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 content knowledge.  In this picture, the scientist’s capacity for discovery is taken to be part of an innate skill set, evidenced by the learning and daily discovery capacity of children, necessary for human development.  At the same time, sociology studies talk about institutional and field norms inhibiting discovery.  Using this mindset, I rationalized that achieving discovery more often might be about eliminating inhibitors to discovery. It’s as if we start out with the necessary tools, but access to the toolbox gets restricted over time and the tools get rusty.  Here the goal would be to identify these discovery inhibiting factors and strive to experience less of them, less often.

But upon reading the philosophy and cognitive psychology literature I generated an alternative mindset: here the emphasis is often on the individual and on mental strategies acquired by the individual over time that make discovery more likely.  Particularly fascinating, and resonant for a physicist, were the computational psychology studies reproducing famous discoveries.  Out of these investigations, into human discovery processes and computer artificial intelligence, grew techniques and algorithms much beloved by physicists today: machine learning approaches.  Using this mindset, I rationalized that achieving discovery more often might be about cultivating enablers to discovery. It’s as if we start out with a small set of tools and then add-on a toolbox and new tools over time, keeping them in pristine condition through care and attention.  Here the goal would be to identify these discovery fostering factors and strive to experience more of them, more often.

Of course, this is actually a continuum, between doing more discovery cultivating and doing less discovery inhibiting.  But which way to move toward first?  Especially in tough times, i.e., in a “limited resources scenario” where your time, your money, your patience, your motivation, and even the data available might be limited to the bare minimum.  What’s a discoverer to do then?

I found one possible answer to this question in something I read a few months earlier.  I was reading a book on evidence-based approaches to mindful meditation for pain management, by a pair of British practitioners and academics, when I came across a fictionalization they devised regarding the pull between positive and negative tendencies.  I think it stuck in my memory since, being an American from the East Coast, I used to visit the Blue Ridge mountains, connected to the Great Smoky Mountains in the story’s opener:

“It was a crisp autumn day in the Great Smoky Mountains.  A group of Cherokee children had gathered around their grandfather and they were filled with intense curiosity and excitement.  A few hours earlier, a fight had broken out between men and the village elder was called upon to settle the dispute.  The children were keen to know what the elder had to say about it.

‘Why do people fight?’ asked the youngest child.

‘Well,’ the elder replied.  ‘We all have two wolves inside us and they constantly do battle with each other.’

‘Inside us too?’ asked another child.

‘Yes, inside us all,’ he replied.  ‘There is a white wolf and a grey wolf.  The grey wolf is filled with anger, fear, bitterness, envy, jealousy, greed, and arrogance.  The white wolf is filled with love, peace, hope, courage, humility, compassion, and faith.  And the two wolves fight constantly.’

‘But which wolf wins?’ asked another child.

‘The one that we feed,’ replied the elder.”

[Vidyamala Burch and Danny Penman, Mindfulness for Health, published by Piatkus (2013), p.177-178.]

It came back to me in the context of scientific discovery because it feels like it sums up the issue in another way.  To me the wolf metaphor says, if you only have two bones, give one to yourself and one to the white wolf.  In other words, we could spend a lot of time trying to remove all the obstacles to discovery (i.e., chasing away the grey wolf).  But even if we are wildly successful, if we haven’t cultivated what fosters discovery, then all we’ll have is the most lovely, discovery-friendly environment in the world where precisely nothing happens because we didn’t actually build the capacity to discover anything yet (i.e., feed the white wolf).

So focusing on fostering seems like one promising approach.  Some old narratives of scientific discovery and high achievement  tended to liken discovery to a battle between two competing forces, a kind of assault of the intellect on the hidden aspects of Nature embodied in “ignorance”.  But, perhaps, the war is part of the problem, part of what occasionally misdirects our discovery aspirations and saps our limited resources.

Perhaps another discovery paradigm might be more effective.  Just feed the white wolf of scientific discovery and discovery may become your companion more often than you think.

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 makes Figment real.  More to the point, there is a song that used to play during the original iteration of the 1983-1998 ride in Walt Disney World, which I first saw at the age of 3 years old (and still remember it being love and adoration at first sight):

“We all have sparks, imaginations

That’s how our minds create creations

Right at the start of everything that’s new

One little spark lights up for you.”

