Lecture

Visited Nagoya University to give a lecture. The audience students were quiet. No questions, no comments. So, I asked them questions instead.
"Why do you think this phenomenon occurs at a lower temperature?"
None volunteered to answer. I pointed at a student sitting in the front row who looked a bit more attentive than others.
"what do you think?"
"Well... I have no idea." said he.
"It's important to come up with many ideas, any ideas, if you would like to work in the scientific field. Even silly ideas would be far better than no ideas."
"I don't have silly ideas either." said he. Other students laughed out loud.
"Good ideas very often come from seemingly stupid ideas. So in a sense, we can say, it's the number of different ideas, good or silly, you come up with, that really counts."
True, what looked good at first often turns out to be nothing. It's because it's within our banal thought. On the contrary some ideas look absurd just because they are beyond the frame of our thinking.
Perhaps they will learn it the hard way by themselves.
Afterward the professor who asked me the lecture complained to me.
"They are good boys and girls... Maybe too good... They are docile and accept everything without having questions."
Yes. The same impression I got. But can't we think that they may look soft and docile to us just because they are beyond our old-fashioned thought? More and more I like to see things this way. I got old.