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Re: Tinkerers who insult engineers and scientists alike rejoice!

"science and engineering are systematic processes of investigation, determination of concrete facts, and tested results."

WHat about intuition and innovation? These do often do not result from systematic investigation. In fact, many times the most interesting things are learned when an expected result does NOT occur.

I remember once talking to Bill Duddleston, the designer and chief of Legacy Audio, about his (then pretty new) Whisper speaker. In case you don't know, it uses 6 x 15 inch woofers in a compound open baffle dipole configuration. One the back in a damped chamber is one 12 inch woofer. I asked him if this driver was wired out of phase with the main woofers to cancel some of the back wave to minimize cancellation of the front wave. He replied that this is what they had originally intended but had found it didn't work so well until one day suddenly it was working much better. They eventually discovered that the technicians had forgotten to hook them up and they were simply acting as passive radiators and were passively absorbing the back waves off the wall. So in this case an accident resulted in the discovery of a better way to execute the design.

This happens a lot in research labs all over the world but of course its not in any text book. How do you teach someone to be innovative and intuitive? It comes from having a deeply rooted understanding in the fundamentals of your science and then making the proper brain connections when opportunity arises. Unfortunately this simply takes brains, full stop. Some have it and some don't. But it cannot come from raw intelligence with no training (there are notable exceptions of course). The scientific method is a toolbox to allow the innovations to be tested for validity but the innovations rarely come directly from the scientific method.

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