Discovery Awaits the Mind That Pursues It
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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 of…