Creative Thought Is All Over The Place, And Out Of This World, Or Is Not

Real breakthroughs in thinking have always come, and will always come, from getting ideas from galaxies of knowledge, far away.

Why? Breakthroughs are, by definition, a change in logic. Logic can change in only two ways: by changing, or adding, one or more axioms, or by changing the “universe” the logic bathe in. Either change is metalogical in nature. Thus, out of the box.

When one speaks of nothing new, one can solve nothing new.

Science didn’t just learn, but it learned to learn. That should be, itself, learned, and one should use how science learned to learn how to learn. And the same holds for thinking. Hence the postmodernist critique of science, which amounted, correctly, to suspect that much science activity was just tribalism in disguise. Thus the “academic specialization” is often exactly that:   tribalism in disguise. Getting a PhD, for example, is often little more than a tribal accession rite enabling one to become a soldier in a larger organization.

Breakthroughs break. If one looks at the Seventeenth Century, most breakthroughs were made by polymaths who were outside of Academia (Kepler, Descartes, Bullialdus, Fermat, Pascal, Huygens, Hooke, Boyle, Leibnitz, etc.).

The pattern goes on: Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet towered in many ways, including the philosophy of science, and as a polymath, she discovered and demonstrated the concept of energy, ½ mv^2 (which Isaac Newton had confused with momentum, mv). And she discovered not just kinematic energy, but infrared energy… (Not bad for someone who died from childbirth in her early forties…)

Lamarck Meditating With Recycled Aluminum Dragon Statue Behind, Jardin des Plantes, Paris

Lamarck, a research professor in zoology who demonstrated, among other things, biological evolution around 1800, was also a polymath: he started, like Descartes as an officer with a military career. After an injury and illness put an end to that, he became an MD, and, while posted in Monaco, developed an interest for botany, when he observed how much the plants varied with the environment there, among rocky crags, roasting mountainsides, sheltered oases,  and fertile canyons. He became the world expert of malacology, which he uses to demonstrate speciation, over millions of years (something the Catholic and Anglican churches hated him for). Darwin, a student of Lamarck of some renown, was also a polymath, like Wallace, outside of academia (Lamarck and evolution couldn’t be taught in England, by law; Darwin and Lyell had to go to Edinburg to be taught evolution).

Historians now believe that Lamarck’s military career and battlefield prowess is the reason Lamarck defended and continued the study, and publication, of his theory of evolution despite its unpopularity in the scientific society of the times (the same applies for Descartes who had to flee the god crazed French superpower).

Lamarck was mostly opposed by the bloody, self-aggrandizing dictator Napoleon and the Catholic and Anglican churches. Napoleon insulted Lamarck, while telling him a number of idiocies witnessed by mathematician and physicist Arago. Essentially, Lamarck viewed life as having arise gradually from inert materials, thanks to physics. Not nice for the self-described god derived Napoleon, a dinosaur in more ways than one (whom all too many French still adulate, while they reject Maréchal Pétain, who was not as bad).

It is curious that Lamarck didn’t insist on natural selection. But clearly the giraffes with longer neck would reproduce better. Not only Anaximander, Empedocles and others mentioned it (they were opposed by the deists Plato and Aristotle), but a mix of natural and artificial selection was well-known to produce superlative Greek cattle sold all over. It’s possible that Lamarck viewed the selection of the fittest as self-obvious. What was less obvious is what impelled animals to become fitter. Even the modern contemporary theory, which views DNA as more durable than stone (except for allele variations) is weak that way.

Lamarck’s observation, the complexifying force is a fact. There again, contemporary biology and physics have no final answer. An obvious hope is Quantum theory, because the Quantum is nonlocal, which makes it all-knowing in some ways. DNA is essentially a Quantum structure, so the connection is obvious. As the deepest polymaths, Lamarck dared to make observations which require explanations whose time has not come yet.

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There is no reason to believe this superiority of polymath will stop:

As I said, the reason for polymath superiority in the advancement of thinking are intrinsic to the nature of logic, however crazy said logic is.

Jules Henri Poincaré (creator of Relativity, including, local spacetime, E = mc2, gravitational waves, and the most general theories of gravitation of which Einstein’s weirdly called “General Relativity” is a special case) became revered after 1905; however Poincaré’s early career in France was difficult, precisely because the tribes didn’t appreciate his encroachments over their territories… Although Poincaré made it so that Lorentz got the Physics Nobel for Relativity, he didn’t get it himself, although even most deserving of it (later all too conscious of the controversies about Relativity involving Einstein, especially with Bergson, the Nobel committee specifically did NOT give the Nobel to Albert for Relativity).

Many of the top thinkers of the Twentieth Century were polymaths. De Broglie started as a prince studying medieval history. Then the prince wrote a physics thesis, getting the Physics Nobel 4 years later, after his waves were observed by Americans. Cartan, Bergson, Weyl, Feynman, Von Neumann… Nearly all the top research mathematicians or physicists I got to know some of them recipients of the greatest prizes are, to some extent polymaths, or have a very strong desire to be so (Chern, Thom, Yau, Attiyah, Donaldson, Singer, Penrose, Connes, Witten, Susskind,  etc.). When one knows the research in detail, one can see that the pattern is always the same: ideas from way out of the box are brought into a field, and revolutionize it (even Planck, a sedate career physicist, if there ever was one, brought ideas of statistical mechanics to optics to derive the Quantum, another case of polymath…)

Thinking anew requires at least wanting to jump out of the box. It’s intrinsically multi-learning (the translation of polymath). Indeed, “mathema” comes from the Greek manthanein “to learn”. Would-be philosophers can’t invent new wisdom if they couldn’t learn anything new, first.

Let alone the fact that it is hard to invent new ideas from the same exact old basis; “Pascal’s” famous triangle was already known in China, and maybe that’s what Blaise alluded to, when he said “we come too late, since there are men, and they think…“. However, from a new basis, Pascal discovered atmospheric pressure… 

One could say, that learning, mathema, is the opposite of Jihadism, or, more exactly of superstitious religious fundamentalism, which is intrinsically axiom, and universe, reductive, not open and expansionist (as learning is).

The Quantum is out of this world, and all over the place, so is creative thinking. And only those who fester too deep in the box, couldn’t guess why!

Patrice Ayme’