Hypothesis v/s Insight

Imagine yourself to be Descartes sitting under an apple tree. An apple hits your head and you wonder, ‘Whether in this Earth-centric vortex, are there invisible particles which force the objects down towards Earth?’

Then again, imagine yourself to be Newton sitting under an apple tree. An apple hits your head, and you wonder, ‘Why does this apple fall down perpendicularly, why not sideways or upwards?’ You ponder whether the Earth is drawing the apple, whether there is a force of attraction between the two bodies.

We have two different hypotheses (ignore the time difference between the two scientists when they mooted their idea). Which one is correct? Who wins? Let mathematics decide. If you were Newton, you would be pretty pleased with yourself. Over the span of next 20 years, you expand your hypothesis beyond the realms of Earth, and armed with the maths, you come to a conclusion that all celestial bodies attract each other by the ‘Universal Law of Gravitation’.

Let some time pass. Imagine yourself to be Einstein sitting under the apple tree. An apple hits your head. And you come to a conclusion that there is a space-time fabric which is warped by mass and hence it pulls other objects towards itself, and Newton’s theory is pretty much wrong, and at best an approximation.

What am I trying to prove? Both Newton and Einstein were armed with the irrefutability of mathematics. Why didn’t they reach the same conclusion? Shouldn’t there be one rational, objective answer? Just one singular, rational concept?

But their hypotheses differed. Why? How did they come up with different hypotheses? In science, you are supposed to analyse over a million different hypotheses, disprove 99.99% of them, such that only one hypothesis remain – which is the eternal truth. But is it humanely possible to test millions of hypotheses? Don’t you then have to “subjectively” select a hypothesis from millions other? Also why did you observe just an ‘apple’, why not a ‘rock’ or an ‘underwear’? Why did you choose one fact to form your hypothesis and extend it to all the objects around the world? Shouldn’t Science study all the million facts and events, come up with a million hypotheses which satisfies the nature of the observed events/facts, try to dispassionately prove all but one of them wrong, and what finally remains, must really be the ‘Universal Law of Gravitation’?!! Don’t we “subjectively” select some facts, and “subjectively” come up with some hypotheses – to explain any phenomena? Don’t mathematicians seek “harmony” & “beauty” in their hypotheses & axioms?

You see a violent dream, wherein you are being impaled by cannibals to death, and the next morning you end up coming with a foolproof idea of a Sewing Machine. Or that in your dreams you see yourself being surrounded by snakes who shape themselves into a hexagon, and when you wake up, you say, “Voila! I discovered the structure of benzene”. Not all science is discovered while dreaming, but my point is – you hit upon an idea suddenly, which in your “gut” you feel might actually work, and then you test your hypothesis and it actually does.

Trying out millions of permutations and combinations doesn’t actually work, your “subliminal self” selects for you an “interesting” fact/hypothesis which then breaks into your consciousness. Now  the mode in which the brain communicates to you might be entirely different – it may be in a dream or it may strike you while you are changing the nappy of your kid, but that’s how you get your ‘Special Theory of Relativity’.

Now let’s talk about an entirely different kind of problem. You are a marketing student in a B-School named SPJIMR. You have been given a project about the Hamleys toy store and your task is to come up with Communication strategy for the store. The process which leads to the final deliverable, consists of a very important milestone called ‘insighting’. How do you come up with a deep-rooted insight about the consumer behaviour which would help you communicate a message which resonates with your end consumer and induces them to make a purchase?

You think of a million ideas as a group, but let’s say a hypothetical person named Ravi rejects them, because he finds that they all have internal inconsistency. You are frustrated and tired. You have been doing the same thing for the last 3-4 days, the deadline is approaching soon, and you haven’t really started working on your presentation.

You say to the group, “I am going to sleep, will meet at 8 in the evening”. I guess, everybody is tired, and hence they also go to sleep. When we meet in the evening – suddenly, randomly Vatsala begins something, and I pick on, soon Paras is upon it & so is Arpita; we finally have something. We are happy, but also afraid that Ravi might reject it. So, we bolster our arguments and prime ourselves to launch a blitzkrieg as soon as Ravi utters, “No”. But he never does. The insight appeals to him as well. We have had our “aha” moment, and there is a warm feeling in the belly.

The idea was not to illustrate that your dearest blogger is a creative genius, but to demonstrate that while mathematicians look for harmony, marketers look for the “aha” moment. And though the later is much more “subjective” and can never match the rigorous logical underpinnings of the former, the process of coming up with an idea remains the same.

I guess this “harmony” or the “aha” moment is what Robert Pirsig meant by “quality” in ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’, which unifies the ‘objective’ & the ‘subjective’; the ‘sciences’ & the ‘art’ in one common thread and destroys the artificial divide between the two. So whether you call it your ‘hypothesis’ or your ‘insight’, it actually doesn’t matter.

So is Marketing “gas” (subjective)? If you think so, you might never come up with your ‘Universal Law of Gravitation’.