Creativity in Oil and Gas Exploration - A quotation approach

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Creativity in Exploration

A Quotation Database Approach

compiled by

Walter H. Pierce

2nd Edition 2007

Walter H. Pierce StartExp [email protected]

http://startexp.com/


A Database Quotation Approachto Creativity in Exploration

Objective:

I created this report and compilation for two reasons.

• I found it to be extraordinarily interesting.

• I hoped that it would help others.

The following 2007 compilation of quotations was initiated while working at Amoco as an exploration geologist. As I began to collect the quotes, I began to see value in them as a sort of remote interview of other workers, perhaps more creative than you and I, who had made observations on their attempts or success in creative work. This work represents a database analysis and classification of these quotations into a series of phases of the creative process, which I have interpreted from the quotations. I make no claim that the phases are precisely sequential. The sequence in actual cases may differ, sometimes skipping phase, sometimes overlapping and reversing sequence. My attempt at sequencing phases has only been used to organize the quotations into a compilation that can be useful to those seeking a way through creative problem solving.

Eventually I began putting the quotations in an Access database. From there I developed a “Form” in Microsoft Access which enabled me to begin classifying the quotes.

Figure 1, Access Form designed to aid the classification process. Working with this form is a little like spinning two Rolodex files simultaneously. The main difference is that the two tables are joined in the database so one can classify the quotations on the right with the categories on the left.




The Access “Form” works like two stacks of cards. Imagine that you have over 700 3 by 5 cards in one stack. In the second stack you begin a classification system. You study each quotation and you attempt to judge what phase in the creative process the quotation represents. So, inherent in the classification system is the concept that creativity is step by step process and that the steps are different from one another. Working with both stacks you begin by adding to the second stack of cards categories which you believe may be natural and progressive groupings of the quotations in the first stack. By using the Access “Form” one gradually builds a sequential set of quotations in the first stack, classified by a sequential set of categories in the second stack. After a bit of practice I found that working with he “Form” which I had created made the task a bit easier, especially because I would often change my mind about the categories and have to redo the classification. I know it is probably a bit difficult to picture the process without working with the data and “Form” yourself. If this sort of process interests you, I would be happy to send you the database of quotations and the “Form”. You will find my email address in the footer of this report. I would only ask one thing in return, and that is a promise on your part to search for and provide to me a new quotation that you believe augments the value of what your receive from me.

As I went through this exercise, I found that there were quotes that did not fit my preconceived notions of what typical creative steps would be. As a consequence I was led to invent new steps (at least new for me). I feel that actually applying words to these new steps may help some of us in our own creative endeavors. The outcome of this process is a classification system portrayed by the title page of this compilation. On the title page you see a list of quote classes. In general as one moves down the classification one goes from quotations that represent the creative process as more advanced stages. I have made a symbolic line to the right of the quotation categories on the front page with “wiggles” to make the point that the step wise treatment should not be thought of as a rigid process. My hope is that the user of this compilation could attempt to place themselves in the context of their creative work, choose the category that most nearly matches their position and then read the quotations which in my interpretation may be helpful.

The compilation is set up in pdf format with book marks so you can jump from one position in the creative process to another. The following list (Table 1) is a set of “type” examples of quotations which illustrate the steps or phases that the quotations have led me to interpret. It is a personal classification that hopefully can help others. Several steps or phases will be familiar to workers in the field of psychology. Forgive me for changing nomenclature, but these are the words which seem to help me.

There are some additional new steps or phases that I believe are important to recognize. For example “problem observation”, “muddle”, and “obvious now” are phases that in my opinion are extremely important to recognize by managers.

After you read through the type quotations use the bookmarks to pick a group of quotations that interests you. For example, pick “block busting” to study what other workers have said about this phase of the creative process.

The Scientific Method requires creativity. In Figure two below I have attempted to correlate the creative steps or phases to the scientific method. In this figure lines suggesting where in the steps of the Scientific Method each of the Creativity steps or phases is important can be represented for one cycle of the Scientific Method. In actuality each scientific cycle is unique and the importance and duration through the cycle of the creative phases changes for each cycle. The Diagram is only a model.

The meat of his short report is the compilation of quotations. My hope is that by attempting to find a large number of respected workers this body of text could be helpful. I do not want to claim anything special about the classification system. I have tried to make it useful to me in hopes it would be useful to others. Someone else would not doubt have differed in classification and choice of terminology. There is an active “Access” database behind this report. I would welcome the opportunity to send the database to interested workers. I would only ask in exchange for the




database that the individual requesting the database provide in advance a quotation which they believe in not included here, and which the individual genuinely believes can be helpful to workers in their endeavors at creative problem solving.

Figure 2. Schematic diagram which attempts to relate or correlate sequentially how phases or steps in the creative process relate to the Scientific Method. Lines represent the timing of the creative phases and durational importance. Time moves forward to the bottom of the diagram.

My request is particularly directed toward geoscientists and specifically petroleum geologists to find quotations, perhaps not in the literature, from respected hydrocarbon finders.




Table 1Type Quotations of Creative Phases

DesireTo make a great dream come true, you must first have a great dream.”Dr. Hans Selye

Problem ObservationTranio is advising his master Lucentio on the best was to go about his programme of self improvement The jewel that we find, we stoop and take't Because we see it: but what we do not see We tread upon, and never think of it,Shakespeare

Problem RecognitionAs subsurface explorationists, we are always keying off someone's dry hole. It should not make the prospect any less attractive because it happens to be your own dry hole.Jack Elam (Geologist)

Problem Definition“A problem well stated is half solved.”John Dewey

PreparationIn the field of observation, chance only favors those minds which have been prepared. Louis Pasteur

InvestigationOil and gas are not found by flashes of genius but are a product of rigorous observations and tenacious, dogged, often dreary intensive work and study.B. W. Beebe (Geologist)

JudgementInvention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless combinations and in constructing the useful combinations which are in the infinite minority. To invent is to discern, to chose.Jules Henri Poincare (l854-l912)

Synthesis“Everything of importance has already been seen by someone who did not discover it.”Whitehead

Hypothesis FormationIf therefore there are any advantages in any field in being armed with a full panoply of working hypotheses and in habitually employing them, it is doubtless the field of the geologist.T. C. Chamberlin (Geologist/Astronomer)

Fear / Risk AdversiveThere is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old condition, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.N. Machiavelli, Il. Principe (l513)




Blockbusting“The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.”Antistenes

MuddleThe state of Imaginative muddled suspense which precedes successful inductive generalization.Alfred North Whitehead

Eureka MomentI can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me.The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, l887

Obvious NowIt is characteristic of insight solutions and new ideas, that they should be obvious after they have been found. In itself this shows how insufficient logic is in practice, otherwise such simple solutions must have occurred much earlier.Edward De Bono

Clear CommunicationBad terminology is the enemy of good thinking.Warren F. Buffett

Testing and VerificationThe demolition of hypotheses, instead to testifying to the futility of research, is the method and condition of progress.”G. K.Gilbert (Geologist/Astronomer)

UtilizationThe oil finders do something else. They sell themselves on their interpretations and in turn sell their ideas to others capable of completing the discovery process. The loss of a good idea through poor salesmanship may postpone indefinitely the discovery of an important oil or gas field or new producing province. Salesmanship is the all-important follow-through.Ira Cram, l945

Problem Finding or Failing (Restarting)Biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently.Charles KetteringGM Research Director




Database of Quotations relating to Creativity in Explorationcompiled and arranged by

Walter H. Pierce




Desire To make a great dream come true, you must first have a great dream."

Dr. Hans Selye

Desire I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare; My business is to create.

William Blake

Desire Flaming enthusiasm, backed by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success

. -Dale Carnegie

Desire The thing that gives people courage is an idea.

George Clemenceau

Desire I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life.

Miles Davis

Desire What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.

Eugene Delacroix




Desire The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Charles Dickens

Desire Human beings have been and remain uniquely creative because they are able to integrate the pessimism of intelligence with the optimism of will

Rene Dubos

Desire Our inventions mirror our secret wishes. Lawrence Durrell

Desire Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is the character.

Albert Einstein

Desire To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream: not only plan, but also believe.

Anatole France

Desire Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

Goethe




Desire It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm.

Mary Henle

Desire "Work usually follows will."

William James

Desire "the transistor, the laser, the magnetic disk, the PC were not demands articulated by the customer.

Rolf Landauer,an IBM Fellow at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center

Desire All men dream,but not equally.Those who dream by night in thedusty recesses of their mindsAwake to find that it was vanity,But the dreamers of day are dangerous men,That they may act their dreamswith open eyes to make it possible.

T. E. Lawrence

Desire There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old condition, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.

N. Machiavelli, Il. Principe (l513)




Desire The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.

W. Somerset Maugham

Desire Better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

Herman Melville

Desire Creativity is what cannot wait, cannot stop, cannot backstep: faster or slower, it always goes ahead -- through, alongside, above, regardless of crises or systems.

Joese Roderigues Miguels

Desire For I really do not study or aim at any originality.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Desire Anybody who aspires to be creative should consciously seek to be creative. The best way to become more creative is to practice creativity--actually to reach out for creative problems, rather than to deal only with those which are thrust upon us.

Alex OsbornApplied Imagination

Desire I believe that the architects of science are simply more curious, more iconoclastic, more persistent, readier to make detours, and more willing to tackle bigger and more fundamental problems. More important, they possess intellectual courage, daring. They work at the edge of their competence; their reach exceeds their grasp. They stretch themselves, they stretch science.

Root-Bernstein's character Imp in Discovering




Desire Salk's advice: "Do what makes your heart leap!"

Coined by Root-Bernstein's character: Imp in Discovering. From

Jonas Salk

Desire No profit grows where there is no pleasure taken, in short, study what thou dost affect."

William Shakespeare

Desire The love people feel for their work has a great deal to do with the creativity of their performances.

Robert J. Sternberg

Desire To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end in life.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Desire "If one advances in the direction of his dreams, one will meet with success unexpected in common hours."

Henry David Thoreau The Creative Spirit Goldman, Kaufman, Ray

Desire Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

John Updike




Desire Most forms of human creativity have one aspect in common: the attempt to give some sense to the various impressions, emotions, experiences, and actions that fill our lives, and thereby to give some meaning and value to our existence..... The crisis of our time in the Western world is that the search for meaning has become meaningless for many of us.

Victor WeisskopfThe Privilege of Being a Physicist, l989

Problem Observation Tranio is advising his master Lucentio on the best was to go about his programme of self-improvement

The jewel that we find, we stoop and take'tBecause we see it: but what we do not seeWe tread upon, and never think of it,

ShakespeareMeasure for Measure

Problem Observation I think almost everybody has it in his or her capacity to do something creative, without necessarily being able to explain how it's done. Society just doesn't give most people the chance to do this......What we have to do, generally (for a living), is not the sort of thing the utilizes our brain function to the fullest.

Isaac Asimov

Problem Observation The true worth or a researcher lies in pursuing what he did not seek in his experiment as well as what he sought.

Claude Bernard (1813-1878)

Problem Observation You can observe a lot by watching.

Yogi Berra

Problem Observation Like much play, creativity is often open-ended, with no particular goal or aim.

Margaret A. BodenThe Creative Mind,




Problem Observation Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.

--Leo Burnett

Problem Observation "Great ideas come into the world as quietly as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively,we shall hear among the uproar of empires and nations a faint fluttering of wings, the gentlestirrings of life and hope." -- Albert Camus

Problem Observation Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.- Charles F. Kettering

Problem Observation I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand. Why shells existed on the tops of mountains. How the various circles of water form around the spot which has been struck by a stone, and why a bird sustains itself in the air. These questions and other strange phenomena engaged my thought throughout my life.

Leonardo da Vinci

Problem Observation I had, ... during many years, followed a golden rule, namely that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed by my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and a once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from memory than favorable ones.

Charles Darwin

Problem Observation In the course of my seminars I often ask the participants to write down an area or problem to which they would like to apply lateral thinking. The response is always poor. These executives are trained to solve problems as they arise. They are not trained to pick out areas in which the generation of ideas could be useful.

Edward De Bono Opportunities, 1978




Problem Observation Problem-finding is just as important as problem-solving but much more difficult and much more rare.

Edward De BonoOpportunities, l978

Problem Observation Like a new born baby a new idea must, at first, be nourished by care and indulgent attention."

Edward De BonoOpportunities, 1978

Problem Observation Look sharply after your thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen on your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Problem Observation Some men go through a forest and see no firewood.

English proverb

Problem Observation While working with staphylococcus variants a number of culture plates were set aside on the laboratory bench and examined from time to time. In the examinations these plates were necessarily exposed to the air and they became contaminated with various microorganisms. It was noticed that around a large colony of contaminating mold the staphylococcus colonies became transparent and were obviously undergoing lysis.

Alexander Fleming

Problem Observation Never neglect any appearance or any happening which seems to be out of the ordinary: more often than not is a false alarm, but it may be an important truth.

Alexander Fleming




Problem observation "... the great Appalachian mountains show in many places, near the highest parts of them, strata of sea-shell, in some places the marks of them are in solid rock. It is certainly the wreck of a world we live on!" --Benjamin Franklin (1755)

Problem Observation I Look for what needs to be done.....After all, that's how the universe designs itself.

R. Buckminster FullerChristian Science MonitorNovember 3, l964

Problem Observation The ultimate solutions to problems are rational; the process of finding them is not.

W. Gordon

Problem Observation On two different kinds of inventions:One consists, a goal being given, in finding the means to reach it, so that the mind goes from the goal to the means, from the question to the solution. The other consists, on the contrary, in discovering a fact, then imagining what it could be useful for, so that, this time, mind goes from the means to the goal; the answer appears to us before the question. Now, paradoxical as it seems, that second kind of invention is the more general one and becomes more and more so as science advances."

Jacques Hadamard

Problem Observation There is more to seeing than meets the eyeball.

Norwood Russell HansonPatterns of Discovery 1958Cambridge: Cambridge University Press




Problem Observation If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out, and difficult.

Heraclitus [of Ephesus]

Problem Observation Incredibility escapes recognition.

Heraclitus [of Ephesus]in C H Khan the art and Thought of Heraclitus 1979Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Problem Observation There are some people who see a great deal and some who see very little in the same things.

T. H. Huxleyadvise written to his grandson

Problem Observation We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but does not know what to create. Lord of all things, he is not lord of himself. - Jose Ortega y Gasset The Revolt of the Masses

Problem Observation "...action creates surprises."

Charles F. Ketteringgreat General Motors Inventor

Problem Observation "Questions are the creative acts of intelligence."

Frank Kingdomy




Problem Observation ..most scientists spend their life articulating existing discoveries, invention, and theories.

Kuhn

Problem Observation ..all important shifts in theory begin with anomalies. ..

Kuhn

Problem Observation Langmuir emphasized the futility of making formal plans in an effort to obtain new ideas. He stressed the importance of developing a receptive mind which could accept a new idea engendered by a fortunate accident, an unexpected occurrence, or some other set of circumstances beyond the immediate control of the individual.

