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...it's the process of losing oneself in the jungle that makes science worth doing.
My diary entries during this period constantly refer to the importance of learning how to take criticism. If you shut yourself in your own little world, that will be the death of your theory. On the other hand, many of the criticisms you receive are pointless and simply reflect the view that anything new is bad. In such a delicate situation it is crucial to tread gingerly and be careful to appreciate the difference between pertinent and idiotic comments.
Becoming a real researcher has been the ultimate humbling experience for me. Nature is the examiner from hell; if you find new things at all, you always find them the hard way, with sweat and tears. Only then do you notice that there was a really easy way to find them. But this insight rarely arrives before you have been utterly humiliated and reduced to despair.
When you put numbers into this formula [E=mc2] and perform a short calculation, the implication is that inside 1 gram of matter lies dormant an energy equivalent to the explosion of about 20,000 kg of TNT. [] But that's obviously wrong, isn't it? How did Einstein cope with this enormous contradiction? No worries, Einstein pointed out that we do not notice energy, but only variations in energy. I feel cold if thermal energy moves from my body into the environment. I feel my car accelerating if I push the accelerator pedal and burn fuel, thereby taking chemical energy from the fuel and converting it into motion. The tremendous amount of energy harnessed inside 1 gram of matter passes unnoticed because it is never released into the world; it's just like a huge reservoir of energy sitting inside a body, never making its presence known.
Thinking can be lateral or "sweaty". For the latter you're better off in an office and following a routine but for the former you have to be "out of your mind", so to speak. So although I recognize the merits of hard work, I find that my work goes stale if I don't go off wandering around the world every few weeks. My friends think I'm a gipsy, but that's when I do "part 1" of my best work.
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