Please subscribe to the Night Science Podcast, where in each episode, two scientists – @ItaiYanai & @MartinJLercher – explore the creative side of their process with a leading colleague. Apple:podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas… Spotify:open.spotify.com/show/6berzd… Google:podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR…

Science at its best is organized chaos. We teach young scientists how to be organized and robust, but not the night science creativity that’s needed for discovery. Come train with us in how to teach the tools of the creative scientific process in our EMBO train the trainer event.

🔥The NIH has funded our R25 grant to bring Night Science training to all 40,000 US postdoctoral fellows! It all started with discussions at the Radcliffe Summit we organized 2 years ago at Harvard where the question was how bring creativity training into the sciences. Our R25 team includes the amazing @StearnsLab, @brangwynnelab, @OylerYanivLab, @JamesKaufman, Maura N. Polansky, Oliver Bogler and @MartinJLercher.

How would you let the LLM dream? [...] In a sense, to replay things, organize them, think about them so that tomorrow when we wake up, our thoughts are more organized than just input-output-input-output. –Jure Leskovec, Stanford Professor, @jure

There is where I disagree with Bill Martin: "If you follow the data, then you've completely lost control... you're putting the data where your mind should be. For me, the scientific process is one of questions.. But if you go into data driven science... seek and you shall find."

I actually don't mind being wrong.. we said this is what's happening on the Millennium Bridge.. what we proposed doesn't work. But it was interesting. We really did stick our neck out & unfortunately got our head chopped off. –Steven Strogatz, Cornell Professor @stevenstrogatz

I said to my PI, I want to go do my postdoc, will you write a letter for me. And he wrote in my letter that I wasn't very creative .. I finally met with Magda and she told me she saw straight through the letter. –Samantha Morris, Harvard Professor @morris_lab @ZernickaGoetz

Creativity is ultimately rooted in the individual –Ruth Lehmann, Director of the Whitehead Institute, MIT

Science would be more trustworthy in the public eye if scientists were more open about the creative process behind scientific discovery. – Tom McLeish, on the Night Science Podcast, episode 10

Going from a creative idea [..you ask..] what does that predict that other ideas don't predict? And what's the fastest way we could find out that it's just completely wrong? I think that's critical and I think that doesn't come naturally to a lot of people because they become very attached to their ideas, and they want them to be correct. And that's the worst possible thing. Ideas are cheap. You have to be able to have many ideas, and most of them could be wrong. –@BenLehner, on the Night Science Podcast, episode 9

Day science is trying to design tests that would disprove a hypothesis – and night science is finding something that wasn't initially thought of. So basically wandering into the forest of the data and trying to figure out what's up. – Yana Bromberg, Night Science Podcast, Ep. 8

Is science irrational? There's something very strange about the situation that the scientist is saying, on the one hand beauty is incredibly informative about which theories are right and which are wrong. And on the other hand, our official means of arguing with one another about which theories are right and which are wrong is not allowed to appeal to beauty. So there's lots of incredibly valuable information that you're not allowed to consult. That's what I take to be strictly speaking irrational. –Michael Strevens, on the Night Science Podcast, Ep. 7

Sometimes the dark alleys are in fact dark alleys that we shouldn't have gone down. But sometimes the dark alleys are really the path to enlightenment. And we don't really know, ahead of time. –@HarmitMalik on the Night Science Podcast, episode 6

Often people have something that makes them their skin tingle. I'm a believer in that skin tingling. –Sarah Teichmann, on choosing a project (from the Night Science Podcast, episode 5) @teichlab

The PhD is the best point in time to try very dangerous ideas or to try things that don't work. – @OdedRechavi, on the Night Science Podcast

Maybe creativity is just how big a bag of tricks you have; how many different tricks you've seen, applied in different contexts. And perhaps some people have a little bit more skill remembering all those tricks or applying them in different situations. - Arjun Raj, @arjunrajlab

I loved this episode especially Ellen’s infectious enthusiasm