Discovery Awaits the Mind That Pursues It
We don’t realize how much of our thinking we lose until we try to tell someone else how we came up with an idea. The harder we try, the more the details get swept into a simplified 2-minute story that sounds logical. The messy truth – the real chain of…
The “powerful patroness” – a person who steps in at just the right moment with a gesture that gifts us momentum – is a necessary companion to the Master-Apprentice approach in science. The phrase came to me years ago when I realized how much of our scientific path is…
On the influence of tracking the evolution of your ideas on the pace of discovery. Have you ever moved, or had a big change in your situation, and when you started sorting through everything you wondered why you kept it all? I have been looking through all the…
It’s tempting when we talk to others about our ideas to only want to share the good stuff. To only share the things we think are logical, sound reasonable, maybe only the things we think (or hope) will make us seem smart and focused. But this tendency to re-frame our…
It’s that time of year when you suddenly realize that any goals, plans, or New Year’s Resolutions you have for 2019 already seem like a bad idea. I certainly have. I’ve been sick, I’m in the midst of a significant professional transition, and I still can’t even find the notebook…
In December I plan to post a series of log entries dedicated to the use of analogies. These posts will be true “log” items, in the sense that they will journal my progress as I try to create a “recipe” for applying analogical thinking in a research physics context, in…
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…
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…