The difficult need for creativity on demand

Thoughts at the end of another busy year…. Good science is a creative enterprise.  Some stereotypes paint most scientists as toiling away, so deeply constrained by logic that they function more like automatons grinding out the next incremental advance in a steady if slow march of progress. In practice, originality and creativity are necessary to develop and grow a research program.  Some of this is laid out (paradoxically, in a methodical list) by Carl Wieman in this article here.   Picking the right open questions to address (hopefully ones that are deep and interesting to other people as well as you), and figuring out how to address them given the tools at your disposal, frequently requires intuition, leaps beyond incrementalism, and some measure of intellectual risk-taking.

One aspect of modern science as practiced today with which I find myself struggling is the issue of time. We live in a short-term world.  Grants are generally brief in duration compared to doctoral student timescales and the time it takes to tackle big questions.  There are many more demands on our time than in the past, and it seems like most funding sources profess to want fresh, new, ground breaking ideas that are both high-risk/transformative/disruptive and yet somehow very likely to produce rapid, high-profile glossy results.  Some also want to see brand new approaches to education and outreach each time.  Finding the time to think deeply about the science and the educational aspects, reinventing research programs like clockwork, is something that I find very challenging.  One answer is, since creativity doesn’t generally respond to on-demand calls, always be thinking and noodling on ideas, but that’s much easier to say than to do consistently.   I’d be curious to hear others’ strategies for dealing with this; while I’m pretty set in how I work at this point, a discussion could be fun and useful.