What BOOK are you reading right now?

I've just started reading...

Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People

by Robert & Michèle Root-Bernstein

Excerpts:

Our tour of mental cookery begins in the kitchen of the mind, where ideas are marinated, stewed, braised, beaten, baked, and whipped into shape. Just as real chefs surprise us by throwing in a pinch of this and a handful of something else, the kitchens of the creative imagination are full of unexpected practices. Great ideas arise in the strangest ways and are blended from the oddest ingredients. What goes into the recipes often bears no resemblance to the finished dish. Sometimes the master mental chef can't even explain how she knows that her dish will be tasty. She just has a gut feeling that this imagined mixture of ingredients will yield a delicious surprise.

Gut feelings don't make obvious sense. Consider, for example, the experience of young Barbara McClintock, who would later earn a Nobel Prize in genetics. One day in 1930 she stood with a group of scientists in the corn fields around Cornell University, pondering the results of a genetics experiment. The researchers had expected that half of the corn would produce sterile pollen, but less than a third of it actually had. The difference was significant, and McClintock was so disturbed that she left the cornfield and climbed the hill to her laboratory, where she could sit alone and think.

Half an hour later, she "jumped up and ran down to the field. At the top of the field (everyone else was down at the bottom) I shouted, 'Eureka, I have it! I have the answer! I know what this 30 percent sterility is.'" Her colleagues naturally said, "Prove it." Then she found she had no idea how to explain her insight. Many decades later, McClintock said, "When you suddenly see the problem, something happens that you have the answer - before you are able to put it into words. It is all done subconsciously. This has happened many times to me, and I know when to take it seriously. I'm so absolutely sure. I don't talk about it, I don't have to tell anybody about it, I'm just sure this is it."

This feeling of knowing without being able to say how one knows is common. The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal is famous for his aphorism "The heart has its reasons that reason cannot know."

(pages 1-2)
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Gut feelings, emotions, and imaginative images do make sense in science, but, like the meaning of a dance or musical theme, that sense is felt rather than defined. - page 4-5

To think creatively is first to feel. The desire to understand must be whipped together with sensual and emotional feelings and blended with intellect to yield imaginative insight. - page 6

As we will show in subsequent chapters of this book, if you can't imagine, you can't invent. "Illusion," as Pulitzer-Prize-winning author and artist Paul Horgan has written, "is first of all needed to find the powers of which the self is capable." If you can't conceive of things that don't exist, you can't create anything new. If you can't dream up worlds that might be, then you are limited to the worlds other people describe. You see reality through their eyes, not your own. - page 22

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(On Algebraic versus Geometric Thinking)

What are we to understand by Faynman's statement that he treated algebra problems geometrically and Hoyle's that he treated geometric problems algebraically? A concrete example may help.

A classic word problem concerns a man rowing a boat when his hat falls into the river, which is flowing at 3 kilometers per hour downstream. He is rowing upstream 2 km per hour faster than the stream is taking him down. He discovers his hat is missing one half-hour after it has fallen in the river. If he turns around and rows back at the same speed relative to the river to fetch his hat, how long will it take to catch up to it?

(page 68)
____________________________________________________

PoetSeductress wrote:

I've just started reading...

Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People

by Robert & Michèle Root-Bernstein

Excerpts:

Our tour of mental cookery begins in the kitchen of the mind, where ideas are marinated, stewed, braised, beaten, baked, and whipped into shape. Just as real chefs surprise us by throwing in a pinch of this and a handful of something else, the kitchens of the creative imagination are full of unexpected practices. Great ideas arise in the strangest ways and are blended from the oddest ingredients. What goes into the recipes often bears no resemblance to the finished dish. Sometimes the master mental chef can't even explain how she knows that her dish will be tasty. She just has a gut feeling that this imagined mixture of ingredients will yield a delicious surprise.

Gut feelings don't make obvious sense. Consider, for example, the experience of young Barbara McClintock, who would later earn a Nobel Prize in genetics. One day in 1930 she stood with a group of scientists in the corn fields around Cornell University, pondering the results of a genetics experiment. The researchers had expected that half of the corn would produce sterile pollen, but less than a third of it actually had. The difference was significant, and McClintock was so disturbed that she left the cornfield and climbed the hill to her laboratory, where she could sit alone and think.

Half an hour later, she "jumped up and ran down to the field. At the top of the field (everyone else was down at the bottom) I shouted, 'Eureka, I have it! I have the answer! I know what this 30 percent sterility is.'" Her colleagues naturally said, "Prove it." Then she found she had no idea how to explain her insight. Many decades later, McClintock said, "When you suddenly see the problem, something happens that you have the answer - before you are able to put it into words. It is all done subconsciously. This has happened many times to me, and I know when to take it seriously. I'm so absolutely sure. I don't talk about it, I don't have to tell anybody about it, I'm just sure this is it."

This feeling of knowing without being able to say how one knows is common. The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal is famous for his aphorism "The heart has its reasons that reason cannot know."

(pages 1-2)
____________________________________________________

Gut feelings, emotions, and imaginative images do make sense in science, but, like the meaning of a dance or musical theme, that sense is felt rather than defined. - page 4-5

To think creatively is first to feel. The desire to understand must be whipped together with sensual and emotional feelings and blended with intellect to yield imaginative insight. - page 6

As we will show in subsequent chapters of this book, if you can't imagine, you can't invent. "Illusion," as Pulitzer-Prize-winning author and artist Paul Horgan has written, "is first of all needed to find the powers of which the self is capable." If you can't conceive of things that don't exist, you can't create anything new. If you can't dream up worlds that might be, then you are limited to the worlds other people describe. You see reality through their eyes, not your own. - page 22

____________________________________________________


(On Algebraic versus Geometric Thinking)

What are we to understand by Faynman's statement that he treated algebra problems geometrically and Hoyle's that he treated geometric problems algebraically? A concrete example may help.

A classic word problem concerns a man rowing a boat when his hat falls into the river, which is flowing at 3 kilometers per hour downstream. He is rowing upstream 2 km per hour faster than the stream is taking him down. He discovers his hat is missing one half-hour after it has fallen in the river. If he turns around and rows back at the same speed relative to the river to fetch his hat, how long will it take to catch up to it?

(page 68)
____________________________________________________

I'll make sure I buy that one. Is it available on the Internet,PS?