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Personal accounts of the creative process in science tell us that there is no ‘method’ to the conception of a new scientific idea. Stories from physicist Richard Feynman, the author’s own scientific experience, an example of physics and biology working together, and a conversation of scientists assembled in Cambridge by The Imagination Institute, all give different accounts of the ways that imagination can play out in science. Themes emerge from these raw accounts that will shape the subsequent chapters: especially the experienced typology of imagination into visual, textual and abstract forms. The subtle interaction of conscious and non-conscious thought raises questions of the link between cognition and aesthetic response in mental creative acts.

The third mode of imagination is the abstract—the world shared by mathematics and music. Once held together in the ‘quadrivum’ of medieval liberal arts, they have now lost their obvious connection. This chapter explores their deeper commonalities, starting with Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s last theorem, and Shostakovich’s eighth string quartet, the shared role of number in rhythm, volume, and pitch leads to a deeper world of multi-layered structure and the unconscious imagination. The writing of, and writing about music of Robert Schumann, including a detailed examination of his Konzertstück for four horns and orchestra, is contrasted with writing about mathematical creativity by Hadamard. The collision of beauty, structure, and universality is illustrated by a close encounter with the Fluctuation–Dissipation Theorem. In both cases of mathematics and music, notation is explicitly displayed in an exploration of how it serves as an extension to imaginative thought.

This first chapter surveys the landscape of the book, and the questions it will seek to explore. By listening to the verbal associations we bring to arts and to science, we observe that one reason for the differences is that artists and scientists are private and public about different aspects of their work. Science only speaks of the creative, inspirational moments, more familiar in the arts, in hushed tones, while artists are less forthcoming about the arduous journey from concept to creation through experiment, trial, and error, an essential process closely shared with science. By listening to Einstein, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, and the biblical Book of Job, we conceive of the commonality of imagination within constraint that connects the work of art and science alike.

‘I could not see any place in science for my creativity or imagination’, was the explanation, of a bright school leaver to the author, of why she had abandoned all study of science. Yet as any scientist knows, the imagination is essential to the immense task of re-creating a shared model of nature from the scale of the cosmos, through biological complexity, to the smallest subatomic structures. Encounters like that one inspired this book, which takes a journey through the creative process in the arts as well as sciences. Visiting great creative people of the past, it also draws on personal accounts of scientists, artists, mathematicians, writers, and musicians today to explore the commonalities and differences in creation. Tom McLeish finds that the ‘Two Cultures’ division between the arts and the sciences is not after all, the best classification of creative processes, for all creation calls on the power of the imagination within the constraints of form. Instead, the three modes of visual, textual, and abstract imagination have woven the stories of the arts and sciences together, but using different tools. As well as panoramic assessments of creativity, calling on ideas from the ancient world, medieval thought, and twentieth-century philosophy and theology, The Poetry and Music of Science illustrates its emerging story by specific close-up explorations of musical (Schumann), literary (James, Woolf, Goethe) mathematical (Wiles), and scientific (Humboldt, Einstein) creation. The book concludes by asking how creativity contributes to what it means to be human.

The book finishes with an examination of the human purpose of creativity and creation. The evidence and narrative gathered so far is summarized in a ‘creation narrative’—a basic story of the emotional and cognitive trajectory of the creative process. Drawing on recent work in anthropology, narratology, and theology, and on phenomenological philosophy of the human condition, the chapter develops the thesis that creativity of all kinds contributes to a healing of a broken or incomplete human relationship with the world. The story of our growing understanding of the rainbow acts as an illustration of the extreme length, but great human depth, of this process.

The dual roles of cognition and emotion in creativity that have emerged at many points in the book so far are examined in their own right. Through the lens of medieval philosophy, especially the work of Robert Grosseteste, then Kant, Spinoza, Hume, and the recent study of Iain McGilchrist, this chapter examines the structure of how the affective works in the origination of ideas, not just in response to them. Contemporary scientific testimony to the creative function of emotion leads to a detailed case study of a Caltech project to develop a polymer additive to make jet fuel safe in crashes, and other stories of scientific creation, earth the philosophical discussion in experience.

The first mode of imagination—the visual—is shared by art and science. The chapter starts with an account of the history of visual perception, working though the ancient theory of ‘extramission’, because it sheds light on the role of the mind’s active projection of visual impressions on the world in the interpretation of incoming images. The commonality of scientific and artistic visual imagination is partially to be found in mappings between spaces of three to two dimensions, exemplified perfectly by astronomy, and the work of medieval painter Giotto. Comparisons of the creative process in a recent astrophysical discovery are made with a contemporary artist (Graeme Willson) and through a detailed study of a lesser-known work by Monet.

The coincident birth of experimental science and the early English novel is followed to its underlying rationale of mimesis—the construction of small, abstracted worlds in which possibilities and constraints play out and which teach us about the wider world. The second mode of imagination is the textual. The entangled story of the textual in literature and science is followed though Newton and Milton, Boyle and Defoe, Humboldt and Emerson, and a parallel reading of Henry James’ The Art of the Novel and William Beveridge’s The Art of Scientific Investigation. Late-modern comparisons are made between Feynman’s Nobel Prize account, and the writing of Nabokov and Woolf, finding that textual imagination still displays common creative patterns in science and literature.

Doi and Edwards devised an important new theory of polymer motion in dense melts, revolutionizing conceptual understanding and providing a universal framework on which to develop the theory of the dynamics of entangled polymers. This chapter discusses the Doi-Edwards theory and its tube model concept, together with its modern extensions.