Physics Colloquium 24th October 2014. Delivered by Professor Andrei Seryi, Director of the John Adams Institute. Science has yielded a rich history of inventions, ones often inspired by Nature itself. Despite all this progress, we have always strived to find more efficient approaches to inventing. In fact, during the second half of the 20th century, the industrial world developed specific methodologies with which to promote inventiveness. Though powerful, these methods were rarely heard of outside of their field, let alone in the scientific community. The most advanced methodology, the so-called “theory of inventive problem solving”, has become, according to Forbes, the bedrock of innovations in such companies as Samsung. While the industrial inventiveness methods were originally created for engineering, their methodologies are universal and can also be applied to science. In this lecture we shall show how the theory of inventive problem solving can be used in various areas of science – from philology to accelerator physics – in order to create a powerful and eye-opening amalgam of science and inventiveness.

Prof Andrei Seryi’s forthcoming book, Unifying Physics of Accelerators, Lasers and Plasma, is due to be published by CRC Press / Taylor & Francis in 2015 (http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781482240580). This book will include detailed descriptions of the topic discussed in this colloquium – the theory of inventive problem solving in application to science and the method of Accelerating Science TRIZ (AS-TRIZ), and will use this method throughout the book in applications to accelerators, lasers and plasma. The book will be suitable for students of various levels between senior undergraduate and graduate students in physics who are interested in enhancing their ability to work successfully on the development of the next generation of facilities, devices, scientific instruments, arising from synergy of accelerators, laser, and plasma. This book could also attract anyone interested in scientific innovations.