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The Aha! Moment, Imagine, Ignorance, and The Age of Insight

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by David Jones
The Johns Hopkins University Press, December 2011

Retired chemist David Jones invites readers into his own creative flashes in The Aha! Moment. And for Jones, who used to write the popular Ariadne column in New Scientist, Nature, and the Guardian, there’s been no shortage of such insights throughout his career: he famously proposed and then actually investigated whether arsenic in Napoleon Bonaparte’s wallpaper could have killed the ruler (Nature, 299:626-27, 1982), and Jones’s phony but fantastical perpetual motion machines still spin at the Technisches Museum in Vienna.

Jones airs his theory of creativity, focusing squarely on what he calls the “Random-Ideas Generator” (RIG), a creative center of the unconscious mind.

As Jones describes his personal discovery process, The Aha! Moment leapfrogs between ...

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Meet the Author

  • Bob Grant

    From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer.

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