Moments of Inspiration

[malcubed]

So Sheri Mizumori, the last professor for my neurobiology course, made a claim in her last lecture that has been vexing me since. As an aside while making another point, she stated (something along the lines of) that it was commonly anecdotal for famous scientific revelations to have been had while walking. The rest of the class had a brain-click

Comments

[scathach]

I, too, have all my best ideas in the shower, although not usually while either smoking pot or fucking.

[nemoren]

All I can think of is that guy who invented velcro.

[malcubed]

...and?

[nemoren]

Walking related: yes.

[half_double]

Martin Luther came up with the 95 Theses while sitting in the outhouse. He had chronic constipation, so he spent a lot of time in the outhouse. If only he'd had a bran muffin, we might all still be Catholic.

Re: Oh yeah....

[malcubed]

The impression I had gotten is that the standard version of the story, "Newton thought of gravity after getting hit in the head with an apple," was false in the sense of being an overly reductionist version of "after watching an apple fall to the ground, Newton was inspired to ponder if the power of Earth's gravity had a long enough range to impact a celestial body such as the moon, which eventually lead to his theory of universal gravitation." Wiki quotes his assistant and other contemporaries as relating approximately the latter version; ergo it must be true.

Re: Oh yeah....

[discoflamingo]

I maintain that the story about Galileo throwing two cannonballs at once at his assistants off the leaning tower of Pisa to test F=ma is WAY BETTER

I got nothing <i>good</i>

[discoflamingo]

I thought Einstein came up with the seed for special relativity while walking, when a bicycle passed him.

Paul Erdos is a mathematician (not a scientist), but he got most of his best ideas while walking (especially about graph theory, which is like multi-dimensional walking). He also drank a lot of coffee, and did a lot of meth, so I'm going to bet he spent 90% of his waking life (aka 75% of his life) either pacing, or some longer-distance variant of pacing.

Paul nee Saul (also not a scientist) had a great insight break with reality on the road to Damascus.

The Peripatetic school of philosophy (also not scientists) insisted on walking to encourage thought.

Re: I got nothing <i>good</i>

[malcubed]

Yeah, Paul of Tarsus definitely crosses the line from "revelation about a problem" to "revelation from God," inclusion of which would make consumption of mushrooms and moldy rye bread the most common inspiratory activity in the history of humanity. As such? Right out.