This book is about having ideas and-a much longer haul-making them work. David Jones, best known for his Daedalus column, tells many stories about creators and their creations, including his own fantastical-seeming contributions to mainstream science-such as unrideable bicycles and chemical gardens in space. His theory of creativity endows each of us with a Random-Ideas Generator, a Censor, and an Observer-Reasoner. Jones applies the theory to a wide range of weird scientific experiments that he has conducted for serious scientific papers, for challenging printed expositions, and for presentations to a TV audience. He even suggests new ones, not yet tried! Creativity is as essential to science as curiosity, physical intuition, and shrewd deduction from well-planned experiments. But, says Jones, ingenuity is very uncertain-even for the greatest inventors, about 80 percent of ideas fail. Jokiness can help, and so can lots of random data. Jones has copious clever advice that will help you have that madly brilliant private thought in the first place-and will encourage you to take it further. Neither dense nor demanding, The Aha! Moment is engrossing, edifying, and scientifically serious; yet it is lightly written, has many jokes, and asks lots of silly questions. As Jones shows, it can often pay to take an absurd idea seriously.
| ISBN | 1421403315 | | Pages | 280 | | ISBN13 | 9781421403311
(What's this?) | | Weight (grammes) | 385 | | Publisher | Johns Hopkins University Press | | Published in | Baltimore, MD | | Imprint | Johns Hopkins University Press | | Height (mm) | 229 | | Format | Paperback | | Width (mm) | 152 | | Publication date | 07 Feb 2012 | | Spine width (mm) | 17 | | DEWEY | 500 | | Academic level | General, Professional / Scholarly | | DEWEY edition | DC23 | | Interest age | From 17 |
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The Aha! Moment is not bogged down with scientific detail and tech talk; in fact, it asks a multitude of absurd questions meant to promote innovative and logical brainstorming. Jones gives dozens of examples from his own body of work... While his examples dominate more than half of the book, they are intriguing and stimulating, acting as a means to promote creativity in fellow scientists and artists. -- Aimee Jodoin Foreword Reviews 2011 A top pick not to be limited to science holdings, this will reach many a general-interest reader with its fascinating, readable and lively insights. Midwest Book Review 2012
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