How to find Nobel Prize-winning ideas

A short essay by someone who has never won the Nobel Prize

Introduction

In my field of work, ideas are currency. Original ideas pave the way to good research, which leads to high-impact papers, which ultimately open the door to fame, wealth, and glory (or so I have been told). The better the idea, the greater the glory, and if it just so happens that your idea has the right mix of novelty, awesomeness, and a cool name, all while simultaneously solving a major world problem, you just might end up winning the Nobel Prize.

While all this sounds good on a blog post, there’s just one tiny problem. Simply put, good ideas are really hard to come by. Nobel-Prize-winning ones are even more so. So how do you go about finding them?

The Ideas conundrum

Yesterday I had an existential crisis.

It seemed that for every big idea I could think of, there were already 3 papers published. It felt like I had nothing new to say or no original thoughts to add to the narrative of my field. Despite this, hundreds of new papers were being published every month. Clearly, some people somewhere were getting ideas. The only question is who, what, and where, (which I guess are three questions, but the point remains).

This led me to ask the broader question about Nobel Prize winners and the genesis of their ideas. Is there a secret recipe for getting them? Are there any patterns in the way big ideas are generated? How do you find Nobel-Prize-winning ideas?

If all it takes is one life-changing serendipitous discovery, then how can you set yourself to be the one that makes it?

No matter what field you are in, coming up with creative yet feasible ideas is an important part of research. Yet, there is surprisingly scarce literature available on the subject. Nobody teaches you how to go about ‘thinking’ of ideas, you are just expected to learn it through experience. Part of the problem lies in the fact that even the people who do come up with good ideas, find it exceedingly difficult to articulate how they thought of it in the first place. Vague terms such as ‘think out of the box’ or ‘be more resourceful’ are usually thrown around the subject of creativity, but what does that even mean?

I call this the ideas conundrum – the problem of not knowing where good ideas come from, or how to go about looking for them in the first place. To come up with a solution, I dug into the history of the big ideas in science and tried to trace back their origin. The rest of this series delves into my key takeaways from this process, one aspect at a time.

Part I: Noticing Confusion

It is often believed that great discoveries require great experimentation – they don’t. Often great discoveries involve little, tiny facts that if properly understood completely change the way you think about the world. By their very nature, however, truly profound discoveries present themselves as agents of confusion. They will appear as facts that people never expect, facts that some people might even think are quite impossible, yet they are there, staring right back at you from the visceral depths of your own raw data, if only you would take notice.

Noticing your own confusion is the first step towards making big discoveries. It is the art of recognizing things that you hadn’t expected, and that don’t quite make sense, but are true nevertheless.

It is the skill of noticing when you have a phlogiston theory on your hands.

Phlogiston theory is an actual scientific theory that existed in the 1600s and early 1700s that attempted to explain why things burn. It postulated that combustible substances contain a particle called phlogiston, which is released or dephlogisticated upon burning. Growing plants then absorb this released phlogiston, which is why air does not spontaneously combust and also why plants burn so well.

The phlogiston theory was hugely popular because it provided an explanation for a wide variety of observed phenomena. Metals were thought to rust over time because they gave off phlogiston into the thin air. It also explained why objects burning in an enclosed space, like a candle in a jar, would stop burning after some time. Why it was because the air in the jar became saturated with phlogiston, and therefore no more phlogiston could be released.

However, soon people began to notice that while the rust looked lighter than the metal it came from, it actually weighed significantly more. If the phlogiston was being released from the metal, would the rust not weigh less than the original metal? Phlogiston proponents, however, were in love with their theory. They would explain away the weight difference by postulating that phlogistons indeed have negative mass. With the benefit of time, we can see how they were wrong. In reality, however, these phlogiston theorists were just ordinary scientists that were confused, and they failed to notice their confusion.

