I am grateful for the invitation to participate in this important conference, and I interpret it as evidence that students of creativity themselves possess the sensitivity to divergent approaches that they seek to identify in others. But I am not altogether sanguine about the outcome of your experiment with me. As most of you already know, I am no psychologist, but rather an ex-physicist now working in the history of science. Probably my concern is no less with creativity than your own, but my goals, my techniques, and my sources of evidence are so very different from yours that I am far from sure how much we do, or even should, have to say to each other. These reservations imply no apology; rather they hint at my central thesis. In the sciences, as I shall suggest below, it is often better to do one’s best with the tools at hand than to pause for contemplation of divergent approaches.If a person of my background and interests has anything relevant to suggest to this conference, it will not be about your central concerns, the creative personality and its early identification. But implicit in the numerous working papers distributed to participants in this conference is an image of the scientific process and of the scientist; that image almost certainly conditions many of the experiments you try as well as the conclusions you draw; and about it the historian may well have something to say. I shall restrict my attention to one aspect of this image--an aspect epitomized as follows in one of the working papers: The basic scientist “must lack prejudice to a degree where he can look at the most ‘self-evident’ facts or concepts without necessarily accepting them, and, conversely, allow his imagination to play with the most unlikely possibilities”. In the more technical language supplied by other working papers, this aspect of the image recurs as an emphasis upon “divergent thinking, the freedom to go off in different directions,... rejecting the old solution and striking out in some new direction.”I do not at all doubt that this description of “divergent thinking” and the concomitant search for those able to do it are entirely proper. Some divergence characterizes all scientific work, and gigantic divergences lie at the core of the most significant episodes in scientific development. But both my own experience in scientific research and my reading of the history of sciences lead me to wonder whether flexibility and open-mindedness have not been too exclusively emphasized as the characteristics requisite for basic research.
