Disjointed thoughts ahead:
I found lots of references through google to this page which (sort of) says that the phrase has its origins in the nine dot puzzle. Plausible, I guess, but not too convincing.
Steve may well be right, but I'll bet this phrase has an earlier, more scientific heritage that the EST people (being sort of scientists themselves) latched onto. But I can't prove this.
My guess is that the origin may have a connection to Maxwell's Demon which is a thought experiment involving a demon and a box. Here's a summary from an interesting page:James Clerk Maxwell once theorized that a demon could sit within a two chamber box and sort the molecules by their relative heat. If the demon could control the opening and closing of a door in the box, then all the hot molecules could be put within one chamber. If each chamber had a piston attached, then the piston in the hot chamber would rise, and energy would be created without the expenditure of thermodynamic work. If the demon did exist, the action of decreasing thermodynamic entropy would also result in a gain in information about the position of the molecules. Yet Maxwell's Demon is a rare case where thermodynamic entropy and informational entropy decrease together. We can pull Kesey in at this point because he published a collection of short stories titled Demon Box. The last story (IIRC) is itself titled Demon Box and it concerns a young girl who provides the answer to an older man much concerned with the problems (or negative outcome) associated with the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) of which Maxwell is the orginator. She "solves" the entropy problem by merely noting that entropy is only an issue in a closed system. Only inside the box. In other words, it's only a problem because or science operates on some base assumptions that may well not be true - like the universe is a zero sum energy game. In other words a closed box. If this isn't true, than the eventual heat death of the universe due to entropy may not be a problem. Thus, the problem is gotten around, literally, by thinking outside the box.
I wonder if that could possibly make sense. I mean something like the "box" is a scientific metaphore for the closed system of the universe upon which most calculations are based. This is like in school when you do physics equations and are told to "assume a frictionless surface..." which of course is never really the case, but we need to do this to do the math. Similarly, science thinking often calls for "boxes" "black boxes" and such to bound the problem in a way that will make thinking about it possible. But like the "frictionless plane" the idea of the "box" is just a convenient framework. Thus, breakthroughs - or surprise solutions like that to the nine dot problem - will have to come by thinking all the way back to challenge the original assumptions that framed the problem. And these assumptions often involve some sort of hypothetical "magic" box that seperates the problem in question from the rest of the messy always interconnected universe. Thus the meaning we all intuit for the phrase "thinking outside the box" - namely, that of somehow getting into a totally different frame of mind in relation to the problem - could come very literally from the language of physics which often employs all sorts of boxes (Maxwell's demon box being one, but there are countless, like the one schrodinger's cat is inside of, etc...) which frame the question. But the solution is often found by exposing the too simple framework of the question, and thus thinking outside the box.
Pynchon (probably more notably than Kesey) also wrote a lot about Maxwell's Demon box. See here for some details.
Just more fuel for the fire. I think this phrase is probably very old in scientific circles.
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I found lots of references through google to this page which (sort of) says that the phrase has its origins in the nine dot puzzle. Plausible, I guess, but not too convincing.
Steve may well be right, but I'll bet this phrase has an earlier, more scientific heritage that the EST people (being sort of scientists themselves) latched onto. But I can't prove this.
My guess is that the origin may have a connection to Maxwell's Demon which is a thought experiment involving a demon and a box. Here's a summary from an interesting page:We can pull Kesey in at this point because he published a collection of short stories titled Demon Box. The last story (IIRC) is itself titled Demon Box and it concerns a young girl who provides the answer to an older man much concerned with the problems (or negative outcome) associated with the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) of which Maxwell is the orginator. She "solves" the entropy problem by merely noting that entropy is only an issue in a closed system. Only inside the box. In other words, it's only a problem because or science operates on some base assumptions that may well not be true - like the universe is a zero sum energy game. In other words a closed box. If this isn't true, than the eventual heat death of the universe due to entropy may not be a problem. Thus, the problem is gotten around, literally, by thinking outside the box.
I wonder if that could possibly make sense. I mean something like the "box" is a scientific metaphore for the closed system of the universe upon which most calculations are based. This is like in school when you do physics equations and are told to "assume a frictionless surface..." which of course is never really the case, but we need to do this to do the math. Similarly, science thinking often calls for "boxes" "black boxes" and such to bound the problem in a way that will make thinking about it possible. But like the "frictionless plane" the idea of the "box" is just a convenient framework. Thus, breakthroughs - or surprise solutions like that to the nine dot problem - will have to come by thinking all the way back to challenge the original assumptions that framed the problem. And these assumptions often involve some sort of hypothetical "magic" box that seperates the problem in question from the rest of the messy always interconnected universe. Thus the meaning we all intuit for the phrase "thinking outside the box" - namely, that of somehow getting into a totally different frame of mind in relation to the problem - could come very literally from the language of physics which often employs all sorts of boxes (Maxwell's demon box being one, but there are countless, like the one schrodinger's cat is inside of, etc...) which frame the question. But the solution is often found by exposing the too simple framework of the question, and thus thinking outside the box.
Pynchon (probably more notably than Kesey) also wrote a lot about Maxwell's Demon box. See here for some details.
Just more fuel for the fire. I think this phrase is probably very old in scientific circles.
- jim 12-11-2001 7:37 pm