Book and Media Review pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
Review of The Aha! Moment: A Scientist’s Take on Creativity Wheeler Conover* Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, Cumberland, Kentucky 40823, United States do not have that we need and a common set of questions that could be found in any book aimed at a general audience. There are only a couple of minor drawbacks to this book. One is the frequent mention of his scientific alter ego, “Daedalus”, an invention put to good use for almost 2000 columns in respected publications such as New Scientist, Nature, and the Guardian, in the third person. The other drawback is putting the most interesting examples of scientific jury-rigging in the last half of the book, which made it a little tedious for me to get through the early parts of the book. However, I appreciated his observation that public displays of informal science education, such as filtering red wine with burned toast and drinking the filtered liquid in an ordinary glass instead of an Erlenmeyer flask, work better when using ordinary household items. He even muses about cheating on a medical treadmill by exerting all of your weight on the handlebars. The science in this book is not difficult. The creativity? If you are an inquisitive type and enjoy lighting 100 birthday candles simultaneously, like thinking about how surgeons would repair bodies in four dimensions instead of three, or want to reconfigure a bicycle so that someone can ride it down the road backward, this is your book. The Aha! Moment would make a good book for someone who may not have all the formal knowledge a scientist has but who should be encouraged to funnel that creativity into a career in science or engineering. After all is said and done, send that person my way so I can hire him or her for my science faculty. I have one or two who will not be around much longer to share the wisdom collected over many years of scientific tomfoolery.
The Aha! Moment: A Scientist’s Take on Creativity, by David Jones. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, MD, 2012. xii + 264 pp. ISBN: 978-1421403311 (paperback). $25.
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n the community college, one of the principle functions of a faculty member is community service. Another function is to figure out how to make a science laboratory operate on a budget of air. In that respect, the discount or hardware store is the source of acetone, sodium carbonate, 30% hydrogen peroxide, rebar for stands, and other common items that can recreate any respectable chemistry set from the past. I have a feeling from reading The Aha! Moment: A Scientist’s Take on Creativity that David Jones would be quite happy making friends with the machine-tool and carpentry instructors at my institution, along with the educational psychologist and the sociologist, before becoming chummy with the chemist.
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected]. Notes
The authors declare no competing financial interest.
Cover image provided by The Johns Hopkins University Press and reproduced with permission.
Jones is a sort of “Mr. Wizard” or “MacGyver” who hosted a show on British television that highlighted many of his weird scientific contraptions for an everyday audience. However, the examples that Jones outlines in the second half of his book fall secondary to the mental processes that cause us to say “Aha!” or “That’s curious!” on a regular basis. He espouses for four chapters the notion that a “random ideas generator” comes up with a wide spectrum of ideassome crazy, and some not that are eventually run past a “censor” and an “observer− reasoner” to produce creative inventions. These schemes may not work 80% of the time even for the best innovators, he states, but look out when they do. He infers that both a whimsical attitude and a propensity to store random facts in the back of your mind will encourage both the creativity of ideas and the bravery to use them for other than its originally intended purpose. Later chapters include a set of inventions we © 2013 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
Published: July 15, 2013 957
dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed400456x | J. Chem. Educ. 2013, 90, 957−957
