Night Science
Where do ideas come from? In each episode, scientists Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher explore science's creative side with a leading colleague. New episodes come out every second Monday.
Night Science
87 | On the joys of being a young scientist
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What can early-career scientists teach us about creativity? For this special episode, we talked to PhD students and postdocs about their creative processes. They told us about finding scientific ideas in art museums, sketching on whiteboards, borrowing concepts from other disciplines, going to unrelated seminars, swimming, hiking, talking in pubs, and deliberately letting ideas lie fallow like in a crop rotation system. Through this diversity, a few themes kept coming back: openness, play, visual thinking, talking, and incubation. This episode is also a reminder of something that is easy to forget amid the frustrations of academic life: science gives us the extraordinary freedom to think without bounds, ask questions, and spend our lives solving puzzles.
The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .