Creativity is as essential to science as curiosity, physical intuition, and shrewd deduction from well-planned experiments. But, says Jones, ingenuity is very uncertain. Even for the greatest inventors, about 80 percent of ideas fail. Jokiness can help, and so can lots of random data. Jones has plenty of clever advice that will help spark that madly brilliant private thought in the first place—and will encourage you to take it further. Neither dense nor demanding, is engrossing, edifying, and scientifically serious; yet it is lightly written and asks lots of silly questions. As Jones shows, it can often pay to take an absurd idea seriously.