Vincent J. Schafer in "Can We Do it Better?", Bull. American Meteorological Soc., Feb. l968

Problem Observation Great is the human who has not lost his childlike heart.- Mencius (Meng-Tse), 4th century BCE

Problem Observation It is only doubt that creates.

H. L. Mencken

Problem Observation I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Sir Isacc Newton(1642-1727)




Problem Observation Begin by conditioning yourself to be restless and uneasy about the status quo. Don't overlook the familiar just because you've seen it so often

Jack OliverGeophysicist

Problem Observation To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. - George Orwell

Problem Observation Je ne cherche pas, je trouve.

Picasso

Problem Observation [Science] advances by leaps; and the impulse for each leap is either some new observational resource, or some novel way or reasoning about the observations. Such novel way of reasoning might, perhaps, be considered as a new observational means, since it draws attention to relations between facts which would previously have been passed by unperceived.

Charles Santiago Sanders Pierce

Problem Observation They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

~Edgar Allan Poe, "Eleonora"

Problem Observation Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

Edgar Allen Poe




Problem Observation Camille Jordan wrote of Henri Poincares's work: "It is beyond ordinary praise, and forcefully recalls what Jacobi wrote of Abel; that he solved problems which before him nobody would even dared to pose."

Rene Taton, historian of science, l957

Problem Observation Curiosity is idle only to those who fail to realize that it may be a very rare and indispensable thing. Even occasionally and fitfully idle curiosity leads to creative thought."

James Harvey Robinson

Problem Observation People learn more from observation that they do from conversation.

Will Rogers

Problem Observation Aim to keep an open mind. Be on the alert to hunches, and whenever you find one hovering on the threshold of our consciousness, welcome it with open arms. doing these things won't transform you into a genius overnight. But they're guaranteed to help you locate the treasure chest of ideas which lies hidden in the back of you own brain.

Doctor SuitsGeneral Electric

Problem observation "Vision is the art of seeing the invisible."-- Jonathon Swift

Problem Observation Vision is the art of seeing the invisible.

Jonathon Swift




Problem Observation Every now and then, something turns up in the course of exploration that's worth--as the quidebooks say about restaurants---a detour. I think that's when really important observation are made.

Lewis Thomas

Problem Observation"The artist's whole business is to make something out of nothing."

Paul Valéry c. 1930 The Creators, Boorstin

Problem Observation Having retreated in 1666 to the countryside near Cambridge, one day he [Newton] was walking in the garden and saw the fruit falling from a tree and he indulged himself in deep mediation on gravity, about which philosophers have so long searched in vain, and in which the common people do not even suspect a mystery....

Voltaire[Francois Marie Arouet][it is thus Voltaire who has preserved this story which he had from Newton's niece, Mrs ConduittLettres Philosophique

Problem Observation Data from a discovery well, and from subsequent wells, should be evaluated by a geologist, not a petroleum engineer.

Robert J. WeimerProfessor of GeologyColorado School of Mines

Problem Recognition As subsurface explorationists, we are always keying off someone's dry hole. It should not make the prospect any less attractive because it happens to be your own dry hole.

Jack ElamGeologistCreativity in Oil Exploration

Problem Recognition "How wonderful that we have met with paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress."

Niels Bohrquoted in Root-Bernstein's Discovering




Problem Recognition Emotion, conviction, intensity--all show that one cares about the business, not that one lacks team spirit. Teamwork doesn't mean compliant submission to harmonious, bureaucratic mediocrity. some of the most creatively productive meetings I've ever participated in gave birth to new ideas amidst raised voices, table pounding, and displays of naked emotion. We need not fight to progress, but we must avoid avoidance.

Donald W. Blohowiakauthor of Mavericks!

Problem Recognition When I want your opinion, Edith, I'll give it to you.Archie Bunker

Problem Recognition It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Problem Recognition No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time steady eye.

Winston Churchill

Problem Recognition "Behold the turtle, He makes progress only when his neck is out."

Motto on Office Wallduring Dr. James Bryant Conant's tenure as President of Harvard University

Problem Recognition To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step to knowledge.

Disraeli




Problem Recognition But they have only analyzed the parts and overlooked the whole, and, indeed, their blindness is marvellous.

Dostoevski 1880

Problem Recognition The recognition and understanding of the need was the primary condition of the creative act. When people feel they had to express themselves for originality for its own sake, that tends not to be creativity. Only when you get into the problem and the problem becomes clear, can creativity take over.

Charles Eames

Problem Recognition "The formulation of a problem," said Albert Einstein, "is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old questions from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science."

A. Einstein and L. InfeldThe Evolution of Physics, l938

Problem Recognition A problem is a chance for you to do your best.

Duke Ellington

Problem Recognition A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across this mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility than most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our opinion from another.

Ralph Waldo EmersonSelf-Reliance, l844




Problem Recognition "What good is it." a man asked Benjamin Franklin of one of his new ideas. "What good is a Baby? Franklin retorted.

Benjamin Franklin

Problem Recognition The problem of fostering science is of the greatest unsolved problems of our day. T. H. Huxley once remarked that the new truths of science begin as heresy, advance to orthodoxy, and end up as superstition. It is not science in its last two phases that we are interested in promoting: such kinds of science can take care of themselves only too well. It is young science, new science, science that is heretical that is our problem. How do we encourage that?

Garrett Hardin, biologist and historian of science,

Problem Recognition shut my eyes in order to see.- Paul Gauguin

Problem Recognition Getzels pointed out that creativity is not just solving problems of the kind that already exist or that continually arise in human life. Creative individuals often actively search out and discover problems to solve that no one else has perceived.

Jacob Getzels, inDrawing on the Artist Within by Betty Edwards

Problem Recognition Science is the topography of ignorance.

Oliver Wendel Holmes

Problem Recognition "...any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not enough that a problem be 'interesting'--almost any problem is interesting...."

Peter Medawar




Problem Recognition Evaluation can stimulate rather than stifle creativity by asking the right questions.

William Miller

Problem Recognition Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as one can through pictures or sensations

George OrwellPolitics and the English Language

Problem Recognition An ingenious method of memo-making is used by a New York lawyer. He always carries a pack of government postal cards, addressed to himself, Whenever an idea hits him--whether on the subway or in the bathroom--he jots it down on one of the cards and sticks it in the mail.

Alex F. Osborn

Problem Recognition Creative people always tackle impossibly big problems and then let their goal guide them through a process of filling in the gap between what they already know and what they need to know. My artist friend, Tom van Sant, calls this the "leap and fill" method. That's how these creative types push beyond the limits of the known. They have an amazing ability to handle the ambiguities involved. To most other people, however, they look crazy, because the initial leap is based on nothing more than stochastic aiming into the unknown guided by one or more themata. Some simply has to have faith in such people and give them a chance to succeed.

Robert Scott Root-Bernstein's character: Arianain Discovering.

Problem Recognition The principle of problem choice: Think Big.

Coined by Root-Bernstein's character: Imp in Discovering. From several scientists.

Root-Bernstein




Problem Recognition Thoughts die the moment they are embodied by words.

Schopenhauer

Problem Recognition Creativity and innovation done democratically tends to sink to a very low common denominator. If you're going to get somewhere, it's because some wide-eyed radical jumps up and says, "I'm going to do that."

Mark Sebell

Problem Recognition Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

George Bernard Shaw

Problem Recognition The secret of science is to ask the right question, and it is the choice of problem more than anything else that marks the man of genius in the scientific world.

C. P. SnowA postscript to Science and Government.

Problem Recognition It is much more exciting not to catch a big fish than not to catch a little fish.

Albert Szent-GyorgyiNobel Laureate in biochemistry

Problem Recognition And the more important the idea or the observation to which you an find a paradox, contradiction, or anomaly, the greater your chance of having identified an important problem.

The character Imp in Robert Scott Root-Bernstein's book "Discovering"




Problem Recognition It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

~Henry David Thoreau

Problem Recognition It isn't answers that make a scientist it's questions.

George Wald

Problem Definition "A problem well stated is half solved."

John Dewey

Problem Definition Any problem can be solved as long as it is stated properly.- Dr Edwin Land

Problem Definition "Knowing what you are looking for helps you to recognize it when you see it. But in the case of innovation, how do you know what you are looking for? You don't unless you state your problem so broadly, so basically, so all-inclusively and generically, that you do not preclude even the remotest possibility--so that you do not pre-condition your mind to a narrow range of acceptable answers."

John ArnoldStanford Professor

Problem Definition Every problem contains the seeds of its own solution.

Stanley Arnold




Problem Definition Specify your problem consciously, coin it at the beginning into a perfectly definite question."

Brand Blanshard Yale

Problem Definition 'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to', said the Cat. " I don't much care where...', said Alice. 'Then it doesn't matter which way you go' said the Cat. 'So long as I get somewhere', Alice added as a explanation 'Oh, you're sure to do that', said the Cat, 'If you only walk long enough.'

Lewis CarrollAlice's Adventures in Wonderland p.64.

Problem Definition "always the beautiful answer who ask a more beautiful question"

e. e. cummings

Problem Definition Creativity in geology is the ability to ask the right question ....geological mysteries are all around us but you have to recognize them to be creative.

Jack Elam

Geologist

Problem Definition The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.

George Elliot

Problem Definition The more you think, the more time you have.

- Henry Ford




Problem Definition "Take care of the means, and the end will take care of itself."

Gandhi

Problem Definition He who seeks for methods without having a definite problem in mind seeks for the most part in vain.

David Hilbert

Problem Definition Science is the topography of ignorance.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Problem Definition "It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which vital. Otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of concentrated."

Sherlock Holmes

Problem Definition The process of research is to pull the problem apart into its different elements, a great many of which you already know about. When you get it pulled apart, you can work on the things you don't know about."


Problem Definition Any problem can be solved as long as it is stated properly.

- Dr Edwin Land




Problem Definition The fundamental point is simple: language matters. Language is the means by which any perception, discovery, or hypothesis acquires a solid and communicable reality. What this means, in turn, is that technical knowledge and its advance are never wholly separable from the forms used to give them an existence.

Scott L. MontgomeryGeologist and Writer

Problem Definition The fundamental point is simple: language matters. Language is the means by which any perception, discovery, or hypothesis acquires a solid and communicable reality. What this means, in turn, is that technical knowledge and its advance are never wholly separable from the forms used to give them an existence. Language and images can work upon the mind in many quiet, subtle ways—they can seem like part of the wallpaper, something we pass by every day without much notice, while actually comprising a crucial part of the architecture of our very ability to speak and conceive. Thus, becoming more conscious of this architecture, its strengths and weaknesses, can be one avenue to enhanced creativity. Taking hold of the images that dominate in certain areas of science and engineering is one possible way to help understand, perhaps even to discover, new directions for thought and research.

by Scott L. Montgomery geologist

Problem Definition ..."part of all research---must be directed at finding out whether the questions, are valid, and, if so, answering them in a useful way."

Root-Benrstein's character, Imp in Discovering. p. 53

Problem Definition The reasonable person adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw

Problem Definition There are two parts to solving any problem: What you want to accomplish, and how you want to do it. Even the most creative people attack issues by leaping over what they want to do and going on to how they will do it. There are many 'hows' but only one 'what'.... You must always ask the question, 'What is?' before you ask the question, 'How to?'

Richard Saul Wurman




Preparation In the field of observation, chance only favors those minds which have been prepared.

Louis PasteurEncyclopaedia Britannica 1911 edn, vol 20

Preparation "As a young, unknown man, I went to Washington to talk with Professor Henry, an authority on electricity, about an idea I had conceived for transmitting speech by wires. He told me he thought I had the germ of a great invention. I told him, however, that I had not the electrical knowledge necessary to bring it into existence. He replied. "Get it."

Alexander Graham Bell

Preparation Disraeli's principle: Court serendipity by being eccentric.

(Your probability of discovering or inventing something different increases as our experiences, hobbies, skills, knowledge, philosophy, and goals become increasingly unusual)

Coined by Root-Bernstein's character Imp in Discovering by interpretation of

Disraeli

Preparation The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance. George Elliot

Preparation We know the value of water when the well runs dry.

Benjamin Franklin

Preparation The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest of navigators.

Edward GibbonThe Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire




Preparation He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.

- Joseph Joubert

Preparation He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.

- Joseph Joubert

Preparation We are apt to think that our ideas are the creation of our own wisdom but the truth is that they are the result of the experience through outside contact.

Konosuke Matsushita

Preparation I never stop studying. There's always lots to learn. When you stop learning, that's about the end of you.

John Morton-Finney

Preparation "The object of planning for research must be to optimize the ability of the investigator to recognize and solve some problem, not to predetermine who will reach particular conclusions by specified methods."

Root-Bernstein character: Hunter in Discovering

Preparation Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

Darrell Royal




Preparation “Look at me, look at me, look at me now. It’s fun to have fun but you have to know how.”

Dr. SuessThe Cat in the Hat

Preparation Young's principle: One can not possess a useless talent or skill.

Coined from by Root-Bernstein's character Imp in Discovering, from " ..it is impossible to possess an qualification which one may not want, and capabilities are but light burdens."

Thomas Young

Investigation Oil and gas are not found by flashes of genius but are a product of rigorous observations and tenacious, dogged, often dreary intensive work and study.

B. W. BeebeGeologist

Investigation The important thing is not to stop questioning.- Albert Einstein

Investigation In those great two years he (Newton) had to the full two priceless gifts which no one enjoys today, full leisure and quiet. Leisure and quiet do not produce a newton, but without them even a Newton is unlikely to bring to ripeness the fruits of his genius.

E. N. daC. Andrade,in Newton Tercentenary Celebrations, Royal Society of London (l947).

Investigation "He who sees things grow from the beginning will have the best view of them." --Aristotle.




Investigation ..."hunt for the next in the series, starting our train of thought from what is now present or from something else, and from something similar or contrary or contiguous to it."

Aristotle

Investigation Originality is the essence of true scholarship. Creativity is the soul of the true scholar.

Nnamdi Azikiwe

Investigation Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all. -Charles Babbage

Investigation Never any knowledge was delivered in the same order it was invented.

Sir Francis Bacon [Lord Verulam] 1561-1626

Investigation Science advances, not by the accumulation of new facts, .... but by the continuous development of new concepts.

James Bryant Conant




Investigation Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.

Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men without talent.

Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.

Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.

Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Calvin Coolidge

Investigation The presence of a body of well-instructed men, who have not to labor for their daily bread, is important to a degree which cannot be overestimated; as all high intellectual work is carried on by them, and on such work material progress of all kinds mainly depends, not to mention other and higher advantages.

Charles Robert Darwin The Descent of Man (l871)

Investigation What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.

