Direct Analogy

A direct analogy answers the question: Where else has this problem or a similar problem been solved? Maybe our problem can be solved in the same way. The richest source of analogous solutions seems to be the natural world. “Nature seems to have solved just about every problem we can think of, if only we know where to look and are able to translate the idea from one context to another,” writes Ronald Whitfield, in ‘Creativity in Industry.’ The same view is echoed by Gordon Edge, of PA Technology: “If you want to solve a problem, see how it is solved in nature. Living forms always have the most economical answers, as a result of evolution.” His team used the way a nocturnal moth’s eye absorbs light and thereby reflecting it, (by means of a delicate crisscross pattern coating the eye), as the basis for an information storage system on an optical disk. In the case of the optical disk for information storage, the connection to the nocturnal moth was found by ‘a lucky chain of coincidences,’ which recalls Pasteur’s comment that ‘chance favors the prepared mind,’ and George Prince’s modification of it – ‘the prepared mind makes its own chances.’ We cannot all be experts in biology, zoology and so on, but we can take an interest in a wide variety of phenomena and trust our own minds to throw up clues that will lead us to the analogies we need.