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New scientific ideas are subjected to an extensive process of evaluation and validation by the scientific community. Until the early 1980s, this process of validation was widely thought to be governed by objective criteria, whereas the process by which individual scientists gave birth to new scientific ideas was regarded as inaccessible to rational study. In this book Gerald Holton takes an opposing view, illuminating the ways in which
the imagination of the scientist functions early in the formation of a new insight or theory. Using firsthand accounts gleaned from notebooks, interviews, and correspondence of such twentieth-century scientists as Einstein, Fermi, Millikan, Heisenberg, and Oppenheimer, Holton shows how the operation of the scientific imagination has practical implications for the history and philosophy of science and for education. 432pp. (1999) 240 × 160mm ISBN 81 7371 215 8
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