I love imagination. Ergo, I love thought experiments. I was also inspired to become a physicist by Einstein. Einstein was famous for his thought experiments. Ergo, I love thought experiments. My most recent thought experiment has been to try and flip on its head a way neutrino physicists have of making neutrinos sound as mystifying …
I have been letting ideas about practice, how to gain skill, how to gain mastery, and how to gain expertise percolate for some time now. Because what’s the point of learning a new skill, like scientific discovery, if you can’t practice it until you can do it well consistently? I’ve been very worried about this …
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 I do that? My natural …
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 magnificent pair of papers published …
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 question I’ve dreamed of answering …
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. Physics Ph.D. training essentially follows …
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 classic example of a representation …
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, a post-colonial literature canon, and …
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 research undertakings much the same …
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 look around the discovery literature …