Episteme, Sophia e le Muse

EPISTEME, SOPHIA AND THE MUSES This article is an attempt to demonstrate how the scientist, rather than following certain deterministic prescriptions of epistemologists, achieves his goals with an empirical imagination of an almost artistic nature. Based on the suggestions and the studies of Paolo Rossi, Alexandre Koyré and Gerald Holton, we examine some stages of 20th century physics: the hypothesis of Heisenberg, according to which the same ultimate principles are geometric-mathematical forms similar to those described in the Timaeus; the confrontation between Ehrenhaft (Machian) and Millikan (Franklinian and equipped with eidetic imagination) on the existence of subelectronic charges; influences in Bohr’s thinking (Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, James and Taoism). Einstein, then, was both a realist and a metaphysicist, leaning towards a speculative investigation of the universe. Furthermore, if in Einstein’s case we could speak of a sort of “artistic creativity”‘, the case of Fermi and his pupils in Via Panisperna represented a form of wisdom that we could call “creative craftsmanship”.