Go on a walk where ideas stalk
Einstein imagined chasing a beam of light
It was while walking through Bern he got that insight
Thinking in images in that beautiful place.
He pursued paradoxes and entwined time and space.
Niels Bohr paused a walk to draw circles with his cane
He muttered about quantum jumps but he wasn't insane.
In one walk he realized levels must be discrete:
Orbits quantize, then he continued down the street.
Barbara McClintock walked through fields of corn
She looked at the kernels and an idea was born.
She saw the pattern of a jumping gene:
Many walk in cornfields and miss what she had seen.
Feynman walked one night and got a new notion
that electrons travel in a strange kind of motion.
He imagined each particle trying every route:
and Quantum Mechanics took a reboot.
Alan Turing walked across meadows under a Cambridge sun
sometimes he'd walk sometimes he'd run.
He came up with the Universal Turing Machine:
It could compute any code a programmer could dream.
Michael Faraday walked by the Thames in a rhythmic pace.
He realized forces act in fields spanning space
River ripples looked to him like lines of force
Others walk by rivers without insights of course.
To Helmholz certainty came like a physical blow:
He realized energy can't be lost wherever it might go
he was walking in the Tiergarten in Berlin
a good place for ideas to flow from within.
Mandelbrot walked by clouds and trees
On the coast of Massachusetts he felt the sea breeze.
Saw fractal patterns at every scale
I've walked on coasts; my mind stays stale.
it seems that for some a walk brings insight
Like emerging from a tunnel and viewing the light.
Like a broad field of view that starts you to think
A falling into place where concepts link.
It can be in science, it can be a song
So go on a walk bring the fragments along.
It is grand that new worlds arise:
When you walk away from your desk under blue skies.
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