CREATIVE SCIENCE 341 



take." All of a sudden, with an abrupt local lowering of the TI, we 

 turn back to look again, at something originally dismissed without 

 much thought, as we grasp what it may signify. We "get it," and are 

 the more apt to do so when— to prior knowledge and an intelligence 

 prolific of new ideas— we join that openness to experience earlier 

 noted. Important even as regards focal discoveries, this tempera- 

 mental trait is absolutely crucial in the making of peripheral discov- 

 eries. 



PERIPHERAL DISCOVERIES 



To notice any manifestation beyond the focal region is exceedingly 

 difficult. Just how difficult is suggested by both the rarity of periph- 

 eral discoveries made and the abundance of peripheral discoveries 

 missed. Consider two celebrated misses. Crookes, meticulous ob- 

 server who found in an evanescent spectral line the clue to the dis- 

 covery of the new element thallium, worked much with high vacuum 

 discharge tubes. He noticed that unexposed photographic plates be- 

 came fogged when stored, in their wrappers, in the vicinity of his 

 discharge tubes. Crookes acted with exemplary promptness: he filed 

 a complaint with the manufacturers of his plates— and so left for 

 Roentgen the later focal discovery of X-rays. Second case: many in- 

 vestigators ( not least among them Tyndall and Pasteur himself ) ob- 

 served that bacterial cultures, made for this or that purpose, failed 

 to grow properly in the presence of such foreign contaminants as 

 molds. The consequent determined effort, to improve culturing tech- 

 niques, facilitated exclusion of the annoying contaminants— and so 

 left to Fleming the discovery of penicillin. 



An empiricist sceptical of the completeness of existing theoretic 

 ideas, the successful peripheral discoverer believes that there is far 

 more to be seen in nature than has yet been found. He stands in 

 sharp contrast with the many who— taking scientific theories as final- 

 depend on those theories to dictate the roster of "significant" quali- 

 ties and categories that alone are worth considering. Thus Bruner 

 and his colleagues comment that: 



... in attempting to differentiate exemplars from nonexemplars of a 

 category, as one so frequently must in science, medicine, and indeed 

 in daily life, the person will, in the absence of other information, tend 

 to fall back on cues that in the past have seemed useful, whether 

 these cues have been useful in an analogous situation or not. 