Eugene Delacroix

Investigation "Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius"

-- Benjamin Disraeli

Investigation Above all, innovation is work rather than genius. It requires knowledge. It often requires ingenuity. And it requires focus. There are clearly people who are more talented as innovators than others but their talents lie in well-defined areas. Indeed, innovators rarely work in more than one area. For all his systematic innovative accomplishments, Edison worked only in the electrical field. An innovator in financial areas, Citibank for example, is not likely to embark on innovations in health care.

Peter F. DruckerThe Discipline of Innovation, HBR




Investigation I'll try anything--I'll even try Limburger cheese!

Thomas Edison

Investigation Many people think of inventions as coming on a man all in one piece. Things don't happen that way, much. The phonograph, for example, was a long time coming, and it came step by step. For my own part, it started way back in the days of the Civil War, when I was a young telegrapher in Indianapolis.

Thomas Edison

Investigation ...science as something existing and complete is the most objective thing known to man. But, science in the making, science as an end to be pursued is as subjective and psychologically conditioned as any branch of human endeavor.

Einstein

Investigation No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

Epictetus, DiscoursesBook I, Chapter 2.

Investigation To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are not only offered practically no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged and have to set about it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions which are continually being thrust upon them.

George Spencer Brown




Investigation Persistence is the hard work that you do after you are tired of doing the hard work you already did.

Newt Gingrich

Investigation "Science is always an interaction of prevailing culture, individual eccentricity and empirical restraint"

Steven J. Gould

Investigation Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, sonata or a mechanical computer.

A. Whitney Griswold SpeechYale University,

Investigation As to words, they remain absolutely absent from my mind until I come to the moment of communicating the results in written or oral form...."

Jacque HadamardThe Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, l945.

Investigation When you have eliminated the impossible, what ever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Sherlock Holmes

Investigation Deduction is science, not speculation and there is no substitute for creative thinking.

Kenneth J. HsuPhysical Principles of Sedimentology




InvestigationNext to undue precipitation in anticipating the results of pending investigations, the intellectual sin which is commonest and most hurtful to those who devote themselves to the increase of knowledge is the omission to profit by the experience of their predecessors recorded in the history of science and philosophy."

T. H. Huxley

Investigation Kettering's principle: Action creates results.

Coined by Root-Bernstein's character Imp from Kettering's statement: "I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down."


Investigation The difference between the impossible and possible lies in a person's determination.

- Tommy Lasorda

Investigation There are many geological discovery tools rusting away in our kit for want of use. The need is for "creative" geology as compared with what may be called "routine" geology.

A. I. Levorsen, l943

Investigation It is often said that what the oil industry really needs is a new exploration tool. Just as the fisherman needs some new tackle. But, like the fisherman analogy, when it is remembered that the new fishing tackle is generally designed to catch the eye of the fisherman and not necessarily the eye of the fish, it gives cause to wonder whether or not some of the new gadgets or devices continually coming into the discovery picture may be more of the nature to catch the eye of the contour-minded executive rather than the illusive oil field which it is hoped to find. Some of the most successful fisherman are those who use only the old-fashioned hook and line with a little bait, and maybe we can learn from them.

A. I. Levorsen (l943)




Investigation An opportunity must be provided for those men with the capacity and with the ability for doing creative geology to actually do geology, and in addition, to be able to spend a part of their time with their feet on a desk looking out of the window where they can generate ideas and where they can reconstruct in their mind the conditions and environments of past geologic ages.

A. I. Levorsen, l943

Investigation You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

~Jack London

Investigation Excellence and learning are not commodities to be bought at the corner store. Rather they dwell among rocks hardly accessible. and we must almost wear our hearts out in search of them.

H. F. Lowry.

Investigation Although we are mere sojourners on the surface of the planet, chained to a mere point in space, enduring but for a moment of time, the human mind is not only enabled to number worlds beyond the unassisted ken of mortal eye, but to trace the events of indefinite ages before the creation of our race, and is not even withheld from penetrating into the dark secrets of the ocean, or the interior of the solid globe; free, like the spirit which the poet described as animating the universe.

- Sir Charles Lyell, 1830

Investigation "Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination."

Somerset Maugham




Investigation Consider the value of writing a summary report or abstract of current work in simpler language than is ordinarily the case, language intended for an educated lay reader for instance. Note what types of abridgment need to be made, what terms require explanation or non-use, what kinds of details become necessary and what kinds expendable. This will help reveal the more central metaphors or images that currently dominate your work.

Scott L. MontgomeryGeologist and Writer

Investigation If you see a man walking down the street with oil on his shoes, where it shouldn't be, and no oil on his hair, where it should be, that's an oil man. If he has a faraway look in his eye and seems to be contemplating the depth of the first Jurassic sandstone in Persia, that's a geologist.

Nebraska Telegraph, circa l900's

Investigation How wonderful that we have met with paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

Niels Bohr

Investigation Creative thinking thrives on enthusiasm, and this tends to lag when we force our minds beyond a certain point. By letting up a while, we tend to regenerate our emotional urge.


Investigation Creativity comes from minds full of concepts, full of carefully observed facts.

John M. ParkerAAPG President, l983

Investigation It takes facts to be able to derive a concept just as it takes concepts to be creative.John M. ParkerAAPG President, l983




Investigation Perfect as is the wing of a bird, it never could raise the bird up without resting on air. Facts are the air of a scientist. Without them you never can fly.

Iran PavlovNobel Prize winner

Investigation If arithmetic, mensuration, and weighing be taken away from any art, that which remains will not be much.

Plato

Investigation This unconscious work is not possible, or in any case not fruitful, unless it is first preceded and then followed by a period of conscious work.

Henri Poincare

Investigation To foresee the future of mathematics, the true method is to study its history and its present state."

Poincare

Investigation On Creative Thought:

For this kind of meditation begets knowledge, and knowledge is really creative inasmuch as it makes things look different from what they seemed before and may indeed work for their reconstruction.

James Harvey RobinsonThe Mind in the Making

Investigation We haven't the money, so we've got to think.

Lord Ernest RutherfordIn R. V. Jones Bulletin of the Institute of Physics, 1962




Investigation Go, my sons, buy stout shoes, climb the mountains, search...the deep recesses of the earth...In this way and in no other will you arrive at a knowledge of the nature and properties of things.

Severinus7th Century

Investigation It is two hundred years since Newton talked of our being in the search for knowledge like children who picked up pebbles on the beach. This man who spoke of "finished sciences; was Newton's successor. As I heard his clipped, impersonal voice, saying what was to him an evident fact, I realized for the first time how far science had gone. We were not picking up pebbles from the beach any more; instead we knew how many pebbles there were, how many we had picked up, how many we should be able to pick up. They had found the boundary to our knowledge.

C. P. Snow

Investigation"Whenever you can hear laughter and somebody saying, 'But that's preposterous'--you can tell that things are going well and that something worth looking at has begun to happen in the lab.'"

Lewis Thomas

Investigation Researchers have already cast much darkness on the subject, and if they continue their investigations, we shall soon know nothing at all about it.

Mark Twain

Investigation The point I wish to make in this stage of the description of field methods is that thinking is appropriate to field work. Facts are to be scrutinized and classified. Gaps in the chain of facts are to be discovered and noted, that they may be filled when opportunity occurs. Groups of facts are to be examined as to their meaning and are to be placed in relation to one another as elements of an hypothesis. Hypotheses that will explain all the known facts and suggest lines of investigation are to be thought out.

Baily Willis and Robin Willis, l934




Judgement Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless combinations and in constructing the useful combinations which are in the infinite minority. To invent is to discern, to chose.

Jules Henri Poincare (l854-l912)

Judgement I don't follow any system. All the laws you can lay down are only so many props to be cast aside when the hour of creation arrives.

Raoul Dufy

Judgement The judgment of ideas, unfortunately, is an extremely popular and rewarding pastime. One finds more newspaper space devoted to judgment (critic columns, political analyses, editorials, etc.) than t the creation of ideas. In the university, much scholarship is devoted to judgment, rather than creativity. One finds that people who heap negative criticism upon all ideas they encounter are often heralded for their practical sense and sophistication. Bad-mouthing everyones else's concepts is in fact a cheap way to attempt to demonstrate your own mental superiority.

James L.AdamsChair: Values, Technology, Science and Society Department at Stanford UniversityConceptual Blockbusting

Judgement Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Scott Raymond Adams

Judgement Thinking is...in part imagination, in part judgment: We must therefore first mark off the sphere of imagination and then speak of judgment.

Aristotle




Judgement It takes little talent to see what is under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in what direction to point that organ.

-W.H. Auden

Judgement Every geologist knows that information sufficient to solve any sizable geologic problem is seldom, if ever, available. There are gaps between the geologic facts that can be spanned only by the imagination. Failure to bridge these gaps means failure to draw conclusions of a tentative nature. These tentative conclusions, or geologic ideas, grease the gears of the exploratory machine.... to bridge the gaps between geologic data by leaps of an imagination under control is to be resourceful. Controlled imagination is not guesswork. It is imagination tempered by experience, knowledge and sound reasoning. Like a muscle it grows through exercise."

I.H. Cram, l945

Judgement While Occam's razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research.

Francis Harry Compton Crick

Judgement Imagination, as well as reason is necessary to perfection in the philosophical mind. A rapidity of combination, a power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts, in the creative source of discovery. Discrimination and delicacy of sensation, so important in physical research, are other words for taste; and the love of nature is the same passion, as the love of the magnificent, the sublime and the beautiful.

Sir Humphry Davy 1778-1829

Judgement It is not enough to just do your best or work hard. You must know what to work on.

W. Edwards Deming




Judgement A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has the third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant.

Manfred Eigen

Judgement " Logic merely sanctions the conquests of the intuition."

Jacques Hadamard

Judgement The art of becoming wise is the art of knowing where to overlook.

William James

Judgement Facts may swamp imagination'

John Livingston Lowes

Judgement Wisdom consists in being able to distinguish among dangers and make a choice of the least harmful.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Judgement Besides learning to see, there is another art to be learned--not to see what is not.

Maria Mitchell19th -century American astronomer




Judgement Use judgement and intuition to choose the best ideas ...the selection is also a creative process.

Hanley Norinsad man

Judgement Pauling's principle: Try many things.

coined by Root-Bernstein's character Imp in Discovering. From the word of Linus Pauling: "Just have lots of ideas and throw away the bad ones."

Linus Pauling

Judgement Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.

~Norman Podhoretz

Judgement He would often begin with an idea which after he had worked at it for some time, turned out to be wrong; he would start off on some other idea which had occurred to him while working on the previous one, and if this turned out to be wrong he would start another, and so on until he found one which satisfied him, and this was pretty sure to be right. He often started out in the wrong direction but he got to his goal in the end.

J. J. Thompson, physicist, writing about his mentor, Osborne Reynolds (l937)




Judgement The stress placed on logical analysis in this discussion has perhaps obscured a parallel need for creative, constructive, innovative thought. Such thought does not in itself conflict with logic, but it can be impaired by standardization of methods no matter how logical the standardization appears to be. Innovative thought seeks to break from prior experience and gain insight, as often by forming new associations among familiar materials in nonstandard ways as by acquiring new data. We must prize the ability to recognize and use new relations among elements of knowledge, to form classifications that in the words of Wadell (1938) are not only broad and close but also so flexible and elastic that they can serve effectively to organize the novel or strange. This human attribute is essential to cope with afuture whose only certain character is acceleratingchange.

David J. VarnesFrom "The Logic of Geologic Maps, With Reference to their Interpretation for Engineering Purposes"

Judgement "We must beware of what I call 'inert ideas'--ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations."

Alfred North WhiteheadThe Aims of Education

Synthesis "Everything of importance has already been seen by someone who did not discover it."

Whitehead

Synthesis He who sees things grow from the beginning will have the best view of them.

Aristotle

Synthesis In the university, the specialist and analyst is king. But resolution of problems in society generally is not to be found in a single discipline ... In society the non-specialist and synthesiser is king.

Lord Eric AshbyThe Sociology of Science ed P Halmers, 1972, Sociology Review Monographs no 18




Synthesis Creativity comes from our brains. It involves making connections - connections between concepts and facts we have learned and remembered. Creativity occurs because we overcome obstacles - because we dare.

Ted Bear, l985Petroleum Geologist

Synthesis The individual geologist will have two options. He can choose the necessary and important role of specialist, a contributor of knowledge to decision process, or he can pursue his traditional role of facilitator and integrator, but to do this he will have to be able to handle an additional order of magnitude of information and know how to use it.

J. F. Bookout (l988)President and CEO of Shell Oil Company

Synthesis Genius is the ability is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.

C. W. Ceram

Synthesis Go some distance away because the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance, and a lack of harmony of proportion is rapidly seen.

Leonardo da Vinci

Synthesis My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.

Charles Darwin

Synthesis Ideas awaken each other....because they have always been related."

Diderot




Synthesis But they have only analyzed the parts and overlooked the whole, and, indeed, their blindness is marvellous.

Dostoevski 1880

Synthesis But they have only analyzed the parts and overlooked the whole, and, indeed, their blindness is marvellous.

(Dostoevski 1880)

Synthesis A creative thinker evolves no new ideas. He actually evolves new combinations of ideas that are already in his mind.

Doctor Easton

Synthesis It is inevitable that you are indebted to the past. You are fed and formed by it. The old forest is decomposed for the composition of the new forest.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Synthesis In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.

- E. M. Forster

Synthesis Goethe frankly said, What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things. . . . My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature; it bears the name of Goethe.




Synthesis Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.


Synthesis Genius is that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates.

Synthesis ...The way the spiders weave, you see, is none the better because they produce the threads from their own body, nor is ours the worse because like bees we cull from the work of others.

Justus LipsiusQuotation carried by numbers of the first volume of the Philosophical Magazine, 1798.

Synthesis Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

Charles Mingus

Synthesis Bare bones ideas are plentiful, but the trick is to identify the good ones. Ideas derive their importance and durability in relation to data, problems and other ideas. In other words, ideas must be tested against reality. Good ideas will have two effects. They will be useful in their original context and they will create surprising, intriguing connections among things that once seemed to exist in separate contexts.


Synthesis It is the function of creative man to perceive and to connect the seemingly unconnected.

William Plommer




Synthesis So part of discovering is linking up solution to right problems. Doesn't always happen immediately. Solution and problem can both exist prior to their meeting.

Root-Bernsteins's character: Imp in Discovering

Synthesis From the mouth of Lord Peter Wimsey:"If ever you want to commit a murder, the thing you've got to do is prevent people from asociatin' their ideas. Most people don't associate anything'--their ideas just roll about like so many dry peas on a tray, making' a lot noise and goin' nowhere, but once you begin lettin' em string their peas into a necklace, it's goin' to be strong enough to hang you, what?"

Dorothy Sayerswriter of mysteries

Synthesis "The best ideas are common property."

Seneca c. 4 BC AD 65

Synthesis [Only a very small part of any ordinary person's knowledge has been the produce of his own observation or reflection] all the rest has been the purchased, in the same manner as his shoes or his stockings, from those whose business is to make up and prepare for market that particular species of goods.

Adam SmithIn W R Scott, Adam Smith as Student and Professor, 1937

Synthesis Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.

Albert Szent Györgyi Nobel Prize winner

Synthesis Our life is frittered away by detail... Simplify, Simplify

- Henry David Thoreau




Synthesis I myself have proved it to be of no little use when in bed in the dark to run the imagination over the surface delineations of forms previously studied, or other remarkable things encompassed with subtle speculation. This is really a most praiseworthy activity and one that is useful for fixing things in the memory.

Leonardo da Vinci

Synthesis Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.

Voltaire

Synthesis technical skill is mastery of complexity while creativity is mastery of simplicity.

E Christopher ZeemanCastastrophe Theroy, Selected Papers

Hypothesis Formation If therefore there are any advantages in any field in being armed with a full panoply of working hypotheses and in habitually employing them, it is doubtless the field of the geologist.

T. C. ChamberlinGeologist/Astronomer

Hypothesis Formation The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

Sir William Lawrence Bragg

Hypothesis Formation Although we are mere sojourners on the surface of the planet, chained to a mere point in space, enduring but for a moment of time, the human mind is not only enabled to number worlds beyond the unassisted ken of mortal eye, but to trace the events of indefinite ages before the creation of our race, and is not even withheld from penetrating into the dark secrets of the ocean, or the interior of the solid globe; free, like the spirit which the poet described as animating the universe. - Sir Charles Lyell, 1830




Hypothesis Formation Imagination is more important than knowledge. - Albert Einstein , On Science

Hypothesis Formation They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

Francis Bacon

Hypothesis Formation It is my firm belief that given all these advances in science and technology, the greatest single factor left in the exploration equation is creative thinking. The best science in the world cannot develop a prospect. Only the petroleum geologist, through creative assembly of all the disparate bits of scientific information available to him, can accomplish this. New ideas in older provinces are not generated by data manipulators. The are generated by creative thinking.

Ted Bear, l985Petroleum Geologist

Hypothesis Formation "Standing still is the fastest way of moving backwards in a rapidly changing world. Imagination is the highest kite one can fly"

-- Lauren Becall

Hypothesis Formation But unfortunately far too many are the gatherers of information, the artisans, the "geological clerks."





Hypothesis Formation In science one must search for ideas. If there are no ideas, there is no science. A knowledge of facts is only valuable in so far as facts conceal ideas; facts without ideas are just the sweepings of the brain and the memory.

Vissarion Grigorievich Belinskii (1811-1848)Collected Works 1948 vol 2 (Moscow: OGIZ) p 348

Hypothesis Formation Ideas are generated best in an organization by friendliness,".. "No stimulus to creative effort is so effective as good pat on the back. We should do everything possible to encourage people to get more and better ideas."

Ernest Benger of Du Pont

Hypothesis Formation Routine work drives out non routine work and smothers to death all creative planning, all fundamental change...

Warren Bennis

Hypothesis Formation What is now proved was once only imagined.

William Blake

Hypothesis Formation What is now proved was once only imagined.

William Blake

Hypothesis Formation Isn't the job of a manager to recognize and choose from lots of great ideas generated by fellow work associates? Unfortunately, most managers--even those who claim they invite suggestions from their people --subscribe to the time-honored myth that a manager's job is to have the ideas.





Hypothesis Formation Creators actively court chance.

John Briggsauthor

Hypothesis Formation There is something antic about creating, although the enterprise be serious. and there is a matching antic spirit that goes with writing about it, for if ever there was a silent process, it is the creative one. Antic and serious and silent.

Jerome BrunerOn Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand, l965

Hypothesis Formation If the hypothesis is a much abused weapon it is also an instrument of logic without which not even observation itself, by its very nature passive, can be realized...Even so-called accidental discoveries are commonly owed to some guiding idea which experience did not sanction but which had the virtue, nevertheless, of carrying us to little-explored or untouched territory.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal, neuroanatomistartist, and photographer l893.

Hypothesis Formation Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

~Lewis Carroll

Hypothesis Formation It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland




Hypothesis Formation Creative study, however, finds its largest application in those subjects in which, while much is known, more remains to be known. such are the fields which we, as naturalists, cultivate: and we are gathered for the purpose of developing improved methods lying largely in the creative phase of study, though not wholly so.

Intellectual methods have taken three phases in the history of progress thus far. What may be the evolutions of the future it may not be prudent to forecast. Naturally the methods we now urge seem the highest attainable. These three methods may be designated, first, the method of the ruling theory: second, the method of the working hypothesis: and, third, the method of multiple working hypotheses.

T. C. ChamberlinGeologist/AstronomerScience, l890

Hypothesis Formation Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one we have.

Emile Chartier

Hypothesis Formation The analysis of data will not by itself produce new ideas

Edward de Bono

Hypothesis Formation "The idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale..."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin The Phenomenon of Man

Hypothesis Formation The most important tool of which any geologist is possessed is his mind, the one tool which is sharpened and not dulled by use.

E. De GolyerGeophysicist




Hypothesis Formation Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

John Dewey

Hypothesis Formation When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.- Dr. Rollo May

Hypothesis Formation Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.

Albert Einstein

Hypothesis Formation ....theories are like detective novels. We should prefer the ones that are internally consistent, follow a rational pattern, and don't depend on accidental or inexplicable events for their solution.

Einstein




Hypothesis Formation The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by peoples in other disciplines. They try to test our imagination in the following way. They say, 'Here is a picture of some people in a situation. What do you imagine will happen next' When we say, ' I can't imagine, 'they may think we have a weak imagination. They overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know; that the electric fields and the waves we talk about are not just some happy thoughts which we are free to make as we wish, but ideas which must be consistent with all the laws of physics we know. We can't allow ourselves to seriously imagine things which are obviously in contradiction to the known laws of nature. And so our kind of imagination is quite a difficult game. One has to have the imagination to think of something that has never been seen before, never been heard of before. At the same time the thoughts are restricted in a straitjacket, so to speak, limited by the conditions that come from our knowledge of the way nature really is. The problem of creating something which is new, but which is consistent with everything which has been seen before, is one of extreme difficulty.

Richard Phillips Feynman

Hypothesis Formation The great investigator is primarily and preeminently the man who is rich in hypotheses. ..... The man who can produce but one, cherishes and champions that one as his own, and is blind to its faults.

G. K. GilbertGeologist

Hypothesis Formation Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again

Johann W. von Goethe

Hypothesis Formation I don't skate to where the puck is, I skate to where it will be.

Wayne Gretsky




Hypothesis Formation The person who is capable of producing a large number of ideas per unit of time, other things being equal, has a greater chance of having significant ideas.

J. P. Guilford

Hypothesis Formation In a study of 2,036 scientists throughout history, Simonton found that the most respected produced not only more great works, but also more "bad" ones. They produced. Period.

Doug Hall

Hypothesis Formation The discover......can only be known through an effort of imagination.

l. J. Hendersonphysiologist

Hypothesis Formation If we lose our imagination then we lose our ability to progress and evolve. Basically, every new idea is a dream, is a thought.

Matthew Holtzberginventor of the plastic passenger car engine

Hypothesis Formation "An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."

Elbert Hubbard

Hypothesis Formation "Man's body is faulty, his mind untrustworthy, but his imagination has made him remarkable. In some centuries, his imagination has made life on this planet an intense practice of all the lovelier energies."

John Masefield




Hypothesis Formation Meritorious inventions are not inevitably produced when social conditions are right. The proper imagination must respond to the conditions.

Waldemar Kaempffert (1930)Patent attorney and engineer

Hypothesis Formation The purpose of models is not to fit the data but to sharpen the questions.

Samuel Karlin

Hypothesis Formation A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.

Nikos Kazantzakis

Hypothesis Formation A scientific hypothesis is elegant and exciting insofar as it contradicts common sense. [paraphrased]

Sir Charles LyellAttributed by S J Gould, Ever since Darwin, 1978.

Hypothesis Formation Although we are mere sojourners on the surface of the planet, chained to a mere point in space, enduring but for a moment of time, the human mind is not only enabled to number worlds beyond the unassisted ken of mortal eye, but to trace the events of indefinite ages before the creation of our race, and is not even withheld from penetrating into the dark secrets of the ocean, or the interior of the solid globe; free, like the spirit which the poet described as animating the universe.

- Sir Charles Lyell, 1830

Hypothesis Formation For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think.

Sir Walter Hamilton MoberleyThe Crisis in the University, 1949, London




Hypothesis Formation Always have two plans; leave something to chance.

Napoleon

Hypothesis Formation If you have the germ of a good idea, preserve it by jotting it down immediately. Then, when you have time, think the idea through until you discard it as worthless or elevate it to the "significant" category. Great writers often scribble inspired thoughts when they arise, then subject them to the time-honored writer's formula: "l) revise 2) revise and 3) revise again." Consider your idea a rough draft that needs to be polished by a few cycles through the idea-processor. Getting Useful Ideas


Hypothesis Formation Such hazards of teamwork can be avoided by simple procedures. For one, thing, during certain periods in a creative quest, each member of a team should go off by himself and do some idea-finding on his own. When the partners come together after such solo thinking, they will find that they have piled up worthwhile alternatives than if they had kept on collaborating all the time.

Alex F. Osborn

Hypothesis Formation As in the piling up of hypothetical alternatives, creative accidents follow the law of probabilities - the more we fish, the more likely we are to get a strike.

Alex Osborn

Hypothesis Formation "What did you ever try to think up on your own initiative?"





Hypothesis FormationThe illusions of the experimenter form the greater part of his power. These are the preconceived ideas which serve to guide him."

Pasteur

Hypothesis Formation I had studied with so much care and perseverance, in their smallest details, the two salts which formed the subject of my note to the Academy, that , if you have established what I was unable to discover, you must have been guided to your result by a preconceived idea."

Mitscherlich said to Pasteur

Hypothesis Formation The illusions of the experimenter form a great part of his power. These are the preconceived ideas which serve to guide him. Many of these vanish along the path which he must travel, but one fine day he discovers and proves that some of them are adequate to the truth. Then he finds himself master of facts and new principles, the applications of which, sooner or later, bestow their benefits.

Louis Pasteur, physicist, chemist,immunologist, artist, l880

Hypothesis Formation Without a theory, practice is only routine driven by habit.

Pasteur

Hypothesis Formation Pauling's principle: Try many things.

coined by Root-Bernstein's character Imp in Discovering. From the word of Linus Pauling: "Just have lots of ideas and throw away the bad ones."

Linus Pauling

Hypothesis Formation "It is by intuition that we discover and by logic that we prove.

Henri Poincaré, Mathematician




Hypothesis Formation "it is by logic we prove but by intuition we discover."

Poincare

Hypothesis Formation What really makes science grow is new ideas, including false ideas.

Sir Karl Raimund Popper

Hypothesis Formation "Where oil is first found, in the final analysis, is in the minds of men. The undiscovered oil field exists only as an idea in the mind of some oil-finder. When no man any longer believes more oil is left to be found, no more oil fields will be discovered, but so long as a single oil-finder remains with a mental vision of a new oil field to cherish, along with freedom and incentive to explore, just so long new oil fields may continue to be discovered."

Wallace E. Pratt, l952Petroleum Geologist

Hypothesis Formation "Historical research involves more than just gathering facts: You've got to analyze data and questions it as well. And, of course, hypothesize to know what data to look for.

Root-Bernstein's character: Jenny in Discovering, p. 101

Hypothesis Formation Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.

Bertrand Russell

Hypothesis Formation The theoretician believes in logic and believes that he despises dreams, intuition, and poetry. He does not recognize that these three fairies have only disguised themselves in order to dazzle him.... He does not know that he owes his greatest discoveries to them.

~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-1944, translated from French by Norah Purcell




Hypothesis Formation A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942

Hypothesis Formation Thus , the task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.

Erwin Schrodingerin l. Bertalanffy, Problems of Life, 1952

Hypothesis Formation The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Crack-Up, 1945

Hypothesis Formation As the years went by, I managed to acquire every available facility that modern science can offer in the way of the most up-to-date techniques of history, chemistry, and pharmacology. I have been given the means to construct one of the best equipped institutes of experimental medicine and surgery in the world and have acquired a staff of 53 trained assistants, technicians, and secretaries. Yet today I look back upon those early observations in l936 I am ashamed to say that, despite this help, I have never again been able to add anything comparable in its significance to those first primitive experiments.

Hans Selyeinventor of concept of physiological stress

Hypothesis Formation "Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will."

George Bernard Shaw




Hypothesis Formation "...an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one."

Sir Charles Sherrington (describing the brain)

Hypothesis Formation What distinguishes the genius, is merely the cognitive and motivational capacity to spew forth a profusion of chance permutations pertaining to a particular problem.

Robert J. Sternberg

Hypothesis Formation He gets the facts, he studies them patiently. And then he applies his imagination.

Of Bernard Baruchby Henry J. Taylor

Hypothesis Formation Though a theory might be Bohemian it might be the parent of very respectable facts.

J.J. Thompson

Hypothesis Formation One may tell the truth in games. But in real life....I should never dare to tell the truth.

Leo Tolstoynovelist

Hypothesis Formation You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

~Mark Twain




Hypothesis Formation A good mathematician perceives analogies between things, a great mathematician perceives analogies between analogies.

Ulam

Hypothesis Formation I will listen to any hypothesis but on one condition--that you show me a method by which it can be tested.

August William von Hoffmann

Hypothesis Formation If you think there is only one right answer, then you will stop looking as soon as you find one.

Roger Von Oech

Hypothesis Formation "Between two evils, I always choose the one I have never tried before."

Mae West

Hypothesis Formation Our field hypotheses are necessarily crude and undeveloped, Nevertheless, they should be cordially entertained and encouraged to multiply, for they have the great advantage over later ideas that they are organized with fresh facts. It is an essential element of good field work that we should develop hypothetical explanations that which we observe, and observation, coordination, and interpretation should go on constantly.

Baily Willis and Robin WillisText Book on Geologic Structures 1934

Fear / Risk Adversive There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old condition, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.

N. Machiavelli, Il. Principe (l513)




Fear / Risk Adversive To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

Fear / Risk Adversive Obviously, when you produce and try to sell a creative idea you are taking a risk: of making a mistake, failing, making an ass of yourself, losing money, hurting yourself, or whatever.

James L. AdamsChair: Values, Technology, Science and Society Department at Stanford UniversityConceptual Blockbusting

Fear / Risk Adversive It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

Edward de Bono

Fear / Risk Adversive "Whenever you see a successful business someone once made a courageous decision" - - Peter F Drucker.

Fear / Risk Adversive To escape criticism - say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.

Elbert Hubbard

Fear / Risk Adversive "And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more." -- Erica Jong.




Fear / Risk Adversive An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.- Dr. Edwin Land

Fear / Risk Adversive "It is a profound mistake to think that everything has been discovered; as well think the horizon the boundary of the world."

