Following on yesterday’s post on the connections between research and philosophy, there is, more generally, an interesting relationship between science and emotion. Science tries to understand what is, in some approximation of objective truth. Yet to conduct science, you need to be motivated. Without passion the mind does not create. In fact, studies of people suffering from severe anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure) have shown that such people can have difficulty solving even the simplest of problems. In humans at least, emotion is a precondition for a well functioning intellect.
And so we have what appears to be a contradiction (but in fact is not): To pursue objective truth, we start with emotion. Perhaps people go into different fields of science not because of intellectual proclivities, but because we each feel an emotional connection with certain truths. Some people are drawn to chaos and randomness, and so they choose fields that study inherently chaotic systems, such as meteorology or oceanography. Others are drawn to perfection and harmony, and so they study crystallography or number theory.
In each case, the research itself must be done honestly and without bias, but the excitement that leads to insight and discovery is fed by a pre-existing emotional resonance.
That makes sense. I guess some people who go into science are getting the positive emotional benefit from pleasing others (external validation) rather than from the inherent nature of what they are studying. You can usually tell those people from the ones who connect with their subject. In either case, it is hard to see how one would be able to sustain the intellectual effort required without a good deal of positive emotional feedback of some kind.
I think emotion also affects a scientist’s approach to a subject. I’m still reading the Gleick book on Feynman. In it he contrasts Feynman’s approach to developing a theory of quantum electrodynamics with Julian Schwinger’s approach to the same topic. Schwinger seemed to be much more attached to symbolic manipulation—lots of math and formulas—while Feynman’s approach was more intuitive and visual (diagrams). It sounds like the personalities of Feynman and Schwinger were key determinants of their choice of approaches. The wikipedia page on Schwinger says that he disliked Feynman diagrams, going so far as to ban them from his classroom, but was observed to use them in private.