(Lyrics from “One Little Spark”, Walt Disney World Ride “Journey Into Imagination”, Composed by the Sherman Brothers, Performed by Chuck McGann and Billy Barty)

The ride and song also featured something about electron beams (I got my Ph.D. in physics), the famous writer Edgar Allan Poe (I got an M.A. degree in creative writing), and even tap dancing (I remember tap dancing to the song “The Good Ship Lollipop” at around age 4 for a brief stint in dance lessons).  So, no doubt, I’m now living the Figment dream, albeit with a little bit of Freud thrown in (I got a B.S. in Psychology too—you can never have too many sparks).

But what stuck most was the word “spark” and it resonated even louder as I was reading the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on scientific discovery about the moment of discovery conception where the authors have a “happy thought” or the “Eureka” moment.  For me it is the “spark point”, when you become aware of the presence of an idea or option which then goes on to become a bona fide discovery.  So what are these spark points?  And can discovery be cultivated by fostering these spark points?

Good questions to craft into scientific hypotheses for testing, maybe in cognitive psychology.  But strictly speaking my own current work remains hypotheses in physics.  So I will have to approach this more as a matter of trial and error, unless I can find a discovery-friendly adventuresome collaborator from another field who might want to investigate the issue, or happily find a body of research has been done that, as of this writing, I just haven’t read yet.  Until then, I will make a sort of ramshackle working hypothesis to guide my trial and error in that direction.

What then is a spark point?  The one-line phrase that pops in to my mind is “an unseen cluster in the network of the mind.”

It’s as if a discovery path were a bridge leading from the known to the unknown.  The bridge exists, always there, but the trick is to find it.  Perhaps there are in fact many roads that lead to this bridge, either directly or indirectly, but even though you may take and re-trace a route you might not happen upon the bridge.  Or upon seeing the bridge you might not recognize it as a route to somewhere new.  So here lie all these links and the route to discovery, but it goes unrecognized.  It’s a key intersection, a crossroads, hiding in plain sight.

It’s similar to the mind perhaps.  We have neural connections linking to the key point from which a discovery idea could be made.  In fact, we re-use and add on to these neural connections with new learning, associations, and experiences daily.  But we don’t see that they are forming a cluster around a key point, a spark point, which provides the neural bridge between known and unknown.  It’s as if the discovery just sits there on a quiet neural pathway that never lights up because it never gets ignited by a spark.

I think maybe discovery strategies help by uncovering these spark points or allowing us to build up connections to them by re-visioning what is known.  Discovery strategies and approaches make the search active, dynamic, explicit, and unfamiliar, causing us to pay attention to what otherwise might go unnoticed.

In my personal experience these spark points often feel like they “resonate” somehow with one’s thinking, because the connections are there, even if as yet unnoticed, in the network of the mind.  The trick would be to lay down new roads through experience or shine a new light on old roads.  A good part of a discovery process search will look for ways to illuminate these hidden clusters and learn how to cultivate them.  This is an area I will definitely have to investigate more deeply.  For indeed, where there’s spark, there’s fire.

In my first-round literature search on what is scientific discovery, which yielded about thirty items, there were many well-known items like Thomas Kuhn’s ever-recycled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  I culled that to a first reading list of twelve, with one goal in mind: compile definitions of what constitutes a “scientific discovery”.  This proved more elusive than I thought.  Many articles used, but did not define, the term.  One text stood out though.  A Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on scientific discovery.

I had already formulated my working definition of scientific discovery before reading these, mentioned in a previous post: “And here, by ‘discovery’, I most definitely mean being the first to conceive of and correctly articulate a previously inconceivable truth about Nature, and not merely the products of any kind of scientific inquiry…”  This is necessarily a first step in attempting to identify discovery paths and apply this in neutrino physics.  One has to know what constitutes “a discovery” so that you can prudently choose an open neutrino research question, which actually has discovery as a goal.

The element my definition seems to have, which sometimes others do not (though I have yet to spend some time delving into more rigorous philosophy and psychology articles, so this will evolve no doubt), is the element that a discovery cannot have previously been conceived.  Of course, this would be tough to prove, but the spirit of it is important.  In my definition, discovery requires an element of radical originality.  The nearest definition I’ve seen to mine is perhaps hinted at by Schikore in the Encyclopedia entry when he references the idea of “historical creativity” from psychologist Margaret Boden: ‘psychological creativity’ is “new, surprising and important to the particular person who comes up with it” (I might have called this insight); ‘historical creativity’ is “radically novel, surprising, and important—it is generated for the first time (Boden 2004).”

