Look up everything. What is the problem’s history? Has anything been done about it before? What did the solution look like? Why did it succeed or fail? Why does the world need your version?
During their research on how human brains process language, neuroscienctists at the University of California, San Francisco, teamed up with designer Christian Swinehart to translate the zebra finch song into visualizations. He describes his chart like this:
“Each syllable [of birdsong] is plotted as a colored square and the sequence is read left to right and down. There is a large amount of variation but one can also see repeated motifs.”
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Research can lead directly to a new idea. While researching a topic for her doctoral thesis, Marie Curie found scientist Henri Becquerel’s discovery — that the element uranium emitted rays — very interesting. Curie decided to investigate these uranium rays and find out what caused them. After only a few days, she made the revolutionary discovery that an emission (which she later called radiation) was coming from the structure of uranium’s atom. This hypothesis, which suggested that the atom was not indivisible after all, is considered one of the most significant contributions to the development of physics.
In 1816, Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laënnec, a French doctor, was walking in Paris and saw two children playing with a long piece of solid wood. One child would scratch the end of the wood with a pin to send a sound to the other child, who held the opposite end of the wood to her ear. Later that year, when Laënnec had to diagnose a female patient with a heart problem, he remembered the children’s toy. Reluctant to use his usual method of pressing his ear and hand to the naked chest of his patient, she being an older woman (she was 40) with a “great degree of fatness,” Laënnec rolled up a piece of paper into a long cylinder and placed one end on her chest and the other to his ear. He was “not a little surprised and pleased,” he wrote, “to perceive the action of the heart in a manner much more clear and distinct than I had ever been able to do by the immediate application of the ear.” Combining the two Greek words stethos (“chest”) and skopein (“to see”), Laënnec named his new tool the stethoscope.
