Notes on Creative Discovery

Here I will log my notes when reading through the writings of various historical Thinkers while collecting their works together for the Work of the Mind.

1. Hermann von Helmholtz
   1. Category - General: Bodily Freshness
   2. A long speech, which I still trimmed greatly. His conception of knowledge, learning, and creativity seems to be the same fundamentally as Poincaré’s or Hamilton’s, namely that only after a period of mental exhaustion trying to sort out a problem, the endeavor must be abandoned, the body refreshed, and only then the subconscious mind at some unexpected time will proffer a new answer. It agrees with Kekulé and Mendeleev in that the mind must undergo immense prior work to become an expert, to know everything about a problem beforehand, and then the subconscious can uncover something new: scientific innovation never comes to a layman whose mind has not been extensively prepared first.
   3. But Helmholtz views flashes of innovation negatively in this speech, saying that they do occur, and they do benefit Man’s quest for knowledge, but that to rely on them is foolishness. Yet his method for generating good ideas is essentially to exhaust the conscious mental capacities and then to allow the subconscious to put in work to solve the problem: this is fundamentally the same as unexpected flashes of inspiration, except that Helmholtz seemingly has a way to manufacture inspiration, to force these lightning flashes to occur, and he considers them an integral part of his scientific process. So he disparages an unexpected flash of inspiration while relying on a manufactured flash of inspiration every day.
2. James Watson
   1. Category - Spatial Imagining
   2. Watson arrived at his conclusion for the pair bonding of the nucleotides after first drawing out chemical rings, and later by fiddling with cardboard models of the nucleotides’ chemical structures. This visualization culminated after the better part of a week.
   3. He seems to have sensed his nearness to a great discovery, and felt that proximity physiologically (“my pulse began to race”). Or perhaps he just saw a Nobel Prize in his future (“I was racing Peter’s father for the Nobel Prize”).
   4. Watson was under a time-pressure as well as a social-pressure caused by his deadlines.
3. Niels Jerne
   1. Category - Walking over Bridge
   2. Walked over the Knippelsbridge in Copenhagen while imagining the chain of reasoning that led to discovery.
4. William Hamilton
   1. Category - Waking over Bridge
   2. Walked over the Broom Bridge (Droichead Broome) in Dublin, over the Royal Canal, and felt an “electric circuit… close and a spark [flash] forth”, when he realized the relationship of quaternions.