Imagery in Scientific Thought: Creating 20th Century Physics - Hardcover

Miller, Arthur I.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0817631968 ISBN 13: 9780817631963

Publisher: Birkhauser, 1984

Synopsis

One of the great mysteries of the human mind is its power to create new forms of knowledge. Arthur I. Miller is a historian of science whose approach has been strongly influenced by current work in cognitive science, and in this book he shows how the two fields might be fruitfully linked to yield new insights into the creative process.The first two sections of this book trace the relationship of creative thinking and the construction of new scientific concepts in the physics of Poincare, Einstein, Boltzmann, Bohr, and Heisenberg (scientists whose research was influenced by their consideration of the nature of thinking itself). These case studies are then used as data to test the attempts of modern psychologists to account for creative development through Gestalt psychology, cognitive science, and genetic epistemology.Arthur I. Miller is University Professor of Philosophy and History, University of Lowell, and an Associate of the Physics Department, Harvard University. He is also an Associate Editor of the "American Journal of Physics."

About this title

Review:

"Miller's book is a pioneering effort to combine the insights of Max Wertheimer's Gestalt psychology, Jean Piaget's genetic epistemology, modern research on mental imagery and other branches of cognitive psychology in explaining the inner workings of the history of physics from about 1900 to 1950. He moves us a long step toward a necessary synthesis of disciplines in trying to understand the interplay of intuition and imagination on one side with conceptual and logical thinking on the other."- Howard E. Gruber, University of Geneva and Rutgers University

About this edition

• Publisher: Birkhauser
• Publication date: 1984
• ISBN 10: 0817631968
• ISBN 13: 9780817631963
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 355