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The following comes from LUCHINS (1968):WERTHEIMER sought examples from the field of perception, an area of psychology with a highreputation for exactness. He had little success until 1910, when he went on a trip, and while onthe train, he thought of an optical phenomenon that seemed suitable. At Frankfurt he got off thetrain and bought a toy stroboscope. In a hotel room he set up the experiment by substitutingstrips of paper on which he had drawn series of lines for the pictures in the toy. The results wereas he expected: by varying the time interval between the exposure of the lines, he found that hecould see one line after another, two lines standing side by side, or a line moving from oneposition to another. This "movement" came to be known as the phi phenomenon.WERTHEIMER asked SCHUMANN, his former teacher at Berlin and now at the FrankfurtPsychological Institute, if he could provide someone to act as an experimental subject.SCHUMANN s laboratory assistant, Wolfgang KÖHLER came. For the next experimental session,KÖHLER brought his friend Kurt KOFFKA, who also served as a subject. KÖHLER persuadedSCHUMANN to visit WERTHEIMER and to invite him to conduct his experiment at the FrankfurtInstitute. A simple apparatus to demonstrate the phi phenomenon was constructed, and the nowclassical experiment was conducted (WERTHEIMER, 1912b).WERTHEIMER explained the significance of the experiment as follows: "What do we see when wesee the movements of a hand or a light? Is it appropriate to say that we have a sensation indifferent places on the retina from which movement is inferred? Is it appropriate to cut thephenomenon of movement in this way into a number of static sensations?" (1937). Although therehad been psychologists and philosophers before him who believed that movement was not aninference from static sensations on the retina but was a sensation sui generis, they had notdemonstrated this in a scientific manner. WERTHEIMER now presented the thesis in a way whichmade experimental decisions possible.It was not merely WERTHEIMER s experiment but his formulation of the underlying problem andthe way to proceed to solve this problem that launched Gestalt psychology. Through experimentalvariations, he tested, one by one, various possible explanations of the phi phenomenon and foundthem wanting. According to WERTHEIMER, the essential features of the phi phenomenon are thefollowing: it is a counter example to the assumption that piecemeal and summative approaches topsychological phenomena are universally adequate; it belongs to a category of genuine dynamicexperience which must be understood in terms of dynamics rather than reduced to static events;finally, it is an example of a structure that is not an arbitrary arrangement of events but has innerconnectedness (1937).WERTHEIMER felt that there was a need for a model of such dynamic experiences, and hehypothesized a possible physiological process: "The motion is due to a field of activity amongcells... not excitation in isolated cells but field effects" (1937). This model applied concepts of fieldtheoreticalphysics to a neurological event. (LUCHINS, 1968, pp. 523-525)WERTHEIMER: ISOMORPHISMThis section is based mainly on LUCHINS and LUCHINS (1973, Vol. II, pp. 157-171), whichreconstructed several sessions of WERTHEIMER s 1937-1938 seminar at the New School for SocialResearch that were devoted to "a new theory of perception of feelings." First WERTHEIMERdescribed a lecture-demonstration in which the instructor was standing behind a table in the frontof the room. In the back of the room were two boxes of the same size, shape, and color. Theinstructor asked a student to go to the back of the room and bring to his table, one at a time, eachof the two boxes. The box contents were visible to the student who carried them, but not to theother students in the class. (One box held a sensitive, delicate apparatus, but the other held old5