Discovery Awaits the Mind That Pursues It
How do I model excellence? I’ve been reading some ideas on how to model the performance of successful people and wanted to translate this into scientific discovery and physics. If I want to model the physics discovery capabilities of one of the greats—Einstein, Newton, Noether, Fermi, Meitner, etc.—how exactly do…
The balancing act between theory and practice, qualitative insight and quantitative assessment, is a tough one. In my quest to develop a repertoire of skills and practices targeted at scientific discovery, theory and qualitative insight have dominated the body of literature I’ve read so far. Until I came across a…
I once told a fellow graduate student at a nuclear physics summer school that, “I don’t speak math.” He found this very funny, and me very funny. But I absolutely meant it. In fact, I was angry about it. By that time, I had already met the sleep-depriving scientific discovery…
J. Hollingsworth’s article on institutional factors affecting scientific discovery and D. Coyle’s book discussing the role of coaching in the development of exceptional ability have me thinking about how connections with other people affect the discovery potential of the individual. In particular, they got me thinking about the Master-Apprentice model.…
Which is a more correct representation of a beloved member of your life—an audio recording, a photograph, a video recording, a pencil sketch, a realist portrait painting, or an abstract painting? That’s the question I keep asking myself every time I think about analogies, metaphors, and representations in physics. The…
What does it mean to have a canon? In English studies this is usually a body of texts that it’s assumed most serious scholars have read deeply and which somehow embody whatever characteristics or themes are deemed most relevant to a given perspective (e.g., a Western canon, a Shakespearean canon,…
Every good story needs an arc: a master strategy that drives all the action from start to finish. Something that, for the writer, guides every word written with the knowledge that an outcome must be obtained: the arc must begin and end. It cannot run off to infinity. Are not…
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…
The idea of mapping information is heavily used and widely favored today. There are mind maps, geographical terrain maps, all manner of mathematical graphs to map relationships, and maps for “landscape analysis” used to summarize the state of the art in many fields. But it turns out that when I…
It occasionally strikes me of just how many mythical notions I had about how researching discovery, fusing it with my own neutrino research, and putting it on “The Insightful Scientist” site would work. Perhaps “pre-conceptions” or “ideas” would be a better word. Which has me thinking about ideas. I’m currently…