The Idea Mill

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 part of what is known as “the Hive” in my institution, a tribute to the symbol of the city we’re in—the Manchester bee.  But on the ground floor of our building is something known as the “Ideas Mill”.  It’s a place for lectures, break-out groups, conferences, students to study and lounge, etc.  And its name honors another Mancunian legacy–industrial mills.

When it comes to scientific discovery I think we too often have an image of the mind as a vessel that gets filled up.  If you are an “average person” then that liquid is just water—necessary, but uninspiring, and on really long days the vessel can get a bit leaky.  If you are one of the “gifted ones”, like good old Albert (Einstein of course), then the liquid is a bit more like fuel and your vessel an engine that runs like a honed machine churning out “something new” at an astonishing rate.

But watching my own ideas evolve, in writing and thinking about the meeting of the minds down in the Ideas Mill and expressions like “grist for the mill”, I think a more helpful picture might be to see the “discovery mind” as a mill.

Raw material is taken in (content, like knowledge and experience).  The materials are prepared for production in some way (distilling, sorting, accepting and rejecting content).  Then the materials are worked upon to create something new (refining, fusing, categorizing mental content).  And at last the final product is packaged for sharing and consumption (articulating mental content).

Each step, as the grist moves through the mill of the discovery mind, could become better known so that discovery-friendly tactics could be applied at key points throughout production.  This matches somewhat with aspects to the three-phase picture of discovery in parts of the philosophy of science.  My own view of the “discovery cycle” has already evolved to now include six phases that I think are suited to theoretical physics.  The main point is to perceive ideas and discovery as a process that can be built up and refined in the mind.  In this picture, how productive we are at discovery will depend on how much care we have taken with our internal mode of manufacture.

In any case, three phases, six phases, or other, it’s something to think about. In other words, grist for the mill.