Firstly very interesting question to ponder upon.

I cant say that is entirely true in today's phase of science where you are judged by the number of publications you have not by the novelty of the science you do.

(I know some would criticize but its purely based on my experience till now and could be subject to modification)

I guess thats why we donot have really revolutionary discoveries since the time of Einstein. Infact if you ask anybody to name a classical genious after Einstein, one would have to pluck many number of brain strings but probably in vain.

One of the significant reasons would be that we concentrate more on becoming knowledgeable rather than going out of the box of conventional science and think what could have been rather than what is there.

I am biologist, so I have got a lot of scope to think what could be there inside because inspite of all the research in biology, we still dont have the basic logic how the systems in nature work(i am not keeping a pessimist note here!!, just a curious one).

But now and then if I hypothesize something and consult it with a so to say "hard core biologist", I am bugged everytime with a comment " We have never come across something like this happening inside the system!"

Thats sort of self explanatory that what kind of beliefs most people have.

Anyways, I do think imagination should be given total air but at the same time minimally constraint by the knowledge because that would really speed up the progress in science..

"imagination can spur on creativity so that you associate apparently unrelated things to beget new findings in science and literature" O.K. Of course imagination has a great role in science especially in mathematics without imagination one cannot generate a new idea/concept/theory or solve a problem. However, I do not dare to disagree with greatest scientist of all times and thinker who is like god to many scientists. But my angle is that imagination is wild and some directional channelising or to apply some restrain on it is must even though "imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand" However, to connect logically all pieces of imagination with the conditions that presentation of concept/theory generated does not look absurd, one has to have COMMONSENSE (what is possible and acceptable and what not) .For this alone one must have rooting in his area of imagination. Einstein could afford it as he knew his rooting.

Dear all!

Thanks.

I agree with nearly all of you.

There is absolutely no knowledge, hence science, without first imagination. ALL intelligence and adaptability requires first imagination.

Imagination allows pre-existing thoughts to merge and multiply. Whether the new thoughts will advance science or science fiction depends upon the quality of the preceding thoughts and the nature of their merger.

"There is absolutely no knowledge, hence science, without first imagination. ALL intelligence and adaptability requires first imagination." In that case for survival and adaptation their natural, not socially inculcated instinct , observations and trial and error methods. People were cross-breeding, selecting and grafting animal and plant species over centuries without knowledge or on the basis of modern bio-science.

Dear Dheeraj Kumar

Well Science fiction is just a terminology. Mobile phones were sci-fi back in time.

New thoughts would definitely advance science in someway or the other. Besides, imagination can never be judged by quality. Imagination is one's own product of mind which itself is a unique permutation!

Writing about the importance of imagination in science, the prominent 19th-century physicist John Tyndall insisted:

" Newton’s passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was an act of the prepared imagination. Out of the facts of chemistry the constructive imagination of Dalton formed the atomic theory. Davy was richly endowed with the imaginative faculty, while with Faraday its exercise was incessant, preceding, accompanying and guiding all his experiments. His strength and fertility as a discoverer are to be referred in great part to the stimulus of the imagination."

Beveridge sums it up beautifully:

"Facts and ideas are dead in themselves and it is the imagination that gives life to them. But dreams and speculations are idle fantasies unless reason turns them to useful purpose. Vague ideas captured on flights of fancy have to be reduced to specific propositions and hypotheses."

Very interesting comments from all of you!

What I have experienced in applied research is that successful thinking outside the box is best done by technically qualified individuals who come from a different field and can apply a new, fresh, (even naive) point of view. They can imagine an end result, unfettered by the various conventional reasons of why it cannot be done. They can make analogies between the subject field and other fields - a kind of informal homomorphism in which proven successes in one field can be applied to the new field.

Michael Polanyi speaks of great scientific discoveries in this fashion:

"All these processes of creative guesswork have in common

that they are guided by the urge to make contact with a reality,

which is felt to be there already to start with, waiting to be

apprehended. That is why the egg of Columbus is the pro-

verbial symbol of great discovery. It suggests that great dis-

covery is the realization of something obvious; a presence

staring us in the face, waiting until we open our eyes.

In this light it may appear perhaps more appropriate to

regard discovery in natural sciences as guided not so much by

the potentiality of a scientific proposition as by an aspect of

nature seeking realization in our minds."

What Polanyi describes as being the process by which we make great scientific discoveries surely sounds as though it involves a lot of imagination.

Dears

Thanks for your comments.

Interesting question. I have two blog entries that are somewhat related. You might find them useful. The first one has been extremely popular:

Theory Formulation:

http://thescientificworldview.blogspot.com/2009/05/theory-formulation.html

Curiosity:

http://thescientificworldview.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-is-meaning-of-curiosity-in.html

First, I ask whether the question differentiates imagination from phantasy (which some would say it should - e.g Husserl)? I find it interesting that so often people equate imagination ( phantasy) to creativity, when in fact they are not the same thing (if we using psychology's interpretation of creativity). Imagination may be seen as a mode of consciousness whereas creativity is often associated to a product (though I believe erroneously) . In creativity theory, something creative is evaluated as such by the appropriate field. This field is made of individual gatekeepers who establish norms and expectations for a particular domain. Should some product be appropriated to the domain but exceed the fields past contributions it will be coined "creative". Thus in science, where methodology and design are essential to the role of the discoveries made to a domain, one generally must truly think inside this rule-oriented box in order to contribute creatively ( a bit of paradox).

Whereas imagination has no regard for rules. Yet, in almost the same paradoxical manner, I find the content in my imagination to be quite non-creative, and as such its main quality is simply the lack of norms and constraints that limits its conjectures. The imagination allows the individual to ask "what if such and such happened" or "what if I did this or said this" without regard to ethics, morals, norms, values. We then run through the after thought and what is retained can build schemata that lead to analogous problems in the "real world". Thus the role of imagination is important because if one imagines enough, the law of numbers suggests that eventually a person will derive a scheme that fits inside the box of a domain, yet exceed their expectations in some capacity. In this case their imagination will lead to creativity.

While the institutions of science require these methodological standards, I believe the biggest role that imagination has to play, and circling back to Einstein, is not so much in the ways in which we can find the solution, but rather the ways in which we can interpret a problem. Surely, if the institution necessitates our confinement to rