There is something nice about having an idea that wouldn't have been had for a while had you not have had it. Of course, most of these, including the ones I have had, are obscure, forever off the main path of the scientific research. Some are not, and in the end these are the ones that accelerate our understanding of the world. I don't think our paper on the unifying theory of plant and fungal movements is too elevated in that sense, but it is a nice idea, and I doubt it would have entered the literature for at least 10 years had we not written it down: Skotheim & Mahadevan, Science 2005
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