Many people, on occasion myself included, may think isn’t all this talk of discovery strategies just smoke and mirrors? Isn’t it just a re-packaging of work done decades ago? I ask myself this all the time. Of course, the answer in some cases is necessarily yes. Many great minds have come before mine and the purpose of research is to build upon, not reinvent. Certainly, many of these strategies, one would assume, are part of our natural capacity. That is how so much has been discovered in the past millennia, with far less education, technology, and access to knowledge and resources than we have today.
For these “already knowns” the goal is to set discovery as the aim and be more consciously strategic about the mental tools applied to the problem, from the beginning. Not just after some anomalous finding has been found. In some sense, it’s as if you’re taking a full complement of available physics strategies including visualization, analogies, simulation, and so on and looking at them through a discovery lens, which changes your focal point. In particular, I think it will change what techniques we perceive as providing a strategic next step. For example, if I’m more concerned with perfecting a dish I already know how to cook the range of actions I consider will be quite different than if I try to discover an ingredient no has tried before and invent a dish with it.
That being said, I am a firm believer that we always know less than there is to know. So, I have no doubt there are new strategies and paths to scientific discovery to be found as well. And these would not be smoke and mirrors re-packaging, but new embers—new mechanisms. Again, I think viewing things through a discovery lens will help, via the medium of psychological “priming” effects. If you start thinking about buying a new Fiat suddenly you feel like you see tons of them on the road where you didn’t notice them before. Perhaps a discovery lens is both good and bad, on the one hand your attention becomes more narrow, but on the other hand sometimes it can bring the unseen into focus.
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