Opening Lines

IT is a singular moment. A man taking a bath notices how the water surges over the side as he sits in. He runs through the streets naked shouting Eureka. I have found it.

The Greek mathematician, Archimedes realised he could measure the volume of irregular objects for the first time by measuring the amount of water they displaced.

This may of course be apocryphal. Archimedes may just have been looking for the soap. But the next time you see a man running naked, don’t judge. He may have just invented something.

Einstein’s theory of relativity was supposed to have been triggered by looking at the clock tower in Berne while travelling away from it on a tram. The clock said 8 o’clock and he knew he was going to be late for work. But if the tram travelled at light speed, the light from the clock would just keep up with the tram and the clock would show 8 o’clock forever! Time would stand still and he would get to work on time. If you have used ‘public transport’ as an excuse for being late too often, then maybe you could try embellishing it by adding “and it was only when I’d got on I realised it wasn’t one of those speed-of-light trains. It was one of the ones that stop everywhere”.

We all look for that Eureka instant in our lives but in reality a lot of ideas occur gradually and are perfected though iteration and dull repetition. There are very few true light bulb moments. Even Thomas Edison who invented the light bulb experimented for days to get the correct filament. His first light bulb lasted just 13 hours and was discarded. Although he did make a batch of them for use on his Christmas Tree.

Certainly for ideas to flourish you need some sort of separation from distraction. Even a simple walk will do. Often when faced with writer’s block I walk in a local park with my wife and it’s roughly around the same point on the walk that my mind has cleared sufficiently to think of the idea that moves things along. Or more accurately, it’s around that point where my wife comes up with the idea and then there’s another point further on where I’ve convinced myself it was my idea.

And why confine your thinking to waking hours? Using a technique called Lucid Dreaming, it is possible to exert control over your dreams and use this state of heightened perception to find the answer to some conundrum. Computer programmers have been known to visualise in their dreams, the screen containing their desired coding solution.

The surrealist painter Salvador Dali is said to have used lucid dreaming to create the painting “Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening.” I have tried it for this column but with very little success.

So for me in the absence of ideas, I’m just going to sit here and stare at the screen until something occurs to me. It’s a crazy idea but it just might work.