Nutella? Just goes to show the power of chocolate.
You never know where the spark of creativity will come from. The 19th
century mathematician Hercule Poncaré solved the perplexing problem of the day
while walking along the base of a cliff. Something in the pattern of the rocks
brought it all together.
In the book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", Robert Pirsig
describes creativity as being a result of numerous subconcious thoughts in the
subconcious coming together with a degree of "quality" that caused the idea to
rise to the conscious. Zen Buddhists call it the "place of ten thousand
things".
I had such a thing happen many years ago while driving to a conference in
Las Cruces. I had stopped at the University of Arizona to copy some papers and
scanned one in particular about a perplexing problem in analogue electronics.
I was halfway across the San Simon Playa when the idea came as to how to solve
it, an extension of two patents that I already held. I pulled to the shoulder
and spent a half hour sketching out the solution, with nothing but bare sand in
every direction and two lanes of asphalt. It became my fourth patent.
>
> A direct numerical solution for aspherics to correct spherical
>aberration in lens design has been a vexing problem. Often now
>can use a pair of aspherics with a brute force approach to correct
>much of it but the calibration of such lenses depend on imprecise
>calculation. A Ph.D. student in nanotechnology came up with an idea
>for the solution for this almost mythical problem while eating bread
>with Nutella. Less than a day later, the program confirmed an exact
>solution.
>
>https://phys.org/news/2019-08-physicists-year-old-optical-problem.html
>
Chris
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro
- Hunter S. Thompson
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