I feel most productive when I’m inspired. Inspiration comes in many forms, but is most often derived from reading or listening to new insights about a range of topics. I love podcasts, and they inspire me. I love factual documentaries and they inspire me. I love reading books, journals, articles and websites, though I’m careful to qualify who has written them. I look for truths. Nuggets of information, facts or insights that are the essential component on which the piece rests. You have to dig deep, scanning over the mountainous chunks of text, that are often just fluff or hyperbole. Maybe that’s a bad thing to do, maybe I should slow down and savour the article, but I don’t.

For example, this nugget of information leapt out of this excellent article on Science Alert about the fine-tuning of the universe:

…there seems to be some sort of mysterious fine-tuning between the mass of a Higgs  boson and the cosmological constant – the density of energy in the vacuum of space.

It immediately aroused my attention and piqued my curiosity. What does it imply? What is it about the Higgs boson that is so remarkable? Why is the cosmological constant relevant? And I’m off…..