Can science be creative?

For whatever reason, we usually don't think of science as a creative endeavor. It's supposed to be too cold, analytical, methodical and objective to be creative. Even parents tend to talk about their kids as having "artistic" or "scientific" aptitudes, meaning that they are creative or analytical, respectively. Things are just like that: black or white, creative or analytical. It doesn't occur to us that perhaps there is far more to science than what meets the eye at first sight. Sure, Kuhn already demonstrated several decades ago that things are not nearly as clear-cut as we'd like them to be. In his landmark work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) he explained how what we tend to view as "science" is actually normal science or "routine science", a set of practices, assumptions and, above all, an overall theoretical framework that underpins all research for a period of time. This normal or routine science is necessary both for the advance of the scientific discipline itself and the application of its discoveries to our daily lives. As it also happens in societies, a constant change of references and frameworks (a permanent revolution in the old Trostkyite fashion) can only lead to Sisyphus' fate, the constante reinvention of the wheel. However, that doesn't mean that there aren't certain moments when we need to break away from the past, destroy the old mold and view things from a completely different perspective. This is what Kuhn called a paradigm shift. Well, chaos theory definitely poses one of these challenges to the status quo.

Those studying chaotic dynamics discovered that the disorderly behavior of simple systems acted as a creative process. It generated complexity: richly organized patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes finite and sometimes infinite, but always with the fascination of living things.

(Gleick: p. 43)

Needless to say, paradigm shifts have been happening far more often since the Enlightenment and Modernity —as a matter of fact, it could be argued that change and paradigm shifts are the very foundation of the modern era. We'll leave it for another time to discuss whether this is a consequence of the philosophical changes brought about by certain thinkers or perhaps something intimately related to the high degree of specialization and the intrinsic complexity of our own societies at this stage of civilization. In any case, it should be patently obvious by now that science can be every bit as creative as anything else, both in its practice and the logical conclusions that can be drawn from what it teaches us about the world that surrounds us. Everything is in place for a new era where perhaps science, technology and other disciplines usually interpreted as artistic or creative —including the so called soft sciences— could converge into a more unified type of knowledge —what Edward O. Wilson calls consilience.