I read another chapter out of ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’. There’s a line at the end of chapter 10 that resonates with me, “Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than arrive.” Last week I read three chapters in one sitting and I feel like I cheated myself. Big damned hurry to get to the end of the book.
I wised up though. Could easily have sat for another hour, tearing through pages, but then I would have missed too much scenery along the way. One chapter… sometimes even one paragraph… it’s best to let those words steep like tea leaves into the mind. The book is that good.
The concept of creativity within the process of Scientific Method was put forward. Seems a contradictory idea. Problem. Hypothesis. Test. Analyze. Conclude. I’m stating the process a bit crudely, but it’s a universal approach to scientific advancement. Not much wiggle room once you’ve begun the process of testing an hypothesis.
Yet, it is hypothesis itself that comes from the spark of creativity and inspiration. This spark is what separates the greats from the average. There is no utilitarian way to dream up hypotheses. An army of scientists can run them through the process once they’re proposed, but nothing happens until the idea is thought up in the first place.
It’s my understanding that scientific theories are never seen in the scientific community to be absolute truths. They merely stand until something better comes along to disprove them. These theories define what the physical world is to us. In other words, they define reality.
With so much scientific discovery going on everyday, so many scientific theories falling to better theories, reality becomes a moving target. The more we look into reality, the more we change it.
It can drive some people crazy. Perhaps in our big damned hurry to understand what reality is, we fail to take the time to contemplate what reality really means.
The Mind of Jarrett 