Kepler’s Leap
In 1609, Johannes Kepler sat at his desk, exhausted, staring at numbers that refused to align. For years, he’d tried to prove that the planets moved in perfect circles – because everyone knew that was how God’s universe had to be. The circle was perfection itself: eternal, unbroken, divine. But the numbers mocked him. No matter how he twisted them, the data would not fit the circle. And then came the reluctant heresy: the orbit wasn’t a circle at all. It was an ellipse.
A Eureka moment so profound, it shook the very foundation of the heavens. Kepler himself described the experience in words that still feel electric centuries later:
“Having perceived the first glimmer of dawn eighteen months ago… the light of day three months ago… but only a few days ago the plain sun of a most wonderful vision – nothing shall now hold me back. Yes, I give myself up to holy raving. … I have cast the dice, and I am writing a book either for my contemporaries, or for posterity. It may wait a hundred years for a reader, since God has also waited six thousand years for a witness.”
This was not just astronomy. It was revelation. And like every true Eureka moment, it was met not with applause, but with resistance.
Arthur Koestler - The Spotlight and the Questioner
Centuries later, the Hungarian-British author Arthur Koestler turned his gaze to Kepler. Koestler had lived through the ideological earthquakes of the 20th century: fascism, communism, exile, war. He knew what it meant to watch entire frameworks of meaning collapse.
That may be why Kepler captivated him. In The Watershed, Koestler cast Kepler as more than an astronomer. He was a man suspended between two universes: the mystical Middle Ages and the rational modern era. Half mystic, half scientist, Kepler bore the burden of tearing down one cosmos while midwifing another.
Koestler’s insight was not just historical; it was existential. He asked: “Where does meaning live when the old framework collapses?”
That question haunted his political novels, his scientific explorations, and his philosophical essays. It was also the seedbed for later thinkers like Margaret Boden. Her taxonomy of creativity owes much to Koestler’s earlier concept of bisociation – the collision of two frames of thought to generate something new.
Koestler gave us both the metaphor and the mystery of Eureka. He spotlighted Kepler, yes, but he also traced the hidden cost of transformational creativity: the human struggle to find meaning in the fracture.
Margaret Boden – The Mapmaker of Creativity
The British cognitive scientist Margaret Boden devoted her career to understanding creativity, both human and artificial. Building in part on Koestler’s notion of bisociation, she codified three distinct modes:
- Combinational creativity: bringing together things in unexpected ways. A new recipe, a surprising metaphor, a clever mash-up.
- Exploratory creativity: refining and pushing deeper within a framework. A new strategy in chess, a faster process at work, a more elegant design.
- Transformational creativity: the rarest of all, when the rules themselves change. Kepler’s ellipse. Darwin’s evolution. Einstein’s relativity.
Boden put it simply: “Transformational creativity is the most striking kind of all: it alters the space of possibilities.”
How This Shows Up in You (and Your Type)
You don’t have to be Kepler to see these modes at work in your own life.
- If you thrive on light bulb innovation – surprising leaps, unexpected combinations – you’re working in the gear Boden calls combinational creativity. This often aligns with what we see in Intuitive types.
- If you’re more drawn to process innovation – refining, improving, polishing – you’re working in the gear Boden calls exploratory creativity. This is often the natural groove of Sensing types.
- And sometimes, rarely, you may stumble into transformational creativity – the kind of shift that doesn’t just change the rules of the game, but the game itself.
Important note: anyone can work in any mode. These are tendencies, not prisons. But knowing your default gear helps you see your creative sweet spot – and the stretch that might unlock something new.
Applying This to Your Life
- Value your mode: If you’re a process innovator (more likely Sensing types), don’t dismiss it as “just refinement.” That’s the kind of creativity that keeps systems alive and thriving.
- Celebrate your sparks: If you’re a light bulb innovator (more likely Intuitive types), honor those leaps – even if they feel messy at first. They are the raw material of new possibilities.
- Recognize the resistance: If you ever feel like you’re on the edge of something transformational, remember: Eureka moments always look wrong at first. That doesn’t mean they are.
- Play across modes: Try the gear that isn’t natural. Refiners can challenge themselves with bold leaps; light bulb thinkers can ground themselves in disciplined refinement. That’s how you expand your creative range and, perhaps, increase your odds for Eureka.
The Acceleration Ahead
Here’s the part Kepler could never have imagined: we are entering an age where Eureka moments are accelerating. Artificial intelligence is already helping us discover medicines, invent new materials, and even propose theories in physics. The pace of transformational creativity is quickening.
That means two things for us:
- Giddy-up: prepare yourself for a future where the “unfathomable” becomes the new normal.
- Practice acceptance: when you encounter an idea that seems impossible at first glance, resist the reflex to dismiss it. Remember: every ellipse looks absurd before it becomes obvious.
Can Machines Have Eureka?
Margaret Boden didn’t just classify creativity; she also left us with a haunting question: can machines ever have true Eureka?
To me, it depends on how it’s defined. If we mean the subjective thrill of sudden understanding – from the “aha!” moment of the child solving a puzzle all the way up to Kepler’s “holy raving” – then that’s eureka with a lowercase e: a felt experience, a spark of awe. Machines don’t feel that.
But if we mean Eureka with a capital E – a breakthrough of such significance that it alters the framework itself, like ellipses replacing circles or relativity redefining time – then AI is already knocking at the door. Protein folding, novel materials, strange new strategies in games: these are outputs that surprise even their creators, rupturing expectations and extending possibility.
Maybe the distinction is this: eureka is human, an inward sensation. Eureka is cultural, a marker of transformation. Humans may always own the lowercase, but machines will likely join us in producing the capital-letter kind.
Kepler got to experience both.
Closing Reflection – Living at the Watershed
Kepler lived the fracture. Koestler spotlighted it, asking the existential question of where meaning lives when the old framework collapses. Boden codified it, giving us a map we can use to navigate our own creative modes. Together, they remind us that creativity isn’t just cleverness – it’s the courage to break and rebuild.
And perhaps (like many NTs before and after) Kepler was also driven by something deeper – a need to leave his mark on the universe, to wrestle order out of the stars so his life could not be dismissed as irrelevant. For him, the ellipse was not only a law of motion; it was proof that the cosmos bore his witness.
Now we are entering an age of accelerating Eurekas. Some will come from humans, others from machines. Either way, the challenge is the same: to resist the reflex of dismissal, and to cultivate the courage to live at the watershed.
The next time an idea feels too disruptive to say out loud, pause and ask yourself: is this my eureka – or could it be our next Eureka – or maybe both?
Further Reading
For a poetic and philosophical exploration of bisociation and creative insight, see Maria Popova’s essay ‘How Creativity in Humor, Art, and Science Works: Arthur Koestler’s Theory of Bisociation’ in The Marginalian. Read here.
