…That’s what Isaac Asimov called it. It’s when you’re mulling over a seemingly unsolvable problem when, as you’re thinking about something else or nothing at all, the answer comes to you in a flash of insight. Asimov used Archimedes’ solution to the problem of volume and displacement as an example. (When you sit in a tub, the amount of water displaced matches your volume).
This happened to me this morning. I awoke with the answer to a problem that had been kicking my ass for months staring me in the face. I have no doubt that I had been subconsciously processing the data for this problem all of this time, with my brain using the downtime of sleep to do it with no distractions. Other times, it may be during watching TV or playing a game.
Do any of you have any examples of The Eureka Phenonemon in action?
I’m out camping. It’s getting late. The bugs are biting. The fire went out. It’s time for bed. I crawl into my sleeping bag. Zip my tent up nice and tight.
The Eureka! Phenomenon.
-Rue.
I grab my vacuum cleaner, turn it on, and vacuum my carpet until it’s clean. That’s is a Eureka Phenominon.
Seriously, mine tend to happen when I’m taking a shower. As a magician, I’m always looking for better ways to perform my effects and I’ve always come up with better ways of performing, or even new magical concepts while in the shower.
I don’t know what it is about the shower that turns on my creative juices, but it works.
Mine happen while I’m drinking. Came up with a plan for world peace five times now, but I keep passing out before I can write it down. I think I need to do some more research tonight, now that I think about it.
BooBoo316, you sound like a person after my own heart.
Actually, I more often feel like I’ve just had the OPPOSITE of the Eureka Phenomenon. I wake up feeling like I had understood something before I went to sleep that has since fled my comprehension. Oh well, such is life, right?
I was in a math class once that had a take home test. There was one problem on the test that I could NOT figure out. I spent hours and hours on it. I finally got so frustrated I hit the wall and bruised my hand. The next morning, I was walking to class with it still unsolved, when I suddenly remembered a rule that proved that the problem was unsolvable. Eureka! I ended up with 105% on the test, thanks to a bonus question. My professor wrote on top that I should be a math major. Hooray for me!!
That reminds me of a time when I had a definite Eureka Moment that came a couple hours too late. I took the PSAT (waaaay back in the day, hehe) and breezed through the math section without too much thought. One question in particular struck me as quite easy, from the section that is not multiple choice.
I quickly summoned an image to my mind of four lines waggling from a perfect square to a very thin diamond, reasoning that if they got close enough together, the number of intersections would be infinite. So the answer was clearly four. I almost remember thinking to myself that the question was too easy.
Sigh. I was sitting and eating eggs and toast a couple hours later, reading the funnies, and suddenly sat up and smacked myself on the forehead. What a putz.
Smeghead, you got off a whole lot better than I did. We were taking our math final in biology class, and it was really a breeze… except for one problem. I solved everything for it (it was a word problem with several parts) but I couldn’t figure out how to get the equation for the graph. Not being in math class there weren’t any posters with all the handy dandy geometric formulas that I could twist to fit the situation. So the time ran out and I turned in the paper as I was walking out the door, the answer hit me, it was so very obvious. I kicked myself all the way to my next class for not getting it.
The answer is zero if they are not intersecting lines. If they are intersecting lines, the answer is one: Imagine the four lines arranged like an asterisk.