Yet More NOS

Creativity and Imagination in Science
Although science is Empirical and appears to be very regimented, human creativity and imagination pay a very large role in doing Science. As you will see in the posts below, we cannot always see things occuring directly. In some cases observers require instrumentation to make indirect observations.

For example, in 1913, when Niels Bohr encountered the emission spectrum from excited Hydrogen gas, he was able to actually get from the results in the diagram above to proposing a model for the structure of the atom (right) that resembles the view that most people recognize today. This model is still taught to Chemistry and Physics students today to lay the foundation for their understanding of the behavior of matter. Without creativity and imagination, such a leap would not be possible.

The scientific literature is littered with elegant methodologies for measuring subtle shifts in systems that cannot be seen with conventional or straightforward means. Researchers are constantly dreaming up ways to look inside black boxes without opening them. This is the realm of creativity and imagination as is molding the significance of the indirect observations into a coherent model that explains how a phenomenon functions.