Range - David Epstein Page 0,46
to take more specialized classes in a single department. They are concerned about the students falling behind. They would rather rush them to specialization than equip them with ideas from what Gentner referred to as a “variety of base domains,” which foster analogical thinking and conceptual connections that can help students categorize the type of problem they are facing. That is precisely a skill that sets the most adept problem solvers apart.
In one of the most cited studies of expert problem solving ever conducted, an interdisciplinary team of scientists came to a pretty simple conclusion: successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it. Less successful problem solvers are more like most students in the Ambiguous Sorting Task: they mentally classify problems only by superficial, overtly stated features, like the domain context. For the best performers, they wrote, problem solving “begins with the typing of the problem.”
As education pioneer John Dewey put it in Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, “a problem well put is half-solved.”
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Before he began his tortuous march of analogies toward reimagining the universe, Kepler had to get very confused on his homework. Unlike Galileo and Isaac Newton, he documented his confusion. “What matters to me,” Kepler wrote, “is not merely to impart to the reader what I have to say, but above all to convey to him the reasons, subterfuges, and lucky hazards which led me to my discoveries.”
Kepler was a young man when he showed up to work at Tycho Brahe’s observatory—so cutting edge at the time that it cost 1 percent of the national budget of Denmark. He was given the assignment nobody wanted: Mars and its perplexing orbit. The orbit had to be a circle, Kepler was told, so he had to figure out why Brahe’s observations didn’t match that. Every once in a while, Mars appears to reverse course in the sky, do a little loop, and then carry on in the original direction, a feat known as retrograde motion. Astronomers proposed elaborate contortions to explain how Mars could accomplish this while riding the interlocking spheres of the sky.
As usual, Kepler could not accept contortions. He asked peers for help, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. His predecessors had always managed to explain away the Mars deviations without scrapping the overall scheme. Kepler’s short Mars assignment (he guessed it would take eight days) turned into five years of calculations trying to describe where Mars appeared in the sky at any given moment. No sooner had Kepler done it with great accuracy than he threw it away.
It was close, but not perfect. The imperfection was minuscule. Just two of Brahe’s observations differed from Kepler’s calculations of where Mars should be, and by just eight minutes of arc, a sliver of sky one-eighth the width of a pinkie finger held at arm’s length. Kepler could have assumed his model was correct and those two observations were slightly off, or he could dispense with five years of work. He chose to trash his model. “If I had believed we could ignore these eight minutes,” he wrote, “I would have patched my hypothesis accordingly.” The assignment no one wanted became Kepler’s keyhole view into a new understanding of the universe. He was in uncharted territory. The analogies began in earnest, and he reinvented astronomy. Light, heat, smells, boats, brooms, magnets—it began with those pesky observations that didn’t quite fit, and ended in the complete undoing of Aristotle’s clockwork universe.
Kepler did something that turns out to be characteristic of today’s world-class research labs. Psychologist Kevin Dunbar began documenting how productive labs work in the 1990s, and stumbled upon a modern version of Keplerian thinking. Faced with an unexpected finding, rather than assuming the current theory is correct and that an observation must be off, the unexpected became an opportunity to venture somewhere new—and analogies served as the wilderness guide.
When Dunbar started, he simply set out to document the process of discovery in real time. He focused on molecular biology labs because they were blazing new trails, particularly in genetics and treatments for viruses, like HIV. He spent a year with four labs in the United States, playing a fly on the wall, visiting the labs every day for months, and later extended the work to more labs in the United States, Canada, and Italy. He became such a familiar presence that scientists called him to make sure he knew