> [!NOTE]+ Meta > Author:: Robert Root-Bernstein > Reference:: Root-Bernstein, R., & Root-Bernstein, M. (2013). The Art and Craft of Science. Educational Leadership, 70(5), 16-21. > Date:: 2013 > Tags:: #warp > WeftLinks:: [[Scientific value of craft]] > Claim:: [[Claim - There is craft in laboratory and other scientific work]] [[Claim - The physical manipulation of materials can help solve an abstract problem]] > [!SUMMARY] Summary > Nobel Prize winners are 15-25 times more likely to engage as an adult in arts and crafts. His heightens their capacity to imagine and build. ### Highlights Albert Einstein's education at the Aargau Cantonal School in Switzerland: > Based on Johann Pestalozzi's philosophy of education, the school encouraged individual differences, sense perception, visualization, and modeling, all developed through a student's self-directed activity. One outcome of this training was Einstein's habit of imagining himself riding a light beam or falling in an elevator at the speed of light, the basis of thought experiments that yielded his revolutionary insights. Another outcome was his facility with devices, which he developed further as a patent examiner and through several inventions of his own. > Luis Alvarez won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1968. He attributed his success to an uncanny ability to visualize and build almost any kind of experimental apparatus he could imagine (Alvarez, 1987). >Long before Alvarez did so, many other Nobel laureates, most notably William and Lawrence Bragg (1928) and P. M. S. Blackett (1933), rued the loss of craftsmanship and with it, the ability to perform—and here the artistic and musical connotations of that term are all too appropriate—experimental procedures. >The idea that arts and crafts training enhances scientific ability, first advanced by J. H. van't Hoff (1967), the first Nobel laureate in chemistry, has been substantiated by numerous subsequent studies of eminent individuals in other fields (see Cox, 1926; Cranefield, 1966; Goertzel, Goertzel, & Goertzel, 1978; Milgram, Hong, Shavit, & Peled, 1997; White, 1931). Our own study of Nobel Prize winners indicates that these eminent scientists are 15 to 25 times more likely than the average scientist to engage as an adult in fine arts, such as painting, sculpting, and print making; in crafts, such as wood and metalworking; in performance arts, such as acting and dancing; and in creative writing and poetry (Root-Bernstein, Allen, et al., 2008). ### References Alvarez, L. (1987). *Adventures of a physicist*. New York: Basic Books. Blackett, P. M. S. (1933). The craft of experimental physics. In H. Wright (Ed.), *University studies, Cambridge, 1933* (pp. 67–96). London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson. Bragg, W. L. (1928). Craftsmanship and science. *Science, 68*(1758), 213–223.