Is the Hadron Collider the most beautiful machine ever invented, or what?
The New York Times article on Nielson and Ninomiya has more detail, including the note that:
Quote:
"[Nielson] is known in physics as one of the founders of string theory and a deep and original thinker, “one of those extremely smart people that is willing to chase crazy ideas pretty far,†in the words of Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist and author of a coming book about time, “From Eternity to Here.â€
The quote from Niels Bohr reminds me of a seminar on "creative problem solving I once attended:
Quote:
We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.
At the heart of the process was, oddly enough, the suspension of judgment, not the exercise of it. Creativity requires the willingness to entertain ideas which one might ordinarily reject out of hand for a whole litany of reasons (crazy, ill-informed, off topic, illogical, counter factual etc.). The theory, so to speak, of brainstorming suggests that it is often the risible idea from one whch can actually stimulate the out -of-the-box thinking of another who comes up with a workable solution to the problem being addressed. I've often found that to be the case on an individual level, where reminding myself not to pass judgment on my own ideas too quickly has proven useful when attacking a difficult problem.
I rather think that attacking the concept of faith and God may ultimately be less, rather than more useful in that regard. After all, the ability to conceive of things that do not exist, or do not yet exist, or that theoretically do not or "cannot" exist, is a unique function of human cognition which serves many purposes. Imagination is very interesting word when you stop to think about at it. It's what we use to write drama, or a poem, or science "fiction" on the one hand, or to search for a theory of everything on the other.
