Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes Read Free Page B

the investigation of a crime, a scientific experiment, or a decision as apparently simple as whether or not to invite a certain friend to dinner, you must first explore the essential groundwork. It’s not for nothing that Holmes calls the foundations of his inquiry “elementary.” For, that is precisely what they are, the very basis of how something works and what makes it what it is.
    And that is something that not even every scientist acknowledges outright, so ingrained is it in his way of thinking. When a physicist dreams up a new experiment or a biologist decides to test the properties of a newly isolated compound, he doesn’t always realize that his specific question, his approach, his hypothesis, his very view of what he is doing would be impossible without the elemental knowledge at his disposal, that he has built up over the years. Indeed, he may have a hard time telling you from where exactly he got the idea for a study—and why he first thought it would make sense.
    After World War II, physicist Richard Feynman was asked to serve on the State Curriculum Commission, to choose high school science textbooks for California. To his consternation, the texts appeared to leave students more confused than enlightened. Each book he examined was worse than the one prior. Finally, he came upon a promising beginning: a series of pictures, of a windup toy, an automobile, and a boy on a bicycle. Under each was a question: “What makes it go?” At last, he thought, something that was going to explain the basic science, starting with the fundamentals of mechanics (the toy), chemistry (the car), and biology (the boy). Alas, his elation was short lived. Where he thought to finally see explanation, real understanding, he found instead four words: “Energy makes it go.” But what was that ? Why did it make it go? How did it make it go? These questions weren’t ever acknowledged, never mind answered. As Feynman put it, “That doesn’t mean anything. . . . It’s just a word !” Instead, he argued, “What they should have done is to look at the windup toy, see that there are springs inside, learn about springs, learn about wheels, and never mind ‘energy.’ Later on, when the children knowsomething about how the toy actually works, they can discuss the more general principles of energy.”
    Feynman is one of the few who rarely took his knowledge base for granted, who always remembered the building blocks, the elements that lay underneath each question and each principle. And that is precisely what Holmes means when he tells us that we must begin with the basics, with such mundane problems that they might seem beneath our notice. How can you hypothesize, how can you make testable theories if you don’t first know what and how to observe, if you don’t first understand the fundamental nature of the problem at hand, down to its most basic elements? (The simplicity is deceptive, as you will learn in the next two chapters.)
    The scientific method begins with a broad base of knowledge, an understanding of the facts and contours of the problem you are trying to tackle. In the case of Holmes in A Study in Scarlet , it’s the mystery behind a murder in an abandoned house on Lauriston Gardens. In your case, it may be a decision whether or not to change careers. Whatever the specific issue, you must define and formulate it in your mind as specifically as possible—and then you must fill it in with past experience and present observation. (As Holmes admonishes Lestrade and Gregson when the two detectives fail to note a similarity between the murder being investigated and an earlier case, “There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.”)
    Only then can you move to the hypothesis-generation point. This is the moment where the detective engages his imagination, generating possible lines of inquiry into the course of events, and not just sticking to the most obvious possibility—in A Study in Scarlet , for