- Lemierre

Fear / Risk Adversive You'll win some. You'll lose some. Only mediocre people are always at their best.

Somerset Maugham

Fear / Risk Adversive "The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger but recognize the opportunity."

Richard M. Nixon

Fear / Risk Adversive Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even through checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat.

T. Roosevelt

Fear / Risk Adversive The act of creating something for yourself is assertion that you are not afraid to test yourself against tradition, or to express your personal view of the world, despite the perils of any such endeavor.

Root-Bernstein's character Ariana inDiscovering




Fear / Risk Adversive Our doubts are traitorsAnd make us lose the good we oft might win,By fearing to attempt.

ShakespeareMeasure for MeasureLucio to Isabella

Fear / Risk Adversive Hand-maiden to complacency in submerging creativity, is another human trait--fear of the unknown.

S. W. Tottenformer president, Chevron Oil CompanyStandard Oil Company of Texas Divisionand Professor of Geology at Hanover College

Fear / Risk Adversive When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

Mark Twain

Fear / Risk Adversive The difficult part of creativity is recognizing our own unique voice and respecting it.

Joyce WycoffMindmapping, l991

Blockbusting "The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue."

Antistenesfounder of the Cynic school of Philosophy

Blockbusting Just those things that are considered impossible are the most important for the advancement of Science

Arrhenius




Blockbusting Meditation No. 32

Many of the anxieties that harass you are superfluous: being but creatures of your own fancy, you can rid yourself of them and expand into an ampler region, letting your thought sweep over the entire universe, contemplating the illimitable tracts of eternity, marking the swiftness of change in each created thing, and contrasting the brief span between birth and dissolution with the endless aeons that precede the one and the infinity that follows the other.

-- Marcus Aurelius, c. A.D. 167

Blockbusting They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

~Francis Bacon

Blockbusting ...well to beware that it be reformation that draweth on the change, and not the desire of change that pretendeth the reformation.

Francis Bacon- Of Innovations

Blockbusting You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius, but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbour. What espionage of deception comes to your door so effectively as the eye of the man who lives at your door? Public opinion is a permeating influence. It requires us to think other men' s thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

Walter BagehotThe Works of Walter Bagehot 1889

Blockbusting "Paris is a city where great ideas perish, done to death by witticism,"

Balzac




Blockbusting A geologist may be correct in his recommendation most of the time by condemning prospects, but the end result is the liquidation of his company's assets through the pipeline.


Blockbusting Most organizations would rather risk obsolescence than make room for the nonconformist in their midst.

Warren Bennis

Blockbusting "The main obstacle to progress is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge."

Daniel Boorstin

Blockbusting For Carruthers, the dawn of excitement came while he was a graduate student at Cornell. He had been studying quantum field theory, a subject that confused him because it seemed riddled with dogma rather than equations that were simple or elegant. "The nightmare of it always made me uneasy in my stomach," he recalls. " I'd go to class and the students would sit there nodding their heads in rhythm to these incantation from the lectern. And I'd be sitting there thinking, "They all understand it and I don't.' I was sure they were all much brighter than I was." Put off by the confusion, he was about to flee particle physics when Dr. Richard P. Feynman, a Nobel Laureate, came to Cornell and taught a course on the subject," He made complete fun of the ridiculous problems of field theory. And I thought, 'My God, maybe I'm right. Maybe there's reason I don't understand this stuff." That experience became the turning point in my development."

Interview of Peter Carrutherstheoretical physicist and violinist.by William Broad (l984)

Blockbusting There is perhaps no beguilement more insidious and dangerous than an elaborate and elegant mathematical process built upon unfortified premises. Thomas Chamberlain, responding to the claim of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) that the sun was not older than ten million years




Blockbusting " a well-established concept may prove a barrier to the acceptance of a new one."

Doctor James B. Conant

Blockbusting I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

-Bill Cosby

Blockbusting False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence do little harm, for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness.

Charles Darwin

Blockbusting "historical continuity that maintains most assumptions is not a repeated assessment of their validity."

Edward De BonoLateral Thinking

Blockbusting To look only for things that are relevant means perpetuating the current pattern.

Edward DeBono

Blockbusting The history of the art of prospecting is strewn with the wrecks of what were once called "ruling theories," many of which were accepted because they seemed to be so reasonable.

E. DeGolyer.Geophysicist




Blockbusting If you have difficulty in sticking to a certain goal, give into your natural desire to change to something else. This particularly important when you do creative work.

Ernest Dichter

Blockbusting "Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy."

--Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859

Blockbusting Edison habitually switched from one project to another and worked on several simultaneously.

Alex Osborn on Edison

Blockbusting Einstein... does not remain attached to classical principles, and when presented with a problem in physics he quickly envisages all its possibilities. This leads immediately in his mind to the prediction of new phenomena which may one day be verified byexperiment.

Henri Poincaré

Blockbusting Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by the age of eighteen.

- Albert Einstein

Blockbusting Only those who attempt the absurd ... will achieve the impossible. I think ... I think it's in my basement ... let me go upstairs and check.

M. C. Escher




Blockbusting "This discovery was an audacious mental creation which we owe chiefly to the fact that Faraday never went to school, and therefore preserved the rare gift of thinking freely."

Of FaradayEinstein

Blockbusting I can take a Yankee boy and a china mug and he will get more results than all the German chemists put together.

Reginald Aubrey Fessenden

Blockbusting Businessmen go down with their businesses because they like the old way so well they cannot bring themselves to change....Seldom does the cobbler take up with a new fangled way of soling shoes, and seldom does the artisan willingly take up with new methods in his trade.

Henry Ford My Life and Work, l922.

Blockbusting Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.

Julies Sextus Frontinus Source: Highly regarded engineer in Rome 1st C A.D.

Blockbusting The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get to the office.

Robert Frost

Blockbusting Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving there is no need to do so almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

John Kenneth Galbraith




Blockbusting It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.

~Paul Gauguin

Blockbusting Without any authorization from New York and without the knowledge of the Directors in Chicago, Burton instructed Humphreys to go to work on the problem of increasing the yield of gasoline from crude.

Paul H. GiddensStandard Oil Company (Indiana)Chapter VI, Doubling the Gasoline Supply

Blockbusting Every individual who is not creative has a negative, narrow, exclusive taste and succeeds in depriving creative being of its energy and life.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Blockbusting Competitive innovation works on the premise that a successful competitor is likely to be wedded to a "recipe" for success. That's why the most effective weapon new competitors possess is probably a clean sheet of paper. And why an incumbent's greatest vulnerability is its belief in accepted practice.

Hamel and PrahaladHarvard Business Review

Blockbusting The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.

Dee Hock

Blockbusting Sherlock Homes: 'It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize out of a number of facts which are incidental and which are vital ..... I would call your attention to the curious incident of the dog in the night time.' 'The dog did nothing in the night-time.' 'That was the curious incident.'

Sherlock HolmesSilver Blaze in Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes




Blockbusting False conclusions which have been reasoned out are infinitely worse than blind impulse

Horace Mann

Blockbusting The supposition that the future resemble the past, is not founded on arguments of any kind, but is derived entirely from habit.

David Hume

Blockbusting Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

--William James

Blockbusting [And it was shown to her] how serious and dangerous it is curiously to examine the things which are beyond one's understanding, and to believe in new things...and even to invent new and unusual things for demons have a way of introducing themselves into suchlike curiosities.

ADMONITION ADDRESSED TO JOAN OF ARCProces de condamation, Vol I, p. 390

Blockbusting New opinions are always suspected and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are notalready common.- John Locke

Blockbusting The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

John Maynard Keynes




Blockbusting Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. .....Hence to think creatively we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.

George KnellerThe Art and Science of Creativity, l965

Blockbusting "We have all, therefore drifted along from one structure-finding method to another until we are now apparently approaching the real danger of an oversupply of methods and an under supply of anticlines.

S. I. Levorsen (l936)Petroleum Geologist

Blockbusting "The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity."

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Blockbusting "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."

--Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

BlockbustingContrary to your Shakespeare, there is madness in my method!

Konrad Lorenz

Blockbusting What is scientific fact today may not be true tomorrow.:

Willy Nelson, paraphrased by F. MeissnerPetroleum Geologist




Blockbusting The obvious is always least understood

- Prince Metternich

Blockbusting As with so much scientific research, the direct approach often gave no results; one had to get at, so to speak, from behind.

Naomi Mitchison, novelist

Blockbusting There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.

Kenneth Olson, President,digital Equipment Corporation atWorld Future Society meeting, l977.(one million were installed by l982).

Blockbusting Open-mindedness is so essential to creativity that we sometimes have to ward off influences which might close our minds while in quest of ideas.


Blockbusting Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.

Picasso

Blockbusting Experience takes away more than it adds.

Plato




Blockbusting "Legend has it that whenever a new Porsche is being created, you can hear the sound of rules breaking."

Porsche Advertisement

Blockbusting The tradition is a beauty which we preserve, and not a set of fetters to bind us.

Ezra Pound

BlockbustingMr. Pratt's genius has been in his courage and his ability to make up his mind quickly, even changing it completely if necessary, and the even rarer ability to look at any situation at any time as if he had never before seen it. I want to make this last point. To my mind, he is like a master who plays many boards of chess simultaneously, looking at each situation with cold scientific precision and without regard to its history.

DeGolyer, l945Geophysicist and Petroleum Explorer

Blockbusting What we learn, instead of illuminating what we have still to learn, sometimes casts a mental shadow over it, rendering it less discernible and impelling us to ignore it.

Wallace PrattPetroleum Geologist

Blockbusting The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in seeing with new eyes.

- Marcel Proust




Blockbusting There have been obstructionists in all times, not merely the lethargic masses, but the moralists, the rationalizing theologians, and most of the philosophers, all busily if unconsciously engaged in ratifying existing ignorance and mistakes and discouraging creative thought.

James Harvey RobinsonThe Mind in the Making (1921)

Blockbusting "He (Tuzo Wilson) had one of his most important papers rejected precisely because it had no mathematics in it, no new data, and it contradicted accepted dogma. Therefore it had to be worthless speculation, right?"

Root-BernsteinDiscovering, p. 219

Blockbusting The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

Bertrand Russell

Blockbusting All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions.

George Bernard Shaw

Blockbusting "...there are two kinds of advice. Only one is meant to help the listener."

C. P. Snowquoted in Root-Bernstein'sDiscovering

Blockbusting In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few.

Shunryu Suzuki




Blockbusting "When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederation against him."

Jonathan Swift

Blockbusting The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.

Publilius Syrus

Blockbusting One factor which has filled my whole scientific life with agony has been writing project proposals. It seems logical that if one asks money from anyone with which to do research, one has to tell what one wants to do with it. However, the situation is not this simple because research means going out into the unknown with the hope of finding something new to bring home. If you know in advance what you are going to do, or even to find there, then it is not research at all: then it is only a kind of honorable occupation.

Albert Szent-GyorgyiNobel Laureate in biochemistry

Blockbusting There is only one person who knows more than anybody, and that is everybody.

Talleyrand

Blockbusting Tradition is a collection of bad habits.

Toscanini




Blockbusting "Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul."

Mark Twain Bartlett 626.19

Blockbusting Anyone who argues on the basis of authority does not exploit his insight but his memory.

Leonardo da Vinci

Blockbusting Ask questions, dig for facts, gather experience, watch for breaks, And at every stage of the game, peer beyond the end of your nose, learn that two and two can make 22 and zero as well as four--and above all get your heaven-sent gift of imagination to work. Once that trick becomes a habit, as it always does, you will realize that imagination, like faith, can and often does move mountains.

Victor Wagner

Blockbusting Bad terminology is the enemy of good thinking.

Warren Buffet2002 Letter to Stock Holders

Blockbusting Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.- Simone Weil

Blockbusting Once written , the strategic document can take on a life of its own, and it may not lend itself to flexibility....an organization can begin to focus on form rather than substance."

Jack WelchCEO General Electric




Blockbusting "The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible."

--A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

Muddle One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

--A.A. Milne

Muddle There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. ~Ansel Adams

Muddle You must usually wallow in misleading and ill-fitting data, hazy and difficult-to-test concepts, opinions, values, and other such untidy quantities, In a sense, problem-solving is bringing order to chaos, A desire for order is therefore necessary. However, the ability to tolerate chaos is a must.

James L. AdamsChair: Values, Technology, Science and Society Department at Stanford UniversityConceptual Blockbusting

Muddle You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think.

Mortimer Adler

Muddle The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person.

Frank Barron




Muddle Creative people may be those who can endure the strain of living with a problem until it's fully decomposed by the brain's digestive juices.


Muddle I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks.

Daniel Boone

Muddle Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

~Lewis Carroll

Muddle "There is a special tension to people who are constantly in the position of making new knowledge. You're always out of equilibrium. When I was young, I was deeply troubled by this. Finally, I realized if I understood too clearly what I was doing, where I was going, then I probably wasn't working on anything very interesting."

Peter Carruthers

Muddle True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.- Winston Churchill

Muddle I have great belief in the fact that whenever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking. I consider chaos a gift.

Septima Poinsette Clark




Muddle If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

Albert Einstein

Muddle "If at first, the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it."

-- Albert Einstein

Muddle "Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow."

-- T S Eliot.

Muddle Intelligence is that faculty of mind, by which order is perceived in a situation previously considered disordered.

Haneef A Fatmi and Robert W YoungNature 1970

Muddle "... the great Appalachian mountains show in many places, near the highest parts of them, strata of sea-shell, in some places the marks of them are in solid rock. It is certainly the wreck of a world we live on!"

--Benjamin Franklin (1755)




Muddle The scientific reasoning process typified by geology offers an account of reasoning more applicable to uncertainties and complexities of our lives. We are seldom in possession of all the data we would like for making a decision, and it is not always clear that the data we possess are unbiased or objective. We are forced to fill in the gaps in our knowledge with interpretation and reasonable assumptions that we hope will be subsequently confirmed. Thus, the methods of a hermeneutic and historical science better mirror the complexities we face as historical beings.

It is likely that this type of reasoning will become more crucial in the next century.

Robert Frodeman,Geological reasoning: Geology as an interpretive and historical science, GSA Bull., v. 107, p. 966.

Muddle For the moment, I am blundering without precise method. I repeat old experiments in this field and demonstrate others which pass through my head...I hope that, among the hundred remarkable phenomena which I come across, some light will shine from one or another.

Henrich Hertz physicist (in Tanton, l957)

Muddle "creativity grows out of irritation like a pearl secreted from the friction-generating particle of sand in the oyster's shell."

A.E. Houseman

Muddle In the dim background of our mind we know what we ought to be doing, but somehow we cannot start. Every moment we expect the spell to break, but it continues, pulse after pulse, and we float with it.

William James

Muddle "The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have."

John Locke




Muddle A wise man changes his mind three times a day, a fool never.

