What makes the scientists tick?

Dr David Weeks

investigates

I once thought that inventing was a practical, very ''hands on'' preoccupation. I also thought fully-qualified scientists were usually right, and amateur scientists were, by definition, relatively unenlightened about the laws of nature. But their comparative lack of an educational grounding, together with the hit-or-miss knowledge bases of auto-didacts, can be both a virtue and a handicap. Their methods also explain how all kinds of false ideas become disseminated.

A coherent, common-sense psychology has to look beyond how urban folk myths come about, and ask why, what are the motivations of those who originate them. However, in the course of investigating what makes such individuals tick, it became clear there was a proliferation of shadings of grey. Many academics prefer rationality, but when it comes to the crunch, also use intuition and instinct. Even a majority of Nobel Prize-winners have admitted to this.

To properly hear a new idea, to work out whether it is sense or nonsense, it needs to be placed in context. You have to know how it came about and what ideas and evidence support it. More importantly, the personality and mental state of the inventor/innovator/scientist bears careful examination. After all, science changes culture, changes our lives, and scientists have become the high priests of a technological society. If this is a New Renaissance, it is one fortified by confident assertions by this new breed of wunderkind on everything from cloning to nuclear fusion to internet hyperspace.

That they sometimes go wrong is known; it is with the hows and whys that I am intrigued. Normal scientists and more unusual garden-shed inventors are especially alert to aspects of a problem which might seem to be on the margins. They both search for, and see significance in, things which customarily would go unnoticed and unremarked.

For instance, Prof CG Barkla of Edinburgh University, who received a Nobel Prize in 1917 for his work on x-rays, searched tenaciously to prove the existence of a J-series of x-ray emissions, which he believed must exist. He maintained this belief for over 20 years with most informed opinion being against his ''will o' the wisp'' and diverted his dedicated research team's efforts into proving it. This descended into the undergraduate satire: ''J's a phenomenon known only to the Prof. On Monday it's working, by Tuesday it's off.'' All great scientists have at some time been made to look as if they were laughing stocks. Unfortunately, the J-curve was never adequately proven, and fell into obscurity.

The self-acknowledged renegades of science can also be equally baffling, and by turns, revealing and informative. One of these real-life Heath Robinsons actually looked the part, the prototypical wild-eyed enthusiast, totally oblivious to his appearance, or to the material world. His white hair seemed to be drawn upward, as if by a permanent charge of static electricity. From behind a large magnifying glass, his bulbous light blue eyes were concentrating on the flying movements of a large bluebottle inside a bell-jar.

This was the first mystery; he was not a biologist, but a mechanical engineer. His favoured subjects were described rapidly in sequences of seemingly disconnected ideas and experiments. His own verbatim account shows the way his inclusive mind diverges: ''After patenting my orbital engine, I challenged my mind by the task of shifting a 10-ton cement-hulled boat over rough ground into the Clyde by manpower and ingenuity alone.

''I developed a set of walking feet and horizontal jacks which were secured to the boat, and by turning a cam the boat progressed slowly to the water. By this time, I was expert in turning my novel circular cams. It stimulated me to ask, 'how fast must the cams be turned before the boat would no longer have time to follow the cam and would in fact be hovering?' I took a guess from a creature in nature that can hover. Namely the blowfly. I found its pitch to be about 64 hertz. I recorded this sound as I released a fly trapped in a cobweb and at the point where it became airborne, some shot in a horizontal loudspeaker also lifted off, as did some talcum powder on a paper sheet placed over it.

''I concluded that, at 64 hertz, mass breaks free from the force of gravity. Now 64 hertz is near enough to C two octaves below middle C. It is the same sound that a Buddhist monk chants his OM HUM. It is the sound of the bee and a drowsy summer's day. I set out to solve the riddle.

''As a result, I have surely been put on the Establishment's 'don't read, just dump' list.''

As a psychologist, I was more interested in how this inventor's mind worked and how his devices worked. What he showed, and what he shared with many highly-respected boffins, was an incredible willingness to use any observation or fact from any field, however obscure. Scientists are not content only to explore novel lines of research, going into uncharted terrain, but to obtain a special Puckish delight by doing so using original methods too.

In scientific work, creative thinking demands the seeing of things not seen previously, in ways not previously imagined. When there are significant blanks in their ''thought experiments'', they are filled in sometimes by following a hunch, an imagination first, with no little determination. As one professor told me: ''To limit oneself to perceptions, the never-see, is not enough. You cannot imagine how marvellously satisfying it is to take a shot in the dark, based on what you know, and what you feel to be right.''

This almost necessitates jumping off, away from standard ''normal'' positions, and taking risks by freely departing from reality. What has been forgotten is that this could place the committed searcher's sense of self, if not his stability, in some jeopardy.

l Dr David Weeks is a clinical neuropsychologist and co-author of Superyoung (Hodder and Stoughton, #9.99).