Avi Loeb

Like, is it strange with the faculty at Harvard?

Well, no.

I mean, anyone that knows me...

recognizes that this is the way i do my science i i think of creative ideas often other people do not think about and frankly i'm surprised most of the time i haven't someone comes to my office a student or a postdoc and tells me what they're doing and i ask that person did you check this or that and they say wow that's an

That's a great idea.

I never thought about that.

And then they, in some cases, they work on it for decades afterwards, decades.

And it takes me just a few seconds to hear what they're talking about, to tell them that this would be a worthwhile research area.

So it comes to me naturally without much effort.

So I think to me, it sounds like this is common sense.

If someone tells me something, I immediately ask them, why didn't you think about this direction?

For them, it's like a revelation.

And I've never understood that.

And I think the reason for that is I think differently.

I think from the perspective of the big picture, and I see things that others don't within the practice of science.

And so that gives me a sense that I shouldn't be swayed by what they say, because there were many instances in the past

where I suggested something like the microlensing example that we mentioned, and then immediately someone would say, no, it's not interesting.

But then they would come back to me and say, yeah, that's interesting.

So very often what happens is if I write an idea like that, it gets posted

someone pays attention to it.