Intuition and science

Intuition and science are not mutually exclusive. They are about synthesis. One way of thinking about these is to imagine putting discovery or invention into a test tube and analyzing it. Each would yield intuition and science. Well-known true stories about intuition and science, though, demonstrate that they often occupy different points on the timeline.

Eli Howe, the inventor of the sewing machine, needed to figure out a better place to put the eye of the needle than in the middle of it. It took years to do it, but one night he dreamed he had been threatened with death by a group of people carrying spears. The spears were shaped like the needles, but they had holes near the spear blades.

Immediately, he made a model of this new version of the needle, and then used the model to create a sewing machine that worked well.

In a dream, Einstein was sledding with friends at night. His sled starting going faster and faster, and he knew in the dream that it was going about the speed of light. He looked up and saw the various colors of the stars. At the end of his life, Einstein said that he knew he had to figure out that dream, and that his entire scientific career was a meditation on the dream.

Can we modify our educational system so that all graduates emerge with a science way of thinking? Let me try to be more specific. Consider Galileo’s great discovery (immortalized as Newton’s First Law): “An isolated body will continue its state of motion forever.” What could be more counter-intuitive? The creative act was to realize that our experience is irrelevant because in our normal experience, objects are never isolated — balls stop rolling, horses must pull carts to continue the motion. However, Galileo’s deeper intuition suspected simplicity in the law governing moving bodies, and his insightful surmise was that if one could isolate the body, it would indeed continue moving forever. Galileo and his followers for the past 400 years have demonstrated how scientists must construct new intuitions in order to know how the world works.

METHOD OF INTUITION

When the problem is very complex and complicated, analytical methods of decision making cannot solve it. In such cases, we rely upon our sub-conscious mind. Most of us get such intuitions through our dreams.

One Simple Procedure for Using Intuition for Decision Making or Problem Solving
1. collect all available info about the problem
2. make detailed analysis of the problem based on these info
3. write everything down in a piece of paper
4. before you go to bed, read the piece of paper once or twice
5. sleep calmly without thinking of anything else

When you sleep, your sub-conscious mind will evaluate the choices and most probably arrive at a suitable solution. This solution may be communicated to you through your dreams or it will come to your consciousness suddenly when you woke up the next day.

The better communication between your conscious mind and sub-conscious mind, the more chances are there to get a solution through intuition.