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How to summon our power to think elastically? First of all, play — and its cousin, daydreaming — can provide forums for the subconscious to form novel associations. (Think of Einstein’s delightful thought experiments — how he conceived the theory of relativity by imagining himself riding a beam of light.) Unfortunately, compulsively busy people regard activities like doodling and staring into space as a waste of time. And in this age of the ubiquitous pocket helper-brain, Mlodinow laments that the “dearth of idle time” fences off exciting new paths that the mind might otherwise wander. In this regard, Mlodinow asserts, people with ADHD may have a distinct advantage over others.

Crispr, the powerful gene-editing tool, is revolutionizing the speed and scope with which scientists can modify the DNA of organisms, including human cells. So many people want to use it—from academic researchers to agtech companies to biopharma firms—that new companies are popping up to staunch the demand. Companies like Synthego, which is using a combination of software engineering and hardware automation to become the Amazon of genome engineering. And Inscripta, which wants to be the Apple. And Twist Bioscience, which could be the Intel

They’re betting biology will be the next great computing platform, DNA will be the code that runs it, and Crispr will be the programming language.

“Being able to do that in a parallel way is the novel part,” says Paul Dabrowski, who estimates that Synthego cuts down the time it takes for a scientists to perform gene edits from several months to just one.

Human minds simply cannot reconstruct highly complex natural phenomena efficiently enough in the age of big data. A modern Baconian method that incorporates reductionist ideas through data-mining, but then analyses this information through inductive computational models, could transform our understanding of the natural world. Such an approach would enable us to generate novel hypotheses that have higher chances of turning out to be true, to test those hypotheses, and to fill gaps in our knowledge. It would also provide a much-needed reminder of what science is supposed to be: truth-seeking, anti-authoritarian, and limitlessly free.