That eureka moment has been carefully planned and programmed to deliver an insight at exactly the right time. When you put the pieces together before the detectives do, you feel smart, happy, powerful, and in control (exactly the emotions needed to motivate you to buy some canned beer, frozen pizza, and extra-soft toilet tissue). And you tune in next week so you can feel that way again.

It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clicks into place. One immediately sees how many previously puzzling facts are neatly explained by the new hypothesis. One could kick oneself for not having the idea earlier, it now seems so obvious. Yet before, everything was in a fog.

I think a lot people had this idea that science advances through eureka moments and it's true to some extent. But my experience has been that it's a lot of really hard work, where finally you have figured out what's going on and you can then move on to the next stage.

Do you ever have those moments where suddenly you make a quantum jump in understanding, where you see the world so differently that you cannot imagine how you could have perceived it any other way before? Do you have those times when this new understanding makes you feel as though up until that moment you must have been deluded or asleep or just plain stupid? I

I don't believe in the sort of eureka moment idea. I think it's a myth. I'm very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that problem for a long time. And it wasn't that suddenly it came to him.

He felt a spasm of excitement because he knew instinctively who it was, or at least knew who it was he wanted it to be, and once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.

I once wrote a lecture for Manchester University called « Moments of Discovery » in which I said that there are two moments that are important. There's the moment when you know you can find out the answer and that's the period you are sleepless before you know what it is. When you've got it and know what it is, then you can rest easy.

The moment you know you know you know.

It's a weird feeling, scientific breakthroughs. There's no Eureka moment. Just a slow, steady progression toward a goal. But man, when you get to that goal it feels good.

If there is a single moment … to give meaning to Emerson's life, it would be this moment when he recognized that his proper response to the world must be astonishment, his proper expression celebration.

Sometimes the answers are hiding in plain sight. A eureka moment came to Archimedes when he connected the dots between the ordinary routine of taking a bath and the scientific pursuit of determining the volume of an irregularly shaped object.

It was then that she experienced an instant of unprecedented clarity, a moment of wholly unanticipated certainty that God was real. The sensation fled almost as quickly as it came but left in its wake the conviction that Emilio was right, that they were meant to be here, doing this impossible thing.

What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness — that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being.

We like to think of innovation as striking us in a stunning eureka moment, where you all at once change the way people see the world, leaping far ahead of our current understanding. I’m arguing that in reality, innovation is more systematic.