Creativity in Science

Abstract

To create is to produce or generate what did not exist before, and most importantly, it is to produce not only an individual which did not exist before but one of a new and hitherto unknown kind. In science the most obvious product of creativity is a sort of discourse, the flow of theory. But theory is itself a secondary product, a description of potent things and products which produce the phenomena we experience. And yet, at least initially, the potent things and processes described in theory are not part of that experience. It is in our conceiving of ideas about them, by imagining possible potent things in which and among which causal activity occurs, that creativity is exercised.