Discovery Awaits the Mind That Pursues It
Our days can be a stream of never-ending emotional busywork and social obligations. Meetings, emails, and time-sensitive demands from others fill our digital inboxes. Requests for help, guidance, feedback, and involvement overflow our emotional inbox. On top of all that we’re supposed to be able to achieve “flow”: a timeless,…
The Insightful Scientist is now officially a business! It’s been a long journey to get to this new phase. Our headquarters are located in one-of-a-kind Hawai’i. But we couldn’t be more excited to evolve from a personal website to a new organization on a mission to help researchers…
There’s a moment in every scientist’s life when we realize that our discovery efforts feel harder than they should. We declutter our schedule, reduce distractions, reorganize our workspace, and try to eliminate every obstacle we can find. And yet, nothing changes. The breakthroughs don’t come. The insights don’t land. The…
Images fuel science even more than math does. It might not feel like it, but it’s true. For one thing, humans started drawing pictures long before they started drawing equations. Capturing what we see, so we can look at it again later is something we take for granted…
On why mindset is the most effortful part of a scientist’s repertoire. This is the second post in a four-part series. In an older post I defined “mindset” as “caring enough to find out what you don’t know”. I was reminded of mindset while cleaning up my old archived files…
Many of us believe we struggle because we can’t come up with ideas. My new opinion is that having “breakthroughs” is not the reason why we struggle with scientific discovery. Knowing what to do after you’ve had a breakthrough is where you’ll have challenges. I have come across people…
I love a good mash-up, so let me ask you this: What do you get when you mash-up the ideas of two prolific female academics, one in social work and the other in theoretical physics? The answer is: my musings for this week’s post, which boils down to the phrase…
When someone asks you what you do for a living, how do you answer? Do you give your job title? Do you say what kinds of project(s) you are working on? Do you give your company name or name of the topic you work on? From researchers of all stripes,…
Putting things into categories is helpful. Sometimes it lets you recognize shared commonalities between things that you didn’t notice before. Other times it gives you a mental shortcut to know how to interact with something—once you know its category, you’re more likely to know what it’s for and what to…
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…