Discovery Awaits the Mind That Pursues It
When I first started reading and thinking about how to actively, meaningfully, and systematically foster the frequency and pace of discovery in my own work I was of two minds. In psychology there is a line of thought which compares a child with a scientist, albeit with different degrees of…
For a long time, I’ve been drawn to the idea of a “spark.” I know where this began. My long-time love and fascination with the Walt Disney World character Figment, as in “a figment of your imagination”. Only in the Disney story, a man by the name of Dreamfinder makes…
In my first-round literature search on what is scientific discovery, which yielded about thirty items, there were many well-known items like Thomas Kuhn’s ever-recycled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I culled that to a first reading list of twelve, with one goal in mind: compile definitions of what constitutes a…
Every master needs a repertoire. Jazz players, tennis players, chess players and more, all have a repertoire. A repertoire has two parts: content and skills. When I graduated with my Ph.D. in physics I thought I had a sufficient repertoire to be able to return to the question that had…
I’m finding the most difficult (and intimidating) part of pursuing discovery to be coming up with new ideas, at least on days when my “systematic mind” is team lead. On these days I stick to knowns and try to refit combinations of knowns, or incrementally push ideas a little toward…
I have in mind a way to foster cross-pollination and more interdisciplinary interaction among the sciences (both physical and social). Initially, I had a hunch that such cross-pollination might be the key to my own discovery efforts as well as to that of others. This is a little bit obvious…
How do I set my mind to make a scientific discovery? And why bother? I suppose it goes back to my Ph.D. advisor’s old advice, “work on the problems that keep you up at night.” Many years ago I heard a fascinating idea proposed in neutrino physics, one that would…