Some things are easy and some things are hard, or at least it would appear that way from the talks I’ve attended. All research is initially hard, and some people endeavor to just work it through anyway. Things may be complicated, but they are solvable, so just enumerate all the special cases and keep track of all the instance variables and it will work. Other people try and rephrase the problem until it sounds like an easy problem, and then they solve the easy problem.
I have to say that, personally, I find the second method much more fun, but it is sometimes difficult to explain to people why the problem was ever hard in the first place once you’ve found a good, lucid explanation. The real answer, of course, is that the lucid explanation was hard to find and hard to make. But that doesn’t mean it needed to be hard. Perhaps we were just too foolish to see it. This drive towards lucid explanations can, when ultimately successful, tend to make the researcher a bit defensive about the fundamental trickiness of the tackled problem.
