32. SUDDEN ILLUMINATION

HE BELIEVES THAT HIS INVENTIONS COME THROUGH HIM FROM THE INFINITE FORCES OF THE UNIVERSE – AND NEVER SO WELL AS WHEN HE IS RELAXED.
– Mina Miller Edison, talking about Thomas Edison

In his book, Cosmic Law: Patterns in the Universe, Dean Brown wrote that Polanyi’s “sudden illumination” was an invariant law of the universe. He said that what is presently concealed will eventually be revealed and that revelation comes through grace alone. Revelations can be progressive and can take place in science, self-knowledge, and learning. One knows one is on the right track if the revelation is progressively more beautiful.

Brown uses the word metanoia to describe the experience of sudden illumination or revelation. “For the Greeks, it meant a fundamental shift or change, or more literally transcendence (‘meta’ – above or beyond, as in ‘metaphysics’) of mind (‘noia,’ from the root ‘nous,’ of mind). In the early (Gnostic) Christian tradition, it took on a special meaning of awakening shared intuition and direct knowing of the highest of God.”

“No amount of … logic … can bring you to this ‘aha’ experience,” writes Brown. “It just comes when it comes, and brings with it certainty.… Moses had a revelation of this sort when he encountered the burning bush on Mount Horeb.”

In science, this “aha” experience occurred to Leonard Euler in 1773 when he found the relationship exp(i*pi) = –1. This has sometimes been called the most beautiful expression in mathematics. A similar revelation occurred to Charles Hermite in 1859 when he discovered that exp is almost an integer. Similarly, “Many of the great masterpieces of art and literature were felt by the artist to have been ‘dictated’ by a higher agency.”

In the history of science and discovery, the role of the sudden insight is a recurring theme. It happened to Archimedes – as he was taking a bath, he came upon a way to calculate density and volume. While lying in a bed, watching flies, René Descartes realized he could describe a fly’s position by what is now known as coordinate geometry. A popular story goes that in an orchard, when he saw an apple fall, Sir Isaac Newton formulated what became his law of universal gravitation.

I’ve spoken with Brian Arthur many times about this phenomenon of sudden illumination. One day during a retreat in Montana, he regaled me with story after story about the discovery of radically new technologies or radically novel discoveries in science and economics. His own influential “theory of increasing returns” – which offered a paradigm-changing explanation of why some high-tech companies achieve breakaway success – came while on a two-month leave in Hawaii when “instantaneously I realized I had something important in economics. This is the ‘bottom of the U.’ The insight arrives whole … and it arrives with a ‘knowing’ that the solution is right – a feeling of its appropriateness, its elegance, its extraordinary simplicity…. And it arrives not in the midst of activities or frenzied thoughts, but in moments of stillness.”

I asked Brian where he thought such origination came from. He paused a moment and said, “We can’t rule out spirit.” Then he paused again, smiling, and said, “Let’s just call it grace.”

Two of America’s best-known discoverers, Thomas Edison and George Washington Carver, were highly explicit in describing the source of their knowledge. Edison, considered an atheist, believed the wellspring of his knowledge to be “the infinite forces of the Universe.” He wrote in 1911, “People say I have created things. I have never created anything. I get impressions from the Universe at large and work them out, but I am only a plate on a record or a receiving apparatus – what you will.” His wife once commented, “He believes that his inventions come through him from the infinite forces of the Universe – and never so well as when he is relaxed.”

George Washington Carver discovered a remarkable number of uses for peanuts and their chemical derivatives and displayed an outstanding degree of creativity in other aspects of his life. When he was asked what methods he used when confronted with a problem, he replied, “I never grope for methods. The method is revealed the moment I am inspired to create something new.” He also spoke more specifically, saying, “When I touch that flower, I am not merely touching that flower. I am touching infinity.”