K. Matsushita

Muddle I doubt that we often use logic actually to solve problems or to 'get' new ideas. Instead, we formulate our arguments and conclusions in logical terms after we have constructed or discovered them in other ways; only then do we use verbal and other kinds or formal reasoning to 'clean things up' to separate the essential parts from the spaghetti-like tangles of thoughts and ideas in which they first occurred.

Marvin Minsky, l986

Muddle Minsky even recoils at the tendency of ordinary mortals, once they have invested the time in learning to do something, to keep doing it. To counter this trait, which he calls the investment principle, Minsky has trained himself to "enjoy the feeling of awkwardness" aroused by confronting an entirely new problem. "It's so thrilling not to be able to do something,"he remarks.

John Horgan of Marvin L.MinskyThe father of Artificial IntelligenceScientific American,Nov., 1993

Muddle The fundamental point is simple: language matters. Language is the means by which any perception, discovery, or hypothesis acquires a solid and communicable reality. What this means, in turn, is that technical knowledge and its advance are never wholly separable from the forms used to give them an existence. Language and images can work upon the mind in many quiet, subtle ways—they can seem like part of the wallpaper, something we pass by every day without much notice, while actually comprising a crucial part of the architecture of our very ability to speak and conceive.

Scott L. MontgomeryPetroleum Geologist and Writer

Muddle Unfortunate those scientists who have only clear thoughts in their heads!

Louis Pasteurin a lecture by A Eachenmoser, 1976




Muddle The problem I have therefore posed is: How can one best survive on the edge of ignorance: What strategies and tactics must the cosmic explorer master to survive in the unknown?


Muddle "Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one's head."

-- Mark Twain

Muddle Mark Twain describing his periods of incubation:I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales. I scratch my head with the lighting and purr myself to sleep with the thunder.

Mark Twain

Muddle ..a piece of art or a well-written novel could be much more revealing than any scientific study.

Victor Weisskipfphysicist

Muddle The state of Imaginative muddled suspense which precedes successful inductive generalization.

Alfred North Whitehead

Muddle "The 'silly' question is the first intimation of some totally new development." -- Alfred North Whitehead.




Muddle Every really new idea looks crazy at first- Alfred North Whitehead

Muddle You have to recognize that every 'out front' maneuver you make is going to be lonely, but if you feel entirely comfortable, then you're not far enough ahead to do any good. That warm sense of everything going well is usually the body temperature at the center of the herd.

- John Masters

Muddle In science, self-satisfaction is death. Personal self-satisfaction is the death of the scientist. Collective self-satisfaction is the death of the research. it is restlessness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, agony of the mind that nourish science.

Jaques MonodNew Scientist, 1976

Muddle Ignorance increases in direct proportion to knowledge.

Unknown

Eureka Moment I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me.

The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, l887

Eureka Moment The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why.

Albert Einstein




Eureka Moment The lightning spark of thought, generated in the solitary mind, awakens its likeness in another mind.

Thomas Carlyle

Eureka Moment "Oh, Kitty, how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking Glass House! I'm sure it's got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let's pretend there's a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let's pretend the glass has got all soft likegauze, so that we can get through. Why, it's turning to a mist now, I declare! It'll be easy enough to get through..."

Lewis Carrol Through the Looking Glass

Eureka Moment It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clinches into place.

Francis Harry Compton Crick

Eureka Moment I don't follow any system. All the laws you can lay down are only so many props to be cast aside when the hour of creation arrives. -Raoul Dufy




Eureka Moment In 1838, the American inventor Elias Howe turned his attention to devising a sewing machine. After perfecting various features, he remained with one major problem: the needle. Needles had always had a point at one end and an eye at the other to hold the thread. Howe's problem: how could such a needle pass all the way through a piece of cloth and come back up again in a continuous action when it had to be fastened at its eye end to the mechanism itself? The machine couldn't "let go" of the needle to pull it through to the other side of the fabric, as happens when a person is sewing with a needle.

Howe could not "see" a needle in any other way until one night he dreamed of being attacked by savages carrying spears that had eye-shaped holes near their tips. Ah-Ha! Howe awakened from his dream and immediately whittled a sewing machine needle with the hole at the pointed end. The problem was solved, essentially by being turned upside down--by Howe's "seeing" the needle, its point, and its eye for the thread in a different orientation.

Betty Edwards of Elias Howe

Betty EdwardsDrawing on the Artist Within, l986

Eureka Moment "The Muses love the morning."

Erasmus

Eureka Moment "On being very abruptly awakened by an external noise, a solution long searched for appeared to me at once without the slightest instant of reflection on my part---the fact was remarkable enough to have struck me unforgettably ---and in a quite different direction from any of those which I had previously tried to follow."

Jacque Hadamard

Eureka Moment"I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could sometimes more closely fitted together: all twining and twisting in snakelike motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke."

Kekule's account of his discovery of the Benzene structure.




Eureka Moment "The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have." Locke, John

Eureka Moment When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer -say, traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep: it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Eureka Moment {Asked how he made his discoveries] By always thinking unto them. I keep the subject constantly before me and wait till the first dawnings open little by little into the full light.

Sir Isaac Newton

Eureka Moment "in the field of observation chance favors only the prepared mind"

Pasteur

Eureka MomentOften when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. during the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and than all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind.

Henri Poincare (l913)The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field




Eureka Moment At this point he had to go on a geologic excursion: "The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me--without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it--that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry."

Poincarequoted from Osborn's Applied Imagination

Eureka Moment "....discovery is the recognition that things don't fit some pattern you have in you head, so that you must invent a new pattern."

Root-Bernstein's character Ariana in Discovering. p. 111

Eureka Moment I started. My thoughts had stopped going back upon themselves. As I had been watching Audrey's eyes, an idea had flashed through the mist, quite unreasonable, illogically. It had no bearing at all on any of the hopeless attempts I had been making; I had explored every way, I thought, but this was new and, too agitated to say even to myself that I believed it, I took out some paper and tried to work it out.

fictional account by Snow in The Search

Eureka Moment Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, now Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

Stephen King

Eureka Moment I go on thinking about my problems all the time and my brain must be going on thinking about them even when I sleep because I usually get the answer to my problems ready-made at the moment I wake up, and sometimes, in the middle of the night. My brain must do as the laxative that was advertised by saying: "While you sleep it does the work."

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (l963)




Eureka Moment I pressed down on the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea.

-- P G Wodehouse

Obvious Now It is characteristic of insight solutions and new ideas, that they should be obvious after they have been found. In itself this shows how insufficient logic is in practice, otherwise such simple solutions must have occurred much earlier.

Edward De Bono

Obvious Now Common sense ... has the very curious property of being more correct retrospectively than prospectively. It seems to me that one of the principal criteria to be applied to successful science is that its results are almost always obvious retrospectively; unfortunately, they seldom are prospectively. Common sense provides a kind of ultimate validation after science has completed its work; it seldom anticipates what science is going to discover.

Russell Lincoln AckoffDecision-making in National Science Policy 1968 (London: Churchill) p 96.

Obvious Now Every great scientific truth goes through three stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Next they say it had been discovered before. Lastly they say they always believed it.

Louis Agassiz 1807-1873

Obvious Now After a year's research, one realizes that it could have been done in a week.

Sir William Henry Bragg (1862-1942)




Obvious Now An act that produces effective surprise- this I shall take as the hallmark of creative enterprise.... Effective surprises ...have the quality of obviousness about them when they occur, producing a shock of recognition following which there is no longer astonishment."

Jerome BrunerThe Conditions of Creativity

Obvious Now To be effective, an innovation has to be simple and it has to be focused. It should do only one thing: otherwise it confuses people. Indeed, the greatest praise an innovation can receive is for people to say: "This is obvious! Why didn't I think of it? It's so simple!"


Obvious Now Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are not missed.

- John Kenneth Galbraith

Obvious Now [On first reading Darwin's Origin of Species] How extremely stupid not to have thought of that.

Thomas Henry HuxleyIn K Lorenz On Aggression 1967

Obvious Now [Of innovations]....when a thing was new people said 'It is not true'. Later when its truth became obvious, people said, 'Anyway, it is not important,', and when its importance could not be denied, people said, 'Anyway, it is not new'.

William James

Obvious Now [Of innovations]...when a thing was new people said 'It is not true'. Later when its truth became obvious, people said, 'Anyway, it is not important,', when its importance could not be denied, people said, 'Anyway, it is not new'.

William James




Obvious Now So easy it seemedOnce found, which yet unfound most would have thought impossible.

John Milton

Obvious Now All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Obvious Now The aspects of a thing that are most important to us are hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity.

Ludwig Wittenstein

Clear Communication Bad terminology is the enemy of good thinking.

Warren F. Buffett

Clear Communication Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

Robert Bresson

Clear Communication Most scientists and engineers don’t think much about the influence of language on their research strategies. But the language we ordinarily use can have a significant effect on the way you try to solve problems.

by Scott L. Montgomery Mr. Montgomery is a geologist




Clear Communication As every scientist and engineer well knows, creativity and innovation very often come not from ideas that arrive “out of the blue,” but from the discovery of latent possibilities. The study of language, then, is one means for making visible the previously invisible. It is one more instrument, a new an untried one at that, in the conceptual laboratory of the manager or researcher..

by Scott L. Montgomery Mr. Montgomery is a geologist

Testing and The demolition of hypotheses, instead to testifying to the futility of Verification research, is the method and condition of progress."

G. K .GilbertGeologist

Testing and Truth comes out of error more readily than out of confusion.Verification

Sir Francis Bacon [Lord Verulam]Novum Organum 1620

Testing and We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, Verification not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye…

The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

Jacob Bronowski

Testing and "Why', said the Dodo, 'the best way to explain it is to do it.'Verification

Lewis CarrollAlice in Wonderland p 33

Testing and One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the Verification peak.

G. K. Chesterton




Testing and "his experimental failures appeared to be merely parts of his day's Verification work, and served as signals for the starting of other experiments."

Of Edisonby a peer

Testing and It has been just so in all my inventions. The first step is an Verification intuition--and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise. This thing

gives out and then that--- "bugs"---as such little faults and difficulties are called--show themselves, and months of anxious watching, study, and labor are requisite before commercial success-- or failure---is certainly reached...I have the right principle and am on the right track, but time, hard work and some good luck are necessary too...

Thomas A. Edison Letter to T. Puskas,1878 The Edison Library Archives

Testing and "A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new."Verification

Albert Einstein The Creative Spirit Goldman, Kaufman, Ray

Testing and No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single Verification experiment can prove me wrong.”

-Albert Einstein

Testing and As subsurface explorationists, we are always keying off someone's Verification dry hole. It should not make the prospect any less attractive

because it happens to be your own dry hole.

Jack ElamGeologistCreativity in Oil Exploration




Testing and To the question, "How do you go at this kind of work?' Dr. C. W. Verification Fuller responded, " Oh, if I have any technique at all, it simply

consists of my making one new model after another until I happen to hit on the one that seems likely to work best."

C. W. Fuller

Testing and Mistake - making is the cosmic wisdom's way of teaching each of us Verification how to carry on.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Testing and A great lawyer-statesman and philosopher of a former age--I mean Verification Francis Bacon--said that truth came out of error much more rapidly

than it came out of confusion. Next to being right in this world, the best of all things is to be clearly and definitely wrong because you will come out somewhere."

T. H. Huxley

Testing and "A proper (scientific) theory must be predictive and at least Verification potentially quantitative."

Auguste LeCompte

Testing and Experimentalists think that it is a mathematical theorem while the Verification mathematicians believe it to be an experimental fact.

Gabriel Lippmannin D'Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form, 1917

Testing and My success has been due to crude, fast, and inexpensive Verification experiments.

MacCready




Testing and It is amazing how few oil people really understand that you only find Verification oil and gas when you drill wells. You may think you're finding it when

you're drawing maps and studying logs, but you have to drill.

John A. Masters, Oil explorer.

Testing and "What shows a theory to be inadequate or mistaken is not, as rule, Verification the discovery of a mistake in the information that led us to propound

it; more often it is the contradictory evidence of a new observation which we are led to make because we held that theory. Error or insufficiency is shown up by a critical process applied in retrospect."|

Peter Medwarquoted by Hunter a character inRoot-Bernstein's book Discovering

Testing and It is only doubt that creates.Verification

H. L. Mencken

Testing and No matter how big and tough a problem may be, get rid confusion by Verification taking one little step toward a solution. Do something.

George F. Nordenbolt

Testing and Others will tell you to try to prove you are right. I tell you to try to Verification prove you are wrong.

Louis Pasteur

Testing and The object isn't to find the right answers but to eliminate all the Verification impossible answers.

Pauling




Testing and Verification Pauling says that whereas some scientists ask, "What

conclusions...are we forced to accept by these results of experiment and observation?" he asks instead, "What ideas" --not the plural--"about this question, as general and as aesthetically satisfying as possible, can we have that are not eliminated by these results of experiment and observation?"

Pauling

Testing and Only when I have satisfied myselfVerification

Planck

Testing and "It is by intuition that we discover and by logic that we prove.Verification

Henri Poincaré, Mathematician

Testing and But I shall certainly admit a system as empirical or scientific only if it Verification is capable of being tested by experience. The considerations suggest

that not the verifiability but the falsifiability of a system is to be taken as a criterion of demarcation. In other words: I shall not require of a scientific system that it shall be capable of being singled out, once and for all, in a positive sense: but I shall require that its logical form shall be such that it be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience.

Karl Raimund PopperThe Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959

Testing and In my branch of learning {history} experiment is impossible. Verification Advance is made through thought. Experiment is often used as a

substitute for thought.

Enoch Powell




Testing and Induction yields possibilities only.Verification

Root-Bernstein's character:Richter in Discovering

Testing and Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; Verification although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this

statement by examining his wives' mouths.

Lord Bertrand Russell

Testing and Great geniuses make tons of mistakes.Verification

Dean Simontoncreativity author and psychologist at University of California, Davis

Testing and It is only through failure and ..... experiment that we learn and grow.Verification

Isaac Stern

Testing and I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my Verification mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to

founts of wisdom and knowledge.

Igor Stravinsky

Testing and I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my Verification mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to

founts of wisdom and knowledge."-- Igor Stravinsky




Testing and In war there are but two forces, the expected and the unexpected; Verification but they are capable of infinite variation. Their mutual interchange is

like a wheel, having neither beginning nor end. They are a mystery that none can penetrate.

Sun TzeSun Tze Ping Fa, Chapter 5

Testing and Verification "Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue

from them."

Miguel de Unamuno 1864 1936

Testing and Wassermann's basic assumptions were untenable, and his initial Verification experiments irreproducible, yet both were of enormous heuristic

value. This is the case with all really valuable experiments.

Ludwig Gleckbacteriologist and philosopher of science (l979)

Testing and Data from a discovery well, and from subsequent wells, should be Verification evaluated by a geologist, not a petroleum engineer.