So why also the “first timeness” in my definition?  Well there’s a saying that if you aim for the stars at least you’ll land on the moon.  The more ambitious the goal, the more likely it is to drive some innovation and progress as necessary by-products.  So, for now, I stand by my definition.  But I’ll continue to read, learn, work, and listen.

In the meantime, it seems scientific discovery is a little like truth and beauty—you know them when you see them, but it’s hard to define them.  In the Schikore entry, early on, it comments about the intimate relationship between scientific inquiry (which I interpret as the “scientific method”) and scientific discovery.  Perhaps there’s something to that.  Perhaps it’s all just in a name.  And maybe the Bard was right:

“’Tis but thy name that is my enemy:

Thou art thyself…

What’s in a name?  That which we call a rose

By any other word would smell as sweet.”

(William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2)

Perhaps “discovery”, by any another name, would still be as sweet once achieved.

And it’s merely the name “discovery”, and all its unfortunate connotations of genius and luck, that is the enemy of letting discovery find kinship in or own individual houses.

Every master needs a repertoire.  Jazz players, tennis players, chess players and more, all have a repertoire.  A repertoire has two parts: content and skills.  When I graduated with my Ph.D. in physics I thought I had a sufficient repertoire to be able to return to the question that had piqued my interest a decade ago and be able to make fresh progress toward discovery.  But in just about fifteen months I had exhausted the repertoire it took me eight years of education to build.

I now realize that what happened is, not that my training had failed me, but that my training was as a neutrino phenomenologist, not as a discovery physicist.  These two repertoires (not identities) are not mutually exclusive, but I was clearly missing one as part of my portfolio.  So, in some sense, as a fellow physicist once told me, I am mis-trained (although they didn’t mean it in such an encouraging sense).

So, like repertoires for many fields which can be mastered, I am treating scientific discovery no differently.  And here, by “discovery”, I most definitely mean being the first to conceive of and correctly articulate a previously inconceivable truth about Nature, and not merely the products of any kind of scientific inquiry; of which much of neutrino phenomenology is a good example–we often verify or measure things that have already been discovered, according to my usage of the word.

The content part of the discovery repertoire includes both knowledge of the discovery process itself, using evidence-based research, as well as historical sources and direct conversation with those who have discovered something new.  For physics specifically, it must also include a new schema for physics-specific knowledge that is better suited for use with discovery strategies.  If we think of things in the old ways, we are likely to be trapped in the old methods.

The other half of the discovery repertoire is skills, the actual physical doing, or discovering.  In music, these might be fingerings, scales, vibrato, or other techniques to execute any of the musical pieces in one’s portfolio.  In physics, we think of “skills” as almost exclusively synonymous with “mathematics” or “computation”.  Other “soft” skills, like writing, presenting, and teaching, we acknowledge in the context of career advancement and reputation, but not necessarily physics acuity.  But research suggests that soft skills like logic, creativity, reasoning (especially analogical thinking), and more play crucial and necessary roles in scientific discovery.  For physics discovery, mathematics is necessary, but not sufficient.

These then are two aspects of “the physicist’s repertoire” that need to be expanded as supporting players in pursuing discovery-level physics.  These carefully rethought knowledge schemas and discovery techniques need to be identified, refined, and articulated so that they become operational, not informational; so that I don’t just know, I do.  Since writing, as a way of refining ideas, is such a strong part of my training from my English degree, I’m keen to make The Physicist’s Repertoire come to life as a series of slim volumes sharing what I learn.

They will be in the spirit of the McGraw Hill published series of Schaum’s Outlines, which I have adored and cherished for years as one who likes self-study (otherwise I would never have accrued as many as 37 different volumes on math and physics at one time).  Brief, to the point, and emphasizing strategies and mental techniques, paired with physics-specific fully worked out examples, is indeed the tactic I wish to take in devising a discovery portfolio.  Creating The Physicist’s Repertoire will be a way to re-train myself as a physics researcher who uses discovery tactics as my modus operandi.  So that I can become more adept at the art of discovery.