Share your Night Science Story Series
I am a psychologist studying curiosity, thinking, and creativity. I conduct experiments and collect stories about unexpected discoveries and inventions like this one: “As he was brushing his teeth on the morning of July 17, 2014, Thomas Royen, a little-known retired German statistician, suddenly lit upon the proof of a famous conjecture at the intersection of geometry, probability theory and statistics that had eluded top experts for decades.”
I have my own analogical experience of unexpected inventions of objects to be used in psychological experiments. The idea for one object suddenly came when I was washing dishes, the idea for the second one--when I was on the subway.
Also, I have experience of a long way from an initially vague idea to its clear implementation. This way could take several months or years.
Perhaps you know about paradoxical intransitive dice beating one another in rock-paper-scissors way because of non-standard numbers on their faces. Rock-paper-scissors relations are a metaphor for so-called intransitive cycles in biology and other areas. In 2021, I came up with a transdisciplinary idea of meta-intransitivity: intransitive cycles containing intransitive cycles (containing intransitive cycles etc.). The initial idea was very vague. Now it has clear implementations.
This story is described in my preprint Vague Stimulating Ideas, Images and Metaphors in Scientific Thinking: Researchers' Work with Horizons of Unclear Knowledge. I write there that vague concepts, images and metaphors in science are important because they can have positive potential to open and expand horizons of future knowledge, and lead to deep existential cognitive emotions (like Einstein’s “something deeply hidden had to be behind things”).
