Discovery Awaits the Mind That Pursues It
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…
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. …
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…
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…
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…