Before he began his tortuous march of analogies toward reimagining the universe, Kepler had to get very confused on his homework. Unlike Galileo and Isaac Newton, he documented his confusion. “What matters to me,” Kepler wrote, “is not merely to impart to the reader what I have to say, but above all to convey to him the reasons, subterfuges, and lucky hazards which led me to my discoveries.”
Kepler was a young man when he showed up to work at Tycho Brahe’s observatory—so cutting edge at the time that it cost 1 percent of the national budget of Denmark. He was given the assignment nobody wanted: Mars and its perplexing orbit. The orbit had to be a circle, Kepler was told, so he had to figure out why Brahe’s observations didn’t match that. Every once in a while, Mars appears to reverse course in the sky, do a little loop, and then carry on in the original direction, a feat known as retrograde motion. Astronomers proposed elaborate contortions to explain how Mars could accomplish this while riding the interlocking spheres of the sky.
As usual, Kepler could not accept contortions. He asked peers for help, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. His predecessors had always managed to explain away the Mars deviations without scrapping the overall scheme. Kepler’s short Mars assignment (he guessed it would take eight days) turned into five years of calculations trying to describe where Mars appeared in the sky at any given moment. No sooner had Kepler done it with great accuracy than he threw it away.
It was close, but not perfect. The imperfection was minuscule. Just two of Brahe’s observations differed from Kepler’s calculations of where Mars should be, and by just eight minutes of arc, a sliver of sky one-eighth the width of a pinkie finger held at arm’s length. Kepler could have assumed his model was correct and those two observations were slightly off, or he could dispense with five years of work. He chose to trash his model. “If I had believed we could ignore these eight minutes,” he wrote, “I would have patched my hypothesis accordingly.” The assignment no one wanted became Kepler’s keyhole view into a new understanding of the universe. He was in uncharted territory. The analogies began in earnest, and he reinvented astronomy. Light, heat, smells, boats, brooms, magnets—it began with those pesky observations that didn’t quite fit, and ended in the complete undoing of Aristotle’s clockwork universe.
Kepler did something that turns out to be characteristic of today’s world-class research labs. Psychologist Kevin Dunbar began documenting how productive labs work in the 1990s, and stumbled upon a modern version of Keplerian thinking. Faced with an unexpected finding, rather than assuming the current theory is correct and that an observation must be off, the unexpected became an opportunity to venture somewhere new—and analogies served as the wilderness guide.
When Dunbar started, he simply set out to document the process of discovery in real time. He focused on molecular biology labs because they were blazing new trails, particularly in genetics and treatments for viruses, like HIV. He spent a year with four labs in the United States, playing a fly on the wall, visiting the labs every day for months, and later extended the work to more labs in the United States, Canada, and Italy. He became such a familiar presence that scientists called him to make sure he knew about impromptu meetings. The surface features of the labs were very different. One had dozens of members, others were small. A few were all men, one was all women. All had international reputations.
The weekly lab meetings made the most interesting viewing. Once a week, the entire team came together—lab director, grad students, postdoctoral fellows, technicians—to discuss some challenge a lab member was facing. The meetings were nothing like the heads-down, solitary work in stereotypical portrayals of scientists, huddled over their test tubes. Dunbar saw free-flowing and spontaneous exchange. Ideas were batted back and forth, new experiments proposed, obstacles discussed. “Those are some of the most creative moments in science,” he told me. So he recorded them.
The first fifteen minutes could be housekeeping—whose turn it was to order supplies, or who had left a mess. Then the action started. Someone presented an unexpected or confusing finding, their version of Kepler’s Mars orbit. Prudently, scientists’ first instinct was to blame themselves, some error in calculation or poorly calibrated equipment. If it kept up, the lab accepted the result as real, and ideas about what to try and what might be going on started flying. Every hour of lab meeting Dunbar recorded required eight hours of transcribing and labeling problem-solving behaviors so that he could analyze the process of scientific creativity, and he found an analogy fest.
Dunbar witnessed important breakthroughs live, and saw that the labs most likely to turn unexpected findings into new knowledge for humanity made a lot of analogies, and made them from a variety of base domains. The labs in which scientists had more diverse professional backgrounds were the ones where more and more varied analogies were offered, and where breakthroughs were more reliably produced when the unexpected arose. Those labs were Keplers by committee. They included members with a wide variety of experiences and interests. When the moment came to either dismiss or embrace and grapple with information that puzzled them, they drew on their range to make analogies. Lots of them.
For relatively straightforward challenges, labs started with analogies to other, very similar experiments. The more unusual the challenge, the more distant the analogies, moving away from surface similarities and toward deep structural similarities. In some lab meetings a new analogy entered the conversation every four minutes on average, some of them from outside of biology entirely.
In one instance, Dunbar actually saw two labs encounter the same experimental problem at around the same time. Proteins they wanted to measure would get stuck to a filter, which made them hard to analyze. One of the labs was entirely E. coli experts, and the other had scientists with chemistry, physics, biology, and genetics backgrounds, plus medical students. “One lab made an analogy drawing on knowledge from the person with a medical degree, and they figured it out right there at the meeting,” Dunbar told me. “The other lab used E. coli knowledge to deal with every problem. That didn’t work here so they had to just start experimenting for weeks to get rid of the problem. It put me in an awkward position because I had seen the answer in another lab’s meeting.” (As part of the conditions of the study, he was not allowed to share information between labs.)
In the face of the unexpected, the range of available analogies helped determine who learned something new. In the lone lab that did not make any new findings during Dunbar’s project, everyone had similar and highly specialized backgrounds, and analogies were almost never used. “When all the members of the laboratory have the same knowledge at their disposal, then when a problem arises, a group of similar minded individuals will not provide more information to make analogies than a single individual,” Dunbar concluded.
“It’s sort of like the stock market,” he told me. “You need a mixture of strategies.”
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The trouble with courses of study like Northwestern’s Integrated Science Program, which impart a broad mixture of strategies, is that they may require abandoning a head start toward a major or career. That is a tough sell, even if it better serves learners in the long run.