Creative Science

The ideas that inspire artists to place paint to canvas, writers to bind their thoughts into books, and composers to tirelessly link music notes together, are the same ideas that inspire scientists to connect observations and facts to make a theory.

Facts alone do not make science. Science also takes a deliberate mashing of observation, experience, and even imagination. To connect all of those aspects takes a different set of mind. A scientist must be able to see through the natural disorder in the world and make an idea of unity. If you could possibly learn every fact that there was and never made the effort to connect them, you wouldn’t really know anything. It is not without being able to make sense of how two seemingly unrelated facts could fuse together that you truly have knowledge and the ability to form a theory. (The SATs contain a great deal of reasoning!)

In class we did a quick write on what we felt the definition of inspiration was. I did not define it because I simply couldn’t. Inspiration is a fleeting, mysterious thing. It comes in an unexpected way, and goes if it is left unattended to. If I sat down waiting to be inspired, I would be sitting down for a long time. When out in the world noticing the little quirks of life around you; that is the discovery. You make connections to memories of the past and predict how things might be in the future, and that is when inspiration sweeps in.   

 Today we mostly think of creativity and inspiration in terms of the arts. But beginning with the earliest scientists we see that science involves the special amount of creativity. Their mediums are physics, medicine, biology, psychology, chemical etc., and their vision is break through and history altering.                  

Jacob Bronowski’s essay ”The Nature of Scientific Reasoning”, lends light to the process that scientists go through to form theories. He hints that’s scientist are no more different than artists, writers, composers or any other creative being. I believe that creativity and science are eternally linked. Facts are not stand alone means to a theory in science, it takes being able to place yourself in an impressionable state of mind. Bronowksi tells the story of Newton in this essay, and how when he saw an apple fall from a tree his theory of gravity was born.

Newton took the fact of general gravity that drew the apple to the tree and through his creativity and experience to connect that apple falling from the tree to the moon and earth falling together in a gravitational pull. It was that process which has shaped scientific theories in the years to come.

Research Plan

              For our group’s research project, we are exploring native Alaskan religion, more specifically the effects of Christianity on the native Alaskan culture. We had a difficult time even creating the words that will ultimately be our heading on Wikipedia. A very difficult time. Actually we might even change it after this is finally posted on my blog. But the main idea that we are trying to express in our page is the effects that western religion had on the native Alaskan people.

                The effects of Christianity on the native Alaskans could be positive or negative. Our research will bring to into light the argument of both possibilities. The video shown in Thursdays class, “The Land Is Ours,” (I think that was the title… :S) showed Christianity as having a negative impact. The missionaries that came to Alaska told the natives that their religion was evil and that even speaking their own language was “wicked”. I connected those facts with that Lance said to us about the native languages dwindling, and in some cases dying out completely. So it poses the question as to what else died out with the introduction of western religions.

                I believe this topic to be important to the investigation of the wests impact on native Alaskans. This correlates directly to the diminishing native culture. By taking on the religion of another culture, they lost their own. I hope our audience to be Alaskans, native or adopted, who are hoping to get a better sense of the people of Alaska and their rich history.

                The work that I will be contributing to the Wiki page is focusing on the Christian missionaries and their impact on native Alaskans. In doing so, I plan on interviewing an Alaskan native woman who is a pastor in her own church. I will ask her what her earliest memories of religion were as well as if Christianity had changed the stories that had been passed down through her people. And other questions that I am frankly too tired to think of right now. Haha….

                I plan on meeting with Ida this week, and our group has been meeting on Sundays. Following the deadlines on the syllabus we will plan and work together to insure our Wiki page is the best it can be by its due date April, 24th.