The Aha! Moment
eBook - ePub

The Aha! Moment

A Scientist's Take on Creativity

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Aha! Moment

A Scientist's Take on Creativity

About this book

This book is about having ideas and—a much longer haul—making them work. David Jones, best known for his Daedalus column, tells a multitude of stories about creators and their creations, including his own fantastical-seeming contributions to mainstream science such as the unrideable bicycle and chemical gardens in space. His theory of creativity endows each of us with a Random-Ideas Generator, a Censor, and an Observer-Reasoner. Jones applies his theory to a wide range of weird scientific experiments that he has conducted for serious scientific papers, for challenging printed expositions, and for presentations to a TV audience. He even suggests new ones, not yet tried!

Creativity is as essential to science as curiosity, physical intuition, and shrewd deduction from well-planned experiments. But, says Jones, ingenuity is very uncertain. Even for the greatest inventors, about 80 percent of ideas fail. Jokiness can help, and so can lots of random data. Jones has plenty of clever advice that will help spark that madly brilliant private thought in the first place—and will encourage you to take it further.

Neither dense nor demanding, The Aha! Moment is engrossing, edifying, and scientifically serious; yet it is lightly written and asks lots of silly questions. As Jones shows, it can often pay to take an absurd idea seriously.

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Yes, you can access The Aha! Moment by David Jones in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Physical Sciences & Creative Ability in Psychology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Preface: Creativity in My Career
  7. 1 A Theory of Creativity
  8. 2 The Creative Environment
  9. 3 Thoughts on the Random Ideas Generator
  10. 4 Intuition and Odd Notions
  11. 5 Creativity in Scientific Papers
  12. 6 Heat and Gravity
  13. 7 Astronomical Musings
  14. 8 Rotating Things
  15. 9 Explosions and Fuses
  16. 10 Tricks with Optics
  17. 11 Properties of Materials
  18. 12 Physical Phenomena I Have Noticed
  19. 13 Odd Notions I Have Played With
  20. 14 Literary Information
  21. 15 Inventions We Need but Don’t Have
  22. 16 A List of Silly Questions
  23. 17 A Short Guide to Being Creative
  24. Notes
  25. Index