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Articles

Metaphors & Creativity

Ignacio Gonzalez-Martinez has a flash of inspiration about the role metaphors play in creative thought.

The equivalence between Richard Feynman’s and Julian Schwinger’s distinct formulations of quantum electrodynamics was by no means obvious. The two physicists themselves saw their methods as competing instead of being complementary. However, after becoming familiar with both approaches, Freeman Dyson had a ‘flash of illumination’ about how to reconcile them, while travelling home in a Greyhound bus. Thus it came to pass that Dyson secured yet another place for himself in the history of physics. And in his book The Emperor’s New Mind (1989), Roger Penrose recounts Henri Poincaré’s narrative of the moment when his search for ‘Fuchsian functions’ came to completion while in the middle of a geological expedition.

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