Sometimes when it was really dark - those clear moonless night where the Milky Way stood out - Brian and I would load the binoculars and telescope into my parent's station wagon and either go East on Highwood Road or North on the Bootlegger Trail past Benton Lake to get away from the town lights. It could be impressively dark. The kind of dark where the ground disappeared. We covered a low powered flashlight with red plastic. Dim red light didn't damage your night vision as much as white light did. But you could do a lot better.
When you're in a very dark place try using your rod-based vision. Give your eyes at least ten minutes to begin to adapt - twenty minutes will be even better. You won't see any colors, but your eyes will be somewhere between one thousand and ten thousands times more sensitive to light. You can navigate with just the light from the Milky Way.
A friend read something about the art of defamiliarizing yourself to gain a new perspective. Artists might concentrate on the empty space between objects. A few years ago Frans Blok played with geography by inverting elevations on a map of the Earth. Everest became the deepest trench in an ocean and the Marianas Trench became the highest peak. He tweaked place names and came up with something that makes you think.
People noted for artistic creativity often do it. Just change something to see what you're working on from a different perspective. Haruki Murakami wrote rough drafts in English and then translated back into his native Japanese. Margaret Atwood likes to change an opening sentence or paragraph to hunt for new perspectives. She uses the example of a change to Little Red Riding Hood where the first sentence becomes: "It was dark inside the wolf." Some writers pin segments of what they're working on to a wall and ponder how the flow changes if you move them around. Some film people use storyboarding in the same way. Artists play with negative space - the space between the physical subjects in their paintings and sculptures. A cute trick some musicians use is to invert music. There are even pianos where the keys are arranged backwards for this kind of play.
Awhile back I taught an intro physics course to non-STEM majors. Hoping to make it a bit more interesting I found examples in sports. I think all of us learned something. At one point we were playing with the idea of what a sport would be like on a different world. Different atmosphere and different gravity and more unusual possibilities like cartoon physics. We found many of our assumptions broke. We came to a more fundamental question - what makes a sport interesting on Earth. Then how could you modify existing sports or invent new ones. Why current rules of sports are what they are? How deeply are they based in physics? It even led to a guest lecture by a neurologist who seemed delighted by the play.
Trying to explain a central concept to someone with your background is both difficult and useful. Wired had a fascinating series of videos on the theme. My thesis advisor required his students to explain their work in a period to high school students. One of the most difficult things I've tried and it completely changed my thinking about teaching.
If you're stuck on a particular problem sometimes it's useful to try something else - perhaps something very different. Problem solving by singing in the shower, running, or doing something else physical is real for some people.
I usually find it's best to change one thing and think about what happens as a result. find it incredibly useful to talk with folks who do very different things - musicians, writers, filmmakers, artists, business people, athletes and so on. Sometimes you get involved in a project that leads to a bit of insight that may seem completely unrelated. Last year I found some thinking on the aerodynamics of spinning volleyballs led to thinking about something curious about neutron stars. Through that interaction I learned a bit about the "chess" of a sport with just two players on a side and that led to some questions for a neurologist.
Finally it's a fundamental part of humor.. So why not end with a bad joke?
A priest, a rabbit and a minister walk into a bar. The priest and minister both order a beer, but the rabbit looks confused. The bartender asks the rabbit "what'll ya have? "The rabbit says "I dunno. I'm only here because of autocorrect."
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