Rethinking Thinking

Creative Modeling

By David Jiles, Ph.D.

War-gaming would probably have remained a largely esoteric if not secret activity if it were not for H. G. Wells, the famous science-fiction writer. Wells wrote two books, Floor Games (1912) and Little Wars (1913) that stimulated the imaginations of generations of players, including Winston Churchill that initiated the war games industry that exists today. Amateurs can now replay, on a tabletop or a computer screen, almost any famous land, sea, or air battle of the past. Terrain, weather, supply lines, even events on the home front, can affect the recreated combat. Modeling Napoleon at Waterloo, Lee at Gettysburg, or Eisenhower at Normandy provides insights into military and political strategy that reading history can’t duplicate. Imaginary situations can even be set up involving hypothetical world crisis. Tom Clancy’s best-selling novels, such as Red Storm Rising or his Op-Center series, are based on such gaming.

War games really are practical tools; simulations created, as the U.S. Department of Defense puts it, to mimic “military operations involving two or more opposing forces and using rules, data, and procedures designed to depict an actual or hypothetical real-life situation.” This definition, with minor modifications, could be used to define modeling in any discipline. The result may be a representational or physical model, displaying the physical characteristics of a real object; a functional model, capturing the essential operations of an object or mechanism; a theoretical model, embodying the basic concepts governing the operation of some process; or an imaginary model, invented to display the features of something we can’t observe directly. The most sophisticated models are often combinations of all four types. All models are distillations of the elements considered to be the most critical determinants of structure and function. They always embody both abstractions and analogies and, usually, dimensional alterations.

Models can be smaller than life, life-sized, or bigger; physical or mathematical; realistic or not, depending on their intended uses. In almost all cases, the point of a model is to make accessible something that is difficult to experience easily.

Modeling an atom or a cell at a scale millions of times its real size can integrate information from hundreds or thousands of experiments and thus represent theoretical sophisticated constructs. Even the human head or heart can be expanded to fill a museum room so that people can experience what it would be like to explore the insides of their own mouth, sinuses, or ears or to follow the path of the blood as it circulates. The huge size of the model allows them to play-act the part of something much smaller — a red blood cell, perhaps, or a microbe or air.

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© David Jiles, Ph.D. All rights reserved.

About the Author | More by David Jiles
David Jiles, Ph.D. latest book is Creativity and the Secret Language of the Mind (LuLu Press, 2007). In an effort to re-think thinking, he has examined the best creative thinkers e.g. Einstein, Hemingway, Picasso, Tesla, Beethoven and countless others to find common secrets towards creative thinking.

07/22/08