of reasons, which I won’t go into. So I decided that I would write up first those that had the most interesting central properties (which really had nothing to do with why I started the program), and I realized that there were twenty or thirty that were just very interesting, and I picked fourteen. I decided to write a paper on these fourteen interesting galaxies. They all have very rapidly rotating cores and lots of gas and other things.
Well, one of them was unusually interesting. I first took a spectrum of it in 1989 and then another in 1990. So I had two spectra of these objects and I had probably not measured them until 1990 or 1991. At first I didn’t quite understand why it was so interesting, but it was unlike anything that I had ever seen. You know, in a galaxy, or in a spiral or disc galaxy, almost all of the stars are orbiting in a plane around the center. Well, I finally decided that in this galaxy some of the stars were going one way and some of the stars were going the other way; some were going clockwise and some were going counterclockwise. But I only had two spectra and one wasn’t so good, so I would alternately believe it and not believe it. I mean, I would think about writing this one up alone and then I would think that the spectra were not good enough, and then I would show it to my colleagues and they would believe it and they could see two lines, or they couldn’t, and I would worry about whether the sky was doing something funny. So I decided, because the 1991 applications for using the main telescopes had already passed, that in the spring of ’92 I would go and get another spectrum. But then I had an idea. Because there were some very peculiar things on the spectrum and I suddenly…I don’t know…months were taken up in trying to understand what I was looking at. I do the thinking in the other room. I sit in front of this very exotic TV screen next to a computer, but it gives me the images of these spectra very carefully and I can play with them. And I don’t know, one day I just decided that I had to understand what this complexity was that I was looking at and I made sketches on a piece of paper and suddenly I understood it all. I have no other way of describing it. It was exquisitely clear. I don’t know why I hadn’t done this two years earlier.
And then in the spring I went observing, so I asked one of my colleagues here to come observing with me. He and I occasionally do things together. We had three nights. On two of them we never opened the telescope, and the third night was a terrible night but we got a little. We got enough on this galaxy that it sort of confirmed it. But on the other hand it really didn’t matter because by then I already knew that everything was right.
So that’s the story. And it’s fun, great fun, to come upon something new. This spring I had to give a talk at Harvard and of course I stuck this in, and in fact it was confirmed two days later by astronomers who had spectra of this galaxy but had not [analyzed them].
This account telescopes years of hard work, doubt, and confusion. When all goes well, the drudgery is redeemed by success. What is remembered are the high points: the burning curiosity, the wonder at a mystery about to reveal itself, the delight at stumbling on a solution that makes an unsuspected order visible. The many years of tedious calculations are vindicated by the burst of new knowledge. But even without success, creative persons find joy in a job well done. Learning for its own sake is rewarding even if it fails to result in a public discovery. How and why this happens is one of the central questions this book explores.
EVOLUTION IN BIOLOGY AND IN CULTURE
For most of human history, creativity was held to be a prerogative of supreme beings. Religions the world over are based on origin myths in which one or more gods shaped the heavens, the earth, and the waters. Somewhere along the line they also created men and women—puny, helpless things subject to the wrath of the gods. It was only very recently