I came across this fascinating quote from the Russian playright Anton Chekhov (spotted on Maria Popova’s site):
“Anyone who says that the artist’s sphere leaves no room for questions, but deals exclusively with answers, has never done any writing or done anything with imagery. The artist observes, selects, guesses, and arranges; every one of these operations presupposes a question at its outset. If he has not asked himself a question at the start, he has nothing to guess and nothing to select.”
Cautioning against the common conflation of the two distinct concepts — “solving the problem” and “correctly formulating the problem” — he observes:
“Only the latter is required of the artist. Not a single problem is resolved in Anna Karenina or Eugene Onegin, and yet the novels satisfy you completely because all the problems they raise are formulated correctly. It is the duty of the law courts to correctly formulate problems, but it is up to the members of the jury to solve them, each to his own taste.”
Being by training a research physicist, I’m very familiar with the skill needed to formulate insightful questions in the sciences. However this is not straighforward as indicated by this interesting quote:
“A common mistake of beginners is the desire to understand everything completely right away. In real life understanding comes gradually, as one becomes accustomed to the new ideas. One of the difficulties of scientific research is that it is impossible to make progress without clear understanding, yet this understanding can come only from the work itself; every completed piece of research represents a victory over this contradiction.” – A B Migdal (Russian physicist, contemporary of Lev Landau)
Steps & Leaps 