Scientists are married to their theories. In the face of confusion and uncertainties, they will try to explain away all of their observational inconsistencies in a way that fits their theory. However, even 100-year-old theories get modified or outright disproved all the time. The genesis of big ideas often lies in making an observation that goes against every scientific principle that you know to be true.

In France, Antoine Lavoisier saw the same phenomenon in a different light. He postulated that instead of a phlogiston being released into the air, a simpler explanation comes by hypothesizing that something is being absorbed from the air during combustion. It seems like an obvious conclusion to reach today, yet, going against a well-accepted theory back then would have required immense resilience. Years later, through careful experimentation, Lavoisier proved that indeed a gas called Oxygen is absorbed from the air in the process of combustion, and it is this same gas that causes the rusting of metals, leading to the production of a substance called oxide, which in fact, is heavier than the metal itself due to the additional weight conferred by the Oxygen.

The point is, that no theory is bulletproof, and in science, it is not only commonplace for well-established theories to be proven wrong all the time, but is actually somewhat of a prerequisite to making great leaps in our understanding of nature.

Here’s another example:

For a long time, people believed the earth to be the center of the universe and all other celestial objects were thought to revolve around it⁴. Even prominent philosophers such as Aristotle and Ptolemy believed the same. I don’t blame them, If I were a medieval peasant, I would also buy that view. Hell, if I were a medieval peasant, I would also probably laugh if a middle-aged Polish bloke by the name of Copernicus tried to tell me that the Sun is actually the center of the universe, and everything we see revolves around the Sun!

While closer to reality than the earth-centric model, even Copernicus’ theory wasn’t fully formed and needed to be corrected first by Johannes Kepler who postulated that the orbits that planets make around the Sun are elliptical – not circular, and later by modern astronomers who realized that while the sun is close to the barycenter of the solar system, there is no such thing as the Center of the universe⁵!

A similar pattern follows the progression of atomic theory. You know the gist. In 1803 John Dalton proposed that atoms are indivisible little blobs of the sphere that all matter is made of. In 1904, JJ Thomson told Dalton, “No wait, that’s not true, here are electrons that are smaller than atoms” and proposed the plum pudding model. In 1911 Ernest Rutherford telegrammed both Thomson and Dalton saying “Hold my gold foil⁶, it’s not just electrons, it seems like there is a large concentration of something positively charged at the center of the atom” this proved the existence of the proton. In 1913, Neils Bohr corrected Rutherford and said ‘The electrons actually move in fixed orbits around the nucleus, and the electron energies are quantized in their orbits, leading to emission or absorption of energies as electrons jump between the orbits’.

Bohr won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for this work. However, even Bohr’s model could not explain why the electrons don’t actually collapse into the nucleus. It needed the development of quantum theory to understand that electrons are not localised, but they actually move around the nucleus in a cloud of probability, and it is impossible to know their exact position. This is the most accurate model of the atom, to date, and yet this might still be corrected in the future.

No such thing as a bulletproof model.

There is a famous theory by the statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb called the Black Swan theory. It postulates:

“No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute it.”

The black swan theory is a metaphor that describes an event that often comes as a surprise and has a major effect on the observer’s world-view. It talks about the psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and a rare event’s massive role in historical affairs.

The first key insight towards getting closer to a Nobel Prize-winning idea, then, is to recognize the black swans in your science – those tiny little interesting things that don’t quite fit the model – and have the courage to follow their stories, and the determination to see them through to the end.

Notice your confusion.

– The Starlitknight

Notes

Of course, not all good ideas end up winning the Nobel Prize, but the prize-winning ones get greater recognition. In the context of this article, I am referring to any high-impact scientific idea, even though I specify ‘Nobel Prize-winning’ ideas.
Source: Phlogiston theory
Source: Antoine Lavoisier
Source: Geocentric Model of the universe
Source: Heliocentric Model of the universe
None of the conversations between Dalton, Rutherford, and Bohr actually happened
Source: Models of atoms
Source: The Black Swan theory