What's in a name?

The question arose when I decided to start my own blog and had to come up with a name that succinctly and accurately represented my feelings about what I was going to deal with in the blog.  I knew I could find the right words, but in the process relearned a lesson that was first imparted to me when I started my Ph.D.

What is the lesson?  It is that our thoughts may be random, but they need not necessarily be unique; in other words, multiple people can have identical random thoughts.  When I started my Ph.D., I was full of these wonderful, original AND unique ideas; there was no one better qualified to do a Ph.D. than I was, or so I felt.  I would run these ideas by my thesis advisor Dr. Ren, who gave me a patient ear whenever I ran into his office.  Then one day after a discussion of another one of my fabulous ideas for half an hour, he said, “Just remember that if you can come up with a novel experiment, someone else would have already done it or would be doing that experiment right now”.  I was thoroughly offended...  What does he know?  Who does he think he is anyway?  Well, next month my idea was published in a scientific paper (proof that it indeed was a fabulous idea and that someone else thought of it before me)!  Maybe Dr. Ren could guess that my idea was an easy one for others to come up with, or maybe he reviewed the paper that was about to be published!  Either way, I learnt the lesson that coming up with unique ideas is not an easy task.

That lesson was revisited when I tried to find a name for my blog.  I first thought of calling it “Random walks of a wandering Brain”, but when I did a Google search for the phrase, I came across other, similar sounding phrases the closest one being “Random thoughts from a wandering mind”.  Upon further cogitation, I came up with the name “Brownian Brain” for my blog, based on Browning motion, which describes the random movement of particles and is named after Robert Brown who first observed it.  Quite naturally others thought of similar names or descriptions for their blogs, such as Brownian movement of my thoughts and Brownian motion of thoughts.  Hmm, what to do?  Well, if people can share a Nobel Prize for coming up with similar ideas independently, why can’t we share similar but original ideas in mundane stuff like names of blogs?  So, with a salute to all others who had thought similar thoughts, I will be calling my blog “Random Walks of a Wandering Brain”, with the link to the blog being, “brownianbrain.blogspot.com”. Thanks for visiting!