Literature & Science: Paradigm Shifts Implicit in the Works of Goethe (Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Literature and science have a closer relationship than may at first meet the eye. In this paper, the catalytic function of literature in effecting important new ways of seeing and conceptualising the world of the scientist is predicated. As background to this argument, some of the major paradigm shifts that have brought us from a classical Newtonian, mechanistic world to a modern quantum perspective are discussed. Early quantum scientists themselves refer to literary ideas impacting upon their vision of reality; with this in mind, important philosophical ideas that are played out in Goethe's works and which helped to galvanise a paradigm shift in science are discussed. My personal vision is a reinstatement of the importance of the arts to science and to human understanding. Literature and philosophy form two important catalytic sources of new ideas stimulating the creative unconscious of the scientist's mind, providing a springboard for the ultimate new leaps which have advanced us from a mechanistic Newtonian understanding of life to a dynamic quantum framework. One example of this can be seen in the works of the great German writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The argument for the crucial role of literature and philosophy in scientific conceptualisation is based on three logical steps: one, that a pre-existing conceptual framework influences the way a scientist interprets what is seen in an experiment or an observation; two, that important paradigm shifts are necessary to make new interpretations of data, and to facilitate the major scientific advancements we have made; and three, that these shifts in paradigm or framework do not materialise out of nowhere, but come from the surrounding discourse of the scientist's era. Goethe's late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century writings, in which he dramatises and plays through important philosophical ideas and visions, contributed to a change in the philosophical and thus scientific understanding of reality influencing the development of twentieth-century quantum mechanics.