Discovery Awaits the Mind That Pursues It
Marshmallows are exquisite probes of the human psyche. So, here’s a question: what relationship do marshmallows, tape, string, scientific discovery, and uncooked spaghetti all have in common? (And in case you’re wondering, this week’s feature photo is a bundle of uncooked spaghetti photographed from above.) The answer to the question…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…