Four-Dimensional Aesthetics.- Poincare and Relativity.- Einstein and Max Wertheimer.- A Portrait of the Physicist as a Young Man.- Einstein in Love.- The Creativity of Albert Einstein.- Einstein Introspects on Intuition and Aesthetics.- Aesthetics.- Poincaré’s and Einstein’s Creative Thinking.- 10 Art, Science, and the History of Ideas.- Aesthetics in Art and Science.- One Person’s Aesthetics and Intuition May Not Be Another’s.- Science as Aesthetics.- Cubism and Quantum Mechanics.- Physicists Re-Represent.- Feynman Diagrams, Representation, and Gestalt Psychology.- The Deeper Structure of Data.- Art in the Twentieth Century.- Picasso, Geometry, and Cubism: Relations Between Developments in Cubism and Science.- Picasso, Braque, and Space.- Cubism and Relativity.- Figurative to Nonfigurative, Objects Disappear.- Art Theory and Science Theory.- Creativity in Art and Science.- Searching for Reality.- Conclusion: The New Sciences.