Eureka moments——科研中的靈光乍現

科研，或者日常生活中，或多或少總有些奇妙的事情出現。以前看到過下面這個問題：

做科研時，都遇到過哪些靈光乍現（Eureka Moment）？ - 知乎用戶的回答

書籍：This Will Make You Smarter New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking-John Brockman (2012) Harper Perennial http://www.amazon.com/This-Will-Make-You-Smarter/dp/0062109391/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1465219583&sr=1-1&keywords=this+will+make+you+smarter

書籍中一篇Structured Serendipity

by JASON ZWEIG

Journalist; personal finance columnist, Wall Street Journal; author, Your Money and Your Brain

Creativity is a fragile flower, but perhaps it can be fertilized with systematic doses of serendipity. The psychologist Sarnoff Mednick showed decades ago that some people are better than others at detecting the associations that connect seemingly random concepts. Asked to name a fourth idea that links 「wheel,」 「electric,」 and 「high,」 people who score well on other measures of creativity will promptly answer 「chair.」 More recently, research in Mark Jung-Beeman』s cognitive neuroscience lab at Northwestern has found that sudden bursts of insight—the Aha! or Eureka! moment—come when brain activity abruptly shifts its focus. The almost ecstatic sense that makes us cry 「I see!」 appears to come when the brain is able to shunt aside immediate or familiar visual inputs.

That may explain why so many of us close our eyes (often unwittingly) just before we exclaim, 「I see!」 It also suggests, at least to me, that creativity can be enhanced deliberately through environmental variation. Two techniques seem promising: varying what you learn and varying where you learn it. I try each week to read a scientific paper in a field new to me—and to read it in a different place.

New associations often leap out of the air at me this way. More intriguing, others seem to form covertly and lie in wait for the opportune moment when they can click into place. I do not try to force these associations out into the open; they are like the shrinking mimosa plants that crumple if you touch them but bloom if you leave them alone.

The sociologist Robert Merton argued that many of the greatest discoveries of science have sprung from serendipity. As a layman and an amateur, all I hope to accomplish by throwing myself in serendipity』s path is to pick up new ideas, and combine old ones, in ways that haven』t quite occurred to other people yet. So I let my curiosity lead me wherever it seems to want to go, like the planchette that floats across the Ouija board.

I do this remote-reading exercise on my own time, since it would be hard to justify to newspaper editors during the work day. But my happiest moments last year came as I reported an investigative article on how elderly investors are increasingly being scammed by elderly con artists. I later realized, to my secret delight, that the article had been enriched by a series of papers I had been reading on altruistic behavior among fish (Lambroides dimidiatus).

If I do my job right, my regular readers will never realize that I spend a fair amount of my leisure time reading Current Biology, The Journal of Neuroscience, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. If that reading helps me find new ways to understand the financial world, as I suspect it does, my readers will indirectly be smarter for it. If not, the only harm done is my own spare time wasted.

In my view, we should each invest a few hours a week in reading research that ostensibly has nothing to do with our day jobs, in a setting that has nothing in common with our regular workspaces. This kind of structured serendipity just might help us become more creative, and I doubt that it can hurt.

讀了這篇文章，覺得前面的問題似乎並不切題。知乎問題的背景是題主科研不順，也許是實驗，也許是理論。但這和這篇文章的Eureka不同：後者可能更符合Eureka現象中相隔遙遠，但瞬間聯通的靈異；前者更傾向於跑馬拉松時半程剛過，腿腳便開始發麻。

現實科研中的靈光乍現，至少對絕大多數普通科研工作者來講，其出現似乎更符合Eureka神行無影的特點，而非一個可以追求，甚至可以用來做緩解疲勞之用的精神雪碧。畢竟，hard science 本身的特點——如果賦予到一種人性中——大概是要盡量排除無規律的柔性入侵，讓規則明顯化，以求利用。

但硬科學能否也人文一點兒呢？多些傳承後世的迷思，如阿基米德洗澡，蘋果砸牛頓。這也是這篇文章和我思考的出發點：有方向性地增加一個小概率事件的概率。

如果存在這種方向性，我覺得，這種方向性依然會瀰漫著硬科學的「硬」。

這種硬最簡單的體現可能就是觸類旁通。了解玻璃的特性能跨越到金屬玻璃，了解一種金屬能類比到另一種金屬，了解一種化合物屬性能類推另一種。 操作系統相同的時候，不同的軟體總是看起來有幾分相似。兩套軟體彼此相隔萬里時看起來毫不相干，但當操作系統也同樣覆蓋萬里時，再看這兩套東西，也許就發現沒那麼不相干了。對這個系統越是了解，個體之間的絲網也便慢慢反光凸顯了。

至於要用多大的步長遍歷自己所需的知識空間，那便是個人的事情了。但至少，似乎無序的Eureka和系統規律在這裡是能結合的。

說了這麼多，總結起來倒非常簡單：多學，多能。

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