Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, a physics professor, said she got her idea when she was changing the channels one day and happened upon a Nascar race. Without warning, she recalled, one of the cars hit an outside wall. None of the cars had bumped, she said, and there were no engine failures or flat tires. So what happened?

It was not idle curiosity. To solve the problem, she immersed herself in racing by spending time with pit crews, crew chiefs, mechanics and drivers, and eventually wrote, “The Physics of Nascar.” The book traces a race car from its design to its race to the finish line.

Sometimes, Ms. Leslie-Pelecky said, she finds herself on the track and thinks, “How did I get here?” It is because of her “pit bull gene,” she decided. “When you get to a problem, you don’t let go until you solve it.”

(The answer to the mystery of the Nascar crash, by the way, was that a trailing car had changed the shape of the air-flow over the first car, which in turn had reduced the downward air pressure on it, causing its wheels to slip as if it were on ice, and it skidded into the wall.)

Image Lopa Mehrotra, the founder of TestToob.com, a social networking site that allows students to showcase scientific experiments. Credit... Geoff Oliver Bugbee for The New York Times

Ms. Mehrotra, Mr. Heim and Ms. Leslie-Pelecky were invited to share their moments of inspiration at the 2008 IdeaFestival in Louisville, Ky., last month, created by Kris Kimel after he had his own “Aha!” moment.

Mr. Kimel was in Park City, Utah, in the late 1990s, he recalled, and witnessed the success of the Sundance Film Festival. Why not, he thought, have a diverse festival that celebrates ideas?