As Jones shows, it can often pay to take an absurd idea seriously.

Now retired, David Jones continues to publish challenging articles, mostly for Chemistry World. He has worked in academia, industry, and television. A constant stimulus for his creativity was his weekly Daedalus column, probably the longest-running joke in science. Daedalus was the court jester in the Palace of Science; he appeared in New Scientist, Nature, and the Guardian newspaper. Each week Daedalus took some well-known bit of science and pushed it to a clever and often preposterous extreme--which sometimes came true. Daedalus frequently leaks into The Aha! Moment.