Physicist tells how science, like the arts, relies on creativity

Professor Persis Drell's lecture in Kennedy Hall July 1 kicked off the Summer Sessions lecture series. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

By John Wilson

Quoting eminent scholars such as Richard Feynman and drawing on tales of scientific discovery by the likes of Copernicus and Galileo, Cornell physicist Persis Drell offered a personal view of the role of creativity in the physical sciences in the first in a series of Wednesday night Summer Session lectures July 1.

The process of scientific inquiry is inherently creative, Drell said, since it is up to scientists to propose models that describe nature and then find ways to test those models. Theoreticians ask new questions and consider different points of view, while experimentalists invent the tools and methods to verify the theoreticians' ideas.

But Drell pointed out that scientists can only be as imaginative as nature allows.

"It is important to understand how tremendously constrained scientific creativity is. Any new theory must agree with all the data and knowledge we have accumulated," she said, going on to quote Feynman extensively on the limits physicists must place on their imaginations.

Theory and experiment usually do not move in sync, so significant advances tend to take a long time. Drell used the example of planetary motion. Before Johannes Kepler could describe this phenomenon mathematically, Copernicus had to theorize that planets orbit the sun, Galileo had to invent the telescope and Tycho Brahe had to compile observational data.

But the moment of discovery is the stuff of legend, and as a consequence, people tend to misinterpret the scientific process, Drell said.

"It was not enough to simply wake up one morning and assert that the planets orbited the sun," she said. "It took a lot of hard work."

And lots of wrong answers, too. "I have seen the career of many a would-be scientist hampered by their fear of doing something wrong. The best physicists I have known have made many mistakes," Drell assured the audience.

In the second half of the lecture Drell, professor of physics, applied her observations on creativity to her own specialty -- experimental particle physics, the ultimate goal of which is to understand the basic constituents of matter, such as quarks. Drell's research team analyzes quark-producing collisions of matter and antimatter in the particle accelerator underneath Alumni Fields.

Drell listed the big, unsolved questions that guide particle physicists. If only two quarks are needed to make all matter, why do four more quarks exist? Why do two of these additional quarks have such greater mass than the other four? And why doesn't there seem to be any antimatter in the universe now, if, as physicists think, there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter right after the Big Bang?

In her research of one particular type of quark interaction, there are creative challenges every step of the way, Drell said. How should the data from the accelerator collisions be studied, and what principles might they illustrate? And in order to get more precise data, how can the accelerator and the apparatus that detects particle collisions be improved?

While there are similarities between creativity in the natural sciences and the expressive arts, Drell said that such disciplines are innately different.

"There has only rarely been such a thing as 'politically correct' physics. There is right physics and there is wrong physics, and I believe that while it may take many years for our mistakes to be discovered, we must live with the humbling knowledge that there is an ultimate truth."

She carefully added: "I hope there aren't any deconstructionists in the house," referring to those who believe all things are relative. Still, Drell disavowed any desire to explain all activity, whether of molecules or humans, in terms of physics.

In between science questions from students, a woman in the audience praised Drell's lecture. "I never took chemistry or physics in school," the woman said. "But you've made me see how important it would have been."

All lectures in the free and open series are at 7:30 p.m. in David L. Call Auditorium of Kennedy Hall. The remaining lecturers are James B. Maas, July 15; Wallace Broecker, July 22; and Diane Ackerman and Paul West, July 29.