A useful counterexample is the discovery of Neptune. Neptune was discovered when astronomers noticed deviations from their predictions of Uranus’ orbit, and then computed the likely orbital characteristics of a hypothetical eighth planet from those deviations. They then tested their hypothesis by turning their telescopes to the night sky, and sure enough, there was another planet out there.
More generally, I would say that it takes both. Yes, there is often a flash of inspiration, but inspiration is not enough. One still has to do the work. It’s not enough to dream of a snake eating its own tail. You still have to do the crystallography to prove your inspiration correct.
As a working scientist now, the hard part is often figuring out which flashes to pursue… the intuitive leaps have started coming hard and fast and I simply cannot follow up on all of them.
My main work involves doing actual evolution experiments in which I keep microbes growing for months on end and see how they change under selective pressures I apply. This requires being very very careful about what experiments I pursue since they take so long. I only have so much time and it is not my lab.
I do like some other circumstances that come up faster sometimes. Like when I read a bunch of data about how a particular protein system works and I realized that someone missed some major implications on the early evolution of earth’s biosphere, which is sort of behind a paper I am finishing up writing now. Or, amusingly enough, how yesterday I learned a new fact about the ‘wow’ signal from the 70s that has so inspired SETI speculation and it set off a chain of associations in my head that led to me realizing what is as near as I can tell a new way to encode seti-relevant information in very brief radio signals that does not seem to have been published before and would have implications on the analysis of one-off radio transients, which a friend and I were able to flesh out in about an hour of scribbling geometry and algebra into actual equations.
One thing that was very annoying was when I had such a flash about the research going on at another laboratory at my university (it has to do with a potential relationship between brain evolution and ribosome structure). It took me two years of trying to explain the connection I saw to anyone from that lab who would listen before someone else understood what I was trying to get at enough to start following up on it in a way that could be productive. This is why collaborations are so productive...
A useful counterexample is the discovery of Neptune. Neptune was discovered when astronomers noticed deviations from their predictions of Uranus’ orbit, and then computed the likely orbital characteristics of a hypothetical eighth planet from those deviations. They then tested their hypothesis by turning their telescopes to the night sky, and sure enough, there was another planet out there.
More generally, I would say that it takes both. Yes, there is often a flash of inspiration, but inspiration is not enough. One still has to do the work. It’s not enough to dream of a snake eating its own tail. You still have to do the crystallography to prove your inspiration correct.
As a working scientist now, the hard part is often figuring out which flashes to pursue… the intuitive leaps have started coming hard and fast and I simply cannot follow up on all of them.
My main work involves doing actual evolution experiments in which I keep microbes growing for months on end and see how they change under selective pressures I apply. This requires being very very careful about what experiments I pursue since they take so long. I only have so much time and it is not my lab.
I do like some other circumstances that come up faster sometimes. Like when I read a bunch of data about how a particular protein system works and I realized that someone missed some major implications on the early evolution of earth’s biosphere, which is sort of behind a paper I am finishing up writing now. Or, amusingly enough, how yesterday I learned a new fact about the ‘wow’ signal from the 70s that has so inspired SETI speculation and it set off a chain of associations in my head that led to me realizing what is as near as I can tell a new way to encode seti-relevant information in very brief radio signals that does not seem to have been published before and would have implications on the analysis of one-off radio transients, which a friend and I were able to flesh out in about an hour of scribbling geometry and algebra into actual equations.
One thing that was very annoying was when I had such a flash about the research going on at another laboratory at my university (it has to do with a potential relationship between brain evolution and ribosome structure). It took me two years of trying to explain the connection I saw to anyone from that lab who would listen before someone else understood what I was trying to get at enough to start following up on it in a way that could be productive. This is why collaborations are so productive...