Everyone knows the story of Archimedes, the legendary Greek mathematician and scientist. One day, Archimedes was sitting in his bathtub, mulling over a problem given to him by the king: he was tasked with figuring out whether a crown was made completely of pure gold, or if it was partially composed of a cheaper metal. While moving around in the water, Archimedes noticed that the amount of water displaced was proportional to the weight of the object immersed in the fluid — it was this observation that fueled his moment of insight. “Eureka” — I have found it! — he is said to have cried, while he ran naked through the streets of Syracuse, possessed by epiphanic euphoria.
However, is this true? Do good ideas come as brilliant flashes of insight, or do they take another form? Steven Johnson has spent his lifetime researching this problem of idea generation and innovation, and opposes this claim. In his TED talk here (and his book), he explains that good ideas do not come as epiphanies, but rather arrive slowly and through a long process of hypothesis testing.