2024.01.08
Surely two distinct Creators must have been at work
It takes a special energy, over and above one's creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all.Sigh. I don't know if that makes me feel better or worse about my almost guaranteed obscurity.
We entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry. I did not verify the idea; I should not have had time, as...I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty. On my return to Caen, for conscience's sake, I verified the result at my leisure.I've cited this anecdote about subconscious processing many times. Maybe I should work harder at training my subconscious to get it to work on a problem.
Philip Henry Gosse, a great naturalist who was also deeply devout, was so torn by the debate over evolution by natural selection that he was driven to publish an extraordinary book, "Omphalos", in which he maintained that fossils do not correspond to any creatures that ever lived, but were merely put in the rocks by the Creator to rebuke our curiosity--an argument which had the unusual distinction of infuriating zoologists and theologians in equal measure.
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