Robert J. WeimerProfessor of GeologyColorado School of Mines

Testing and Try? There is no try. There is only do or not do.Verification

Yoda"The Empire Strikes Back"

Utilization The oil finders do something else. They sell themselves on their interpretations and in turn sell their ideas to others capable of completing the discovery process. The loss of a good idea through poor salesmanship may postpone indefinitely the discovery of an important oil or gas field or new producing province. Salesmanship is the all-important follow-through.

Ira Cram, l945




Utilization "As a young, unknown man, I went to Washington to talk with Professor Henry, an authority on electricity, about an idea I had conceived for transmitting speech by wires. He told me he thought I had the germ of a great invention. I told him, however, that I had not the electrical knowledge necessary to bring it into existence. He replied. "Get it."

Alexander Graham Bell

Utilization In War everything is simple but simple is difficult.

Karl Von Clausewitz, On War

Utilization Time and time again throughout the history of science the consequences of following up or not following up accidental discoveries have been very great. There is a real analogy to a general's taking advantage of an enemy's error or a lucky break, like the capture of the Remagen bridge.

James B. ConantFormer Harvard University President

Utilization With a problem you search for the solution, with an opportunity you search for the benefit.


Utilization "An opportunity is as real an ingredient in business or raw material, labour or finance - but it only exists when you can see it."


Utilization There is no short cut to opportunity search and development. Deliberate thinking time is required. The more of that we can risk the less we risk other resources. Nor should it be imagined that the thinking time is wasted if the opportunity is turned down. That thinking investment may prove useful in another situation later on.





Utilization I can find 100 men who will tell me an idea won't work; what I want are men who will make it work.

Dow

Utilization Purposeful, systematic innovation begins with the analysis of new opportunities.


Utilization Most of my ideas belonged to other people who didn't bother to develop them.

Thomas Edison

Utilization "Make it a practice to keep on the lookout for novel and interesting ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you are working on."

Thomas Edison in A Kick in the Seat of the Pants Roger von Oech

Utilization Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Utilization Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind.

F. Scott Fitzgerald




Utilization The way to sell an idea to another is to state your case moderately and accurately. This causes your listener to be receptive and, like as not, he will turn about and convince you of the worth of your idea. But if you go at him in a tone of positiveness and arrogance, you are likely to turn him against your idea, no matter how good it is."

Benjamin Franklin

Utilization Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Understanding is not enough; we must do. Knowing and understanding in action make for honor. And honor is the heart of wisdom."

--Johann von Goethe

Utilization Held in the palms of thousands of disgruntled people over the centuries have been ideas worth millions - if they only had taken the first step and then followed through.

Robert M. Hayes

Utilization A strong imagination begetteth opportunity

Montaigne

Utilization In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.

Sir William Osler

Utilization It can be damm hard if you're a Mendel or an Einstein and you've invented the problem as well as the solution. Then you have to convince your colleagues to accept a shocking solution to a problem most didn't now they had!

Root Bernstein's character: Hunter inDiscovering




Utilization Whatever one man is capable of conceiving, other men will be able to achieve.

Jules Verne

Utilization Engineering...is the art of doing that well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion.

Arthur Mellen WellingtonThe Economic Theory of the Location of Railways6th Edition

Problem Finding or Biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail Failing? intelligently.

Charles KetteringGM Research Director

Problem Finding or I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when Failing? you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more

complicated.

Poul Anderson

Problem Finding or Few ideas are in themselves practical. It is for the want of active Failing? imagination in their application rather than in their means of

acquisition that they fail of success. The creative process does not end with an idea--it only starts with an idea."

John Arnold Stanford Professor

Problem Finding or "There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments withFailing? unexpected outcomes."

-- Buckminster Fuller




Problem Finding or Failing? States of Investigation

1) Observation, 2) Classification 3) Generalization, 4) Invention, 5) Verification and Elimination, 6) Confirmation and Revision, 7) Interpretation.

No one would pretend that each of the seven stages described above is a sealed compartment, in which the mind performs no function appropriate to the other stages. The human intellect is an unruly member, leaping forward and backward in a most willful way. One could not, even if he would, carry through an investigation strictly in the orderly sequence just enumerated. Nor is it desirable that he should do so. The development of any stage may throw valuable light on the procedure appropriate to some earlier or some later stage; and the intellect instinctively, inevitably turns backward or rushes forward to profit by this better illumination.

Douglas JohnsonProfessor of Geomorphology at Columbia

Problem Finding or Give me fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own Failing? corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.

Vilfredo Pareto[comment on Kepler]

Problem Finding or Discovering is a process that spans time. It requires confirmation of Failing? observations, reinterpretation of prior results, rethinking of

hypotheses, making of predictions, further testing, the determination of boundary conditions, extrapolation to new cases, integration into existing knowledge, a change of normal activity in Kuhn's sense, the definition of new problems, the invention of applications, and so on.

Root-Bernstein's character: Imp inDiscovering

Problem Finding or We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do: and Failing? probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

Samuel SmilesSelf-help, Chapter 11




Problem Finding or The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two Failing? questions grow where only one grew before.

Thorstein VeblenThe Place of Science in Modern Civilization and Other Essays, 119

Importance of Invention is of two kinds much differing; the one, of arts and Creativity sciences; and the other, of speech and arguments. The former of

these I do report deficient, which seemeth to me to be such a difficience as if in the making of an inventory touching the estate of a defunct it should be set down that there is no ready money. For as money will fetch all other commodities, this knowledge is that which should purchase all the rest...so it cannot be found strange if sciences be no further discovered if the art itself of invention and discovery hath been passed over.

Sir Francis Bacon

Importance of There is a grandeur in any act of creativity. There is mystery in the Creativity formation of a new idea. A new idea is one of the most precious

things in the world. it comes along all too seldom. But when it does, revolutions are caused, industries are born, and in some cases, other industries die as a result of the same idea. It is a marvelous thing to know you have thought something no one else has ever thought, and done something no one else has ever done.

Thomas P. Carneychemical engineer

Importance of We usually find oil in new places with old ideas. Sometimes, also, weCreativity find oil in an old place with a new idea, but we seldom find much oil

in a old place with an old idea. Several times in the past we have thought we were running out of oil whereas actually we were only running out of ideas."

Parke A. Dickey, l958

Importance of Imagination governs the world.Creativity

Disraeli




Importance of But the very foundation of entrepreneurship--as a practice and as a Creativity discipline is the practice of systematic innovation.


Importance of "Man is only half himself, the other half is his expression."Creativity

Ralph Waldo Emerson "The Poet" 1844 The Creators, Boorstin

Importance of Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then Creativity all things are at risk.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Importance of A company is only as good as its last good idea.Creativity

Marsh Fisherco founder of Century 21 Real Estate

Importance of It would be a sad day if human beings, adjusting to the Computer Creativity Revolution, become so intellectually lazy that they lost their power of

creative thinking.

Martin Gardnerauthor of Scientific American's Mathematical Games columnaha!, W.H. Freeman

Importance of From inaccessible mountain range by way of desert untrod by humanCreativity foot to the ends of the unknown seas, the breath of the everlasting

creative spirit is felt, rejoicing over every speck of dust that hearkens to it and lives.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe




Importance of Talent ... must be stimulated. The country will not manage without Creativity it.

Mikhail Gorbachev, 1990

Importance of The successful oil finder of the future will be the explorationist who Creativity thinks --- and one who is dedicated to the proposition that he must

use his intensive reasoning powers of imagination, and must use the very best ideas and tools from others in order to get optimum value from the available knowledge.

When this happens we will be practicing the art of finding oil and gas as true scientists --- as pure, thoroughly trained, well-rounded petroleum explorers --- not as unilateral specialists limited in scope, in knowledge and thinking power.

To be pure scientists we must rely on the basic fundamentals requisite for sound exploration which can be summed up in one word --- ingenuity! The synonyms of ingenuity would cover several pages. In order for you to grasp the full connotation of the word, I will cite a few: --- inventive talent, keen perception, skill, resourcefulness, sharpness, ability, readiness, acuteness, capacity, aptitude, intelligence, inspiration, felicity, cleverness, aptness, proficiency, competence, attainment, accomplishment, adroitness, expertness, dexterity, efficiency, mastery, excellence, and genius.

Now, I will sum up all of these various meanings into still one other word --- creativity!

Michel T. Halbouty, Exploration Geologist (1966)

Importance of It's becoming increasingly clear that the real frontiers are no longer Creativity territorial; they are markets and ideas.

Edward L. Hennessychairman and CEO of Allied-Signal

Importance of "Man's mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original Creativity shape."





Importance of "There is one thing stronger than all the armies of the world: and Creativity that is an idea whose time has come."

Victor Hugo

Importance of Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet comeCreativity to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable."

Importance of "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."Creativity

Alan Kay A Fellow of Apple Computer

Importance of Still the question recurs "can we do better?" The dogmas of the Creativity quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is

piled high with difficulty,and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.

Abraham LincolnDecember 1, l862Annual Message to Congress

Importance of The question is, who is interested in creativity? And my answer is Creativity that practically everybody is. This interest is no longer confined to

psychologists and psychiatrists. Now it has become a question of national and international policy as well.

Abraham MaslowThe Farther Reaches of Human Nature, l976

Importance of "We need to make the world safe for creativity and intuition, for it's Creativity creativity and intuition that will make the world safe for us."

Edgar Mitchell, Apollo Astronaut




Importance of "It is better to create than to be learned, creating is the true essenceCreativity of life."

Barthold Georg Niebuhr

Importance of We don't need more creativity in Japan. One creative mind in a Creativity thousand is perfectly sufficient. Any more and the country would

collapse in chaos.

Yasunori NishijimaThe Guardian, 14 December 1987

Importance of "Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity"Creativity

-- Michael Porter, Harvard Business School

Importance of Creativity "I believe that if we respond with our best creative energies, we can

unleash a new renaissance of discovery and learning."

John Scully Apple Computer EDUCOM '87 Conference, Los Angeles October 28, 1987

Importance of I think it's tremendously important at this particular time to keep Creativity thinking about creativity in geology, because this is an era in which it

is extremely easy to fall into the belief that advanced technology and hardware can do our thinking for us.

S. W. Tottenformer president, Chevron Oil CompanyStandard Oil Company of Texas Divisionand Professor of Geology at Hanover College

Importance of Creativity "Bring in ideas and entertain them royally, for one of them may be

king."

Mark Van Doren




Importance of Creativity "Failure to use such an abundant inherent treasure as creativity,

whether it be because of unawareness that it exists, indifference, or deliberate stultification is more than a waste, it is self betrayal."

Mastoshi Yoshimura The Art of Creative Thinking Nierenberg

Education ...it is not possible in any published book to speak freely and precisely about the way science is run. the law of libel, reasons of State, and still more the unwritten code of the scientific fraternity itself forbid particular examples being held up alike for praise or blame.

J. D. Bernalcrystallographer

Education Are geniuses born or made?....It would be easy to think they're born. If so, we could excuse our own failures of creativity.

John Briggs

Education "Modern civilization seems to be incapable of producing people endowed with imagination..."

Doctor Alexis Carrel

Education It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

Winston Spencer Churchill

Education "Not to know the events which happened before one was born, that is to remain always a child..." --Cicero




Education With respect then to curiosity, the teacher has usually more to learn than to teach. Rarely can he aspire to the office of kindling or even increasing it. His task is rather to keep alive the sacred spark of wonder and to fan the flame that already glows. His problem is to protect the spirit of inquiry, to keep it from becoming blase from over excitement, wooden from routine, fossilized through dogmatic instruction, or dissipated by random exercise upon trivial things.

John DeweyHow we Think

Education There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Education We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.

Nobel Lecture 1966

Education We've got to get creativity out of the realm of mystics; we need to do away with the notion that the muses court you but they don't court me.

Marsh Fisher

Education The whole school system discourages looking at things from a different viewpoint which is really what creativity is all about.

Marsh Fisherco-founder of Century 21

Education Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training. --Anna Freud




Education 'amidst the easy artificiality of our life...our creative powers have atrophied.

President Griswold of Yale

Education He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet. - Joseph Joubert

Education Educator Victor Lowenfeld shared a belief with many scholars that creativity itself is common human trait, often existing as a potential ability awaiting release into outward expressions of latent talents. Lowenfeld cautioned educators:"We have to regard it as our sacred responsibility to unfold and develop each individual's creative ability as a dim as the spark may be and kindle it to what flame it may conceivably develop."

V. LowenfeldBasic Aspects of Creative Thinking, l961.

Education Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

W. Somerset Maugham

Education I am still learning.

Michelangelo

Education Those who have changed the universe have never done it by changing officials, but always by inspiring the people.- Napoleon Bonaparte




Education The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done - men who are creative, inventive and discoverers.

Jean Piaget

Education An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generations is familiarsed with the ideas from the beginning.

Max PlanckIn G. Hilton, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought, 1973

Education"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled."

Plutarch

Education Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

--Beatrix Potter

Education"Thou say'st not only skill is gained / But genius too may be obtained, / By studious imitation."

Sir Joshua Reynolds, quoted by Thomas Young, l791.

Education "So why the hell don't we all spend more time talking about what puzzles us instead of our precious and all too limited insights? Good knowledge of unsolved problems of science, and how we know that they're problems, would probably be better education for students than all the 'facts' we could cram into their heads. Exploration--that's what we need to cultivate.!

Root-Bernstein's character, Imp in Discovering.




Education ...."most scientific thinking is not verbal or mathematical, and until we get that through our heads, we aren't going to understand how scientists do think or how to teach them science!"

Root-Bernstein's character, Ariana in Discovering.

Education It is not necessary to surround creativity with mystery and obfuscation. No sparks of genius need be postulated to account for human invention, discovery, creation. These acts are acts of the human brain, the same brain that helps us dress in the morning, arrive at our office, and go through our daily chores, however uncreative most of these chores may be.

Herbert Simon

Education Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.

Burrhus Frederic SkinnerNew Scientist 21 may 1964

Education Truesdell's advise: Learn from the masters.

Coined by Root-Bernstein's character Imp in Discovering From the words of

Clifford Truesdell

Education He is a poor pupil who does not surpass his master.

Leonardo da Vinci

Education "Human history is in essence a history of ideas."

H. G. Wells 1866-1946 from The Outline of History




EducationIt is a common condemnation these days of our Western educational system that it discriminates against the right hemisphere. There is no doubt that our educational system is half-brained, but is it left-brained? To be sure, there are important differences in the learning styles of the two cerebral hemispheres: the left is constructive, algorithmic, stepwise, and logical. It benefits from narrow examples and from trial and error: it can learn by rule. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, does not seem to learn by exposure to specific rules and examples. Our studies show that it does not have an internal model of its own solution processes, which it can then interrogate and up date. It needs exposure to rich and associative patterns, which it tends to grasp as wholes. Programmed instruction is certainly not for the right hemisphere, but I am not sure what is the proper method of instruction for our silent half. It is part of the elusiveness of the right hemisphere that we find it easier to say what it is not than what it is.

