| Respectfully (very respectfully, because your book still haunts my shelf like a specter of how little I understood what was happening to my brain when I took Quantum Computation...) I disagree. At least in part. The ideas you point out are not at all easy to have in the first place, they also, I think, required proper execution to bring them to fruition. Now, Adams is speaking much more to, I think, artistic creativity than mathematical creativity, but that first blush of an idea which starts with "What if I..." is the same and requires a carefully executed (but wildly different) follow through. Imagine the scenario where some guy, say Joe, said to Turing, "What if a machine did it?" to which Alan goes through the effort of building the formalization of the machine. But Joe comes back to say "Well, that was my idea." To come back to my partial agreement. In retrospect, people looking back and may tend to think "well I could have thought of that." And yet the necessary background to effectively wade through the ideas that rage through ones head as he thinks about a problem is non-trivial. Perhaps that's true of either process. When a writer takes what appears to be a really lame idea and says "I can make that work" he or she has probably already, automatically, in the back of his or her head taken a few steps imagining how it would execute. |