I think that often, in science, the hardest part isn’t finding the right answer, but finding the right question. If you hit on a really interesting and well-formulated physics question, then it can take on a life of its own, automatically telling you what calculation you need to do to answer it, and the rest is almost automatic: even if the math takes hours or days, it feels a lot like mechanically pulling in a fishing line to see what you’ve caught.