Eran ZaidelThe Elusive Right Hemisphere of the Brain, l978

Definition The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person. Frank Barron

Definition Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.

Mary Lou Cook

Definition Creativity a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Arthur Koestler (l964)




Definition The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

--Arthur Koestler

Definition Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can play weird--that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple complicated is commonplace--making the complicated simple, awesomely simple--that's creativity.

--Charles Mingus

Definition The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

Carl R. Rogers

Definition Jerome Bruner's definition of creativity, "effective surprise," fits our use of the term "discovering" exactly.

Root-Bernstein's character Ariana inDiscovering

The Need for Tension "a certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man."

Thomas Carlyle

The Need for Tension The only available method for changing ideas is conflict...

Edward De Bono




The Need for Tension Nothing encourages creativity like the chance to fall flat on one's face.

~James D. Finley

The need for tension When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.

Benjamin Franklin

The Need for Tension In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgia's, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

Graham Greene

The need for tension Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it. -- Horace

The Need for Tension Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.

Horace

The Need for Tension "when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

Samuel Johnson




The Need for Tension"Truth emerges from the clash of adverse ideas."

John Stuart Mill

The Need for Tension The mind uses its faculty for creativity only when experience forces it to do so.

Jules Henri PoincareLa science et l'Hypothese, 1902

The Need for TensionIt is providential that the youth or man of inventive mind is not "blessed" with a million dollars. The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone - that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born.

Nikola Tesla

The Need for Tension My father, J. J., often maintained that a certain amount of interruption was good and almost necessary.

G. P. Thompson, physicist

Management Thou shalt not kill a new idea.

3M

Management There is a correlation between the creative and the screwball. So we must suffer the screwball gladly.-

Kingman Brewster




Management There is a correlation between the creative and the screwball. So we must suffer the screwball gladly.

-Kingman Brewster

Management "In any important new beginning, a preoccupation with results can be very damaging"

William Bridges, Transitions

Management Aside from not having a substandard intellect, the number-one quality you need to be a successful investor is the right temperament and intellectual framework. Also, you have to stick within what I call your circle of competence. You have to know what you understand and what you don't understand. it's not terribly important how big the circle is. But it is terribly important that you know where the perimeter is.

Warren BuffettCEO Berkshire Hathaway

Management Ever since I've been here (LANL) there's been an increasing trend, both externally and internally, towards the illusion that you can "manage" science, whereas all you can really do is to get good people who are interested in the subject you want to develop. This increasing accountability at all levels of the federal establishment exudes a cold air that drives out the kind of neurotic and creative people that you need to make a breakthrough. There has to be a feeling of freedom and reward. you can't get good science out of people who recognize that they are being managed.

Peter Carruthers

Management The biggest impediment to creativity is self-censorship for coherence or perceived intelligence by others.

- Ben Casnocha




Management After a new idea is presented in a group, the first comment should be praise.

- Ben Casnocha

Management To be an innovative company, you have to ask for innovation. You assemble a group of talented people who are eager to do new things and put them in an environment where innovation is expected. it's that simple--and that hard.

Paul Cook

Management The most important factor is individual recognition--more important than salaries, bonuses, or promotions. most people, whether they're engineers, business managers, or machine operators, want to be creative.

Paul Cook

Management Creativity in petroleum exploration is not confined to envisioning stratigraphic and structural conditions under which oil and gas may occur. It is also needed in molding organizations and programs needed to carry on successful scientific and technological efforts. Kenneth Crandallformer Director and Vice-President of Chevron Exploration

Management "The ability to learn faster than the competition is often the only sustainable competitive advantage a company can have"

Arie de Geus

Management The most important tool of which any geologist is possessed is his mind, the one tool which is sharpened and not dulled by use.

E. De GolyerGeophysicist




Management We have three principal means: observation of nature, reflection, and experiment. Observation gathers the facts reflection combines them, experiment verifies the result of the combination. It is essential that the observation be assiduous, that reflection be profound, and that experimention be exact. Rarely does one see these abilities in combination. And so creative geniuses are not common.

Denis Diderot

Management What all the successful entrepreneurs I have met have in common is not a certain kind of personality but a commitment to the systematic practice of innovation.

Peter F. DruckerThe Discipline of Innovation

Management For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relation, for Nature cannot be fooled.

R. P. Feynman, What do you Care What Other People Think?p. 237, W. W. Norton, New York, (l988)

Management Companies don't invent: countries don't invent, People invent. We are only as good as people's ideas.'

Marsh Fisher

Management We've got to find ways to encourage everybody to have ideas, and reward them, and recognize them. We can do it with a system where people are encouraged to contribute their ideas whether they're in the mail room, on the assembly line, in the executive suite, or where ever.

Marsh Fisher

Management Creativity varies inversely with the number of cooks involved in the broth.

Bernice Fitz-Gibbon, Macy's Gimbels and Me, l967




Management annuit coeptis (be favorable to bold enterprise)

Benjamin Franklin's choice of Motto above the pyramid on the dollar bill

Management To induce creative thinking, we cannot dominate or threaten. Such methods will not and cannot inspire."

Howard E. Fritzformer Research Head of the B. F. Goodrich Company

Management The only truly effective means that management has for increasing inventivity is to hire, or put in place, the right people. Other means can "trim" it, but cannot have a primary effect. This is because it is useless to ask people who are uneducated, or inexperienced, to practice a technology at a high enough level of sophistication to produce inventions. Therefore, the pool of people from which choices can be made will contain mostly people who do not have the characteristics of inventors. It will also contain a dilute concentration of people who do have the characteristics. Picking them out should be the primary activity of the management. Not picking out projects; picking out people.

Former Manager for Amoco Research in NapiervilleJohn J.Gilman

Management All of this may sound like romantic nonsense, but if we examine the history of our industry and the men behind it, we will discover that the oil business is extremely sensitive to the doings, enthusiasm, and personality of individuals.

Eduardo J. Guzmanformer head of Exploration Technology, Mexican Petroleum Institute

Management Where strategy formulation is an elitist activity it is also difficult to produce truly creative strategies.

Hamel and PrahaladHarvard Business Review




Management The best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line. Great things, of course, have been done by solitary workers; but they have usually been done with double the pains they would have cost if they had been produced in more genial circumstances.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Management Creativity always dies a quick death in rooms that house conference tables.

Bruce HerschensohnNew York TimesApril 2, l975

Management Men and women want to do a good job, a creative job, and ... if they are provided with he proper environment, they will do so.

William R. Hewlett co founder, Hewlett Packard The HP Way, 1980

Management People are able to be creative and display responses that people think of as innovative when they feel good.

Alice M. Isen

Management "Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to."

H. Mumford Jones

Management Ideas for innovations begin to take shape in companies in which the first essential power tool--information--is available, and exchange of ideas is encouraged.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter Harvard business school professor




Management One of Lincoln's favorite stories, one he told often, was designed to encourage people to innovate, to take action on their own initiative, without waiting for orders:

It seems that there was this colonel., who when raising his regiment in Missouri, proposed to his men that he should do all the swearing for the regiment. They assented: and for months no instance was known of violation of the promise. The colonel had a teamster named John Todd, who, as roads were not always the best, had some difficulty in commanding his temper and tongue. John happened to be driving a mule team through a series of mud holes a little worse than usual, when he burst forth into a volley of profanity.The colonel took notice of the offense and brought John to account. "John," said he, "didn't you promise to let me do all the swearing for the regiment?" "Yes, I did, Colonel" he replied, "but the fact was the swearing had to be done then or not at all, and you weren't there to do it." Don T. PhillipsLincoln on Leadership, l992

Management "Where we all think alike, no one thinks very much."

Walter Lippman

Management Capacities clamor to be used and cease their clamor only when they are well used.

A. H. Maslow

Management I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird.

Paul McCartney




Management Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.

Robert King MertonSocial Theory and Social Structure, 1962New York Free Press, 1962, p. 547

Management We tell our folks to make at least 10 mistakes a day. If they are not making 10 mistakes a day they're not trying hard enough.

Metcalf

Management Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity...

- Charles Mingus

Management Louis Pasteur had a stroke which destroyed half his brain: yet he made some of his greatest discoveries after that.


Management "Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity." Patton, George S.

Management Innovative leaders aren't necessarily creative, idea-driven people themselves (though obviously many are). But they welcome change because they're convinced that their competitive survival depends on innovation.

Andrall E. PearsonPresident of Pepsico for 15 years




Management Committee + dark alley down which ideas are led to be strangled.

Pepsico

Management The organization performs up to the level it thinks management expects.

Derwyn Phillipsvice chairman of the Gillette Company

ManagementCommittees are, by nature, timid. They are based on the premise of safety in numbers: content to survive inconspicuously, rather than take risks and move independently ahead. Without independence, without the freedom for new ideas to be tried, to fail, and to ultimately succeed, the world will not move ahead, but live in the fear of its own potential.

Prof. Dr. ing. F. Porsche, l989

Management Rules are the first step in blocking changes."

Chuck ReavesAT&T sales executive

Management When managers must pay as much attention to justifying the rejection of promising ideas as to accepting projects, risk taking is likely to be encouraged.

Henry E. RiggsManagement Expert

Management The best way to find good ideas is to let people tell you what the good ideas are.

- Niel Robertson




Management Be realistic--demand the impossible.

T.J. RodgersCEO of Cypress Semiconductor

Management The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

Carl R. Rogers

Management I believe that the architects of science are simply more curious, more iconoclastic, more persistent, readier to make detours, and more willing to tackle bigger and more fundamental problems. More important, they possess intellectual courage, daring. They work at the edge of their competence; their reach exceeds their grasp. They stretch themselves, they stretch science.


Management When all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for creation. Margaret Sackville

Management Creativity is a learning process, not a management process.

John Scully

Management I would worry if there wasn't always a little bit of anarchy in the organization. It's like arsenic: a little is medical but a lot can kill you.

John Scully




Management Everybody has a vastly greater potential for creative and innovative thinking than the routine workday allows.

Mark Sebell

Management I suffered such agonies of shyness, that I sometimes walked up and down the Embankment for 20 minutes or more before venturing to knock at the door...Few men have suffered more than I did in my youth from simple cowardice.

George Bernard Shaw

Management ...."responsibility of management to provide situations in which creativity is consciously released."

Ordway TeadSociety for the Advancement of Management

Management Leonardo's original notes pose considerable problems of legibility. He wrote in mirror image from right to left - probably as his own individualist way of coping with his left-handedness,

Leonardo da Vinci on PaintingMartin Kemp

Management A scientist seeks to discover what is; an engineer seeks to create what never was.- attributed to Theodore von Karman

Management New ideas...are not born in a conforming environment.

Roger Von Oech




Management While it is true that some people seem naturally creative and others not, we are too prone to leap to the conclusion that creativity is the realm of a relative few.

Robert H. Watermancoauthor of In search of Excellence.

Management Wherever ideas are effective, there is freedom.

Alfred North Whitehead

Management The mistakes of greater and cleverer men are a lesson and consolation to us. Ampere [the father of electrodynamics} had two cats for company, one larger than the other. But at times they disturbed the great physicist in his work because he had to open the door so that they could go in and out repeatedly. So he simply equipped the bottom of his door with two smaller openings--a big one for the large cat and a little one for the smaller cat. Let us be grateful to Ampere.

Willstatter

Thinking about Fields of learning are surrounded ultimately only by illusory Thinking boundaries -- like the 'rooms' in a hall of mirrors. It is when the

illusion is penetrated that progress takes place .... Like- wise science cannot be regarded as a thing apart, to be studied, admired or ignored. It is a vital part of our culture, our culture is part of it, it permeates our thinking, and its continued separateness from what is fondly called 'the humanities' is a preposterous practical joke on all thinking men.

William S. BeckModern Science and the Nature of Life, 1957 (New York: Harcourt Brace)

Thinking about Ever since I've been here (LANL) there's been an increasing trend, Thinking both externally and internally, towards the illusion that you can

"manage" science, whereas all you can really do is to get good people who are interested in the subject you want to develop. This increasing accountability at all levels of the federal establishment exudes a cold air that drives out the kind of neurotic and creative people that you need to make a breakthrough. There has to be a feeling of freedom and reward. you can't get good science out of people who recognize that they are being managed.

Peter Carruthers




Thinking about I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.Thinking

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thinking about The history of Science is science itself."Thinking

Goethe

Thinking about The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, Thinking but that man will begin to think like computers.

S J Harris

Thinking about After having read a large number of books and articles on creativity, Thinking one is left with the feeling that they lack the very creativity they seek

to describe.

Spyros G. Makridakisforecasting, Planning and Strategy for the 21th Century, l990

Thinking about I don't believe there is much difference between normal and Thinking 'creative' thought. Right now, if asked which seems the more

mysterious, I'd have to say the ordinary kind.

MinskyFather of Artificial intelligence

Thinking about The history of a science is...merely a means of research. It Thinking furnishes a method for the development of scientific conquests, but

is not to be cultivated for itself without regard to its applications."

Ostwald




Thinking about Strong inference consists in applying the following steps to a problemThinking in science, formally and explicitly and regularly: (1) devising

alternative hypotheses; (2) devising a crucial experiment (or several of them) with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will , as nearly as possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses: (3) carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result; and recycling the procedure, making sub hypotheses or sequential hypotheses to define the possibilities that remain; and so on.

John Rader Plattin C H Waddington, The Tools of Thought, 1977

Thinking about Science is a search for patterns, rules, causative agents.Thinking

Robert Scott Root-Bernstein's character: Hunterin the Discovering

Thinking about Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made Thinking an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a

week.

George Bernard Shaw

Thinking about There are exactly as many ways of approaching the scientific world asThinking there are individuals in science. It is only because the results are

expressed in the some language are subject to the same control, that science seems more uniform than, say, original literature. In effect, in the end, it is more uniform; but if we could follow the process of scientific thought through many minds, as it actually happens and not as it is conventionally expressed after the event, we should see every conceivable variety of mental texture.

C. P. Snow

Thinking about "The Fact is the basis, the foundation, Imagination, the building Thinking material; the Hypothesis, the ground plan to be tested; Truth or

Reality, the building."

van't Hoffduring his stay in Kekule lab.Full professor of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology at New University of Amsterdam.Nobel Laureate




Thinking about Methods of geologic field work are individual. No two geologists work Thinking alike because geologic field work is thinking and no two men think

alike. It is important to emphasize the thinking. Geologists enjoy their outdoor life, the freedom of the nomad, the delights of the artist, the inspiration of the poet, the aspiration of the seer, according to their gifts. But the geologist who would understand must think, think intensively, earnestly, and truthfully. His thinking is the soul of his work and his habit of thinking fixes his methods.

Baily Willis and Robin Willis, l934Structural GeologistsFather and Son




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Creativity in Oil and Gas Exploration - A quotation approach

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