Re: "first form an hypothesis..."

[William Beaty <billb@ESKIMO.COM>]

On Fri, 24 Sep 1999, Lois Breur Krause wrote:

> I teach that there is no one "Scientific Method." But the idea of
> scientific method certainly describes most constructive human thought in
> problem solving.

My favorite "method" is to beat my head against a problem far into the
night with no progress in sight, then to finally doze off.  Suddenly at
about 3AM the full-blown solution appears, interrupting a dream and
causing me to wake up in shock and write it down before it vanishes from
my mind (which it will if I don't write it down.)

 From talking to many other engineers/scientists, I hear that the above is
common.  Our subconscious pattern-matching capabilities are far beyond
what anyone imagines.  And if Jung's "collective unconscious"  is real,
then perhaps there are resources buried in our minds that have nothing to
do with the contents of our individual brains.  From a materialist
perspective, the above is sort of embarassing, so textbooks usually won't
mention it.  Sometimes they do mention that ???? discovered the Benzene
ring after watching, in a dream, a long snake reach out and bite its own
tail.  What the textbooks never mention is that a goodly portion of the
scientific community uses this technique.  They can't admit it, though.
If we keep saying "it came to me in a dream", colleagues will start
whispering.


Even the reverse of the above procedure is valuable.  I heard recently on
some group (was it here?)  that, in order to avoid tossing and turning all
night, don't work on any problems for about a half hour before going to
bed.  Apparantly this keeps the subconscious from getting the idea that it
needs to keep working all night.  Do something mindless before retiring.
The suggestion was to watch "Seinfeld."


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William J. Beaty                                  SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
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