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 ...
