Tuesday, May 18, 2010

The will to think.

I pulled the quote below from a 1976 paper by William Shockley, Nobel Laureate, inventor of the junction transistor.

A competent thinker will be reluctant to commit himself to the effort that tedious and precise thinking demands - he will lack “the will to think”- unless he has the conviction that something worthwhile will be done with the results of his efforts -- and, of course, there is always also the risk that his hard thinking may not produce any creative ideas.

A meaningful simplest case stimulates the will to think by reducing the threat of being forced to accomplish repugnant and tedious tasks.

Models often provide such meaningful simplest cases. For example, Copernicus' planetary system was a meaningful simple case that explained a lot of very complex astronomical data. The proverbial apple that fell on Newton's head was instrumental in making the gravitational theory simple and relevant despite all the calculus that had to be invented from scratch to prove the theory.
In my own experience, Altshuller's trade-off resolution technique is the easiest concept to explain in TRIZ. It's also the least powerful one. As a result we have a problem: people perceive something that is used to wake up their "will to think" as the real thing. Which is unfortunate because it prevents them from pursuing better invention methods.

References: W.Shockley. The Path to the Conception of the Junction Transistor. IEEE Transactions in Electronic Devices., Vol ED-23,   No 7,  July 1976.


tags: theory, problem, quote, education, triz, theory

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