Quote:
Originally Posted by Taylor514ce
Read "Genius" by James Gleick. It's a biography of Richard Feynman. Even fellow scientists found him a bit daunting. I don't have my copy at hand, so I will very badly paraphrase how one of his colleagues described the situation. He said with "ordinary smart people", you could understand how they reasoned. You knew that you could go through the exact same mental steps, if only you were just a bit smarter. With Feynman, though, you couldn't fathom the process. He himself couldn't explain it. Things just came to him. All you had to do was give Feynman the general outline of the problem (he emphatically didn't want the details) and he'd drum his fingers for awhile, and then tell you the answer.
I might be wrong on this, but I think an aircraft or military company paid him a retainer for "anything he thought up while in the shower".
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Inductive vs. deductive "logic". Sometimes it hard to tell the difference. I occasional have ideas tha "pop out of nowhere", but I still don't know whether they are inductive or just my subconscious working deductively and "popping out the answer" to my conscious mind....