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Discovery fiction

michaelnotebook.com · 2,570 words · saved by 2 readers

To help me understand a scientific result, I often find it helpful to write what I call discovery fiction. By this I mean: a plausible story of how I could have discovered that result – an arc of small questions and ideas, false starts and backtracking, incremental steps eventually leading to the result. None of these things should come out of thin air: they should all be simple, almost-obvious steps. I've written a lot of discovery fiction. For instance, I have a Twitter thread on "discovering" the Hindu-Arabic numerals. And another Twitter thread on "discovering" quantum teleportation. I have discovery fiction essays about how to "discover" Bitcoin and how to "discover" the Bloom filter data structure. I've occasionally included discovery fiction inside longer books and essays. For example, section 6.2 of my first quantum computing book (jointly written with Ike Chuang) explains how the reader could plausibly have "discovered" the quantum search algorithm. Although it perhaps seems a

Discovery fiction df writing tft By: Michael Nielsen (January 3, 2023) To help me understand a scientific result, I often find it helpful to write what I call discovery fiction . By this I mean: a plausible story of how I could have discovered that result – an arc of small questions and ideas, false starts and backtracking, incremental steps eventually leading to the result. None of these things should come out of thin air: they should all be simple, almost-obvious steps. I've written a lot of discovery fiction. For instance, I have a Twitter thread on "discovering" the Hindu-Arabic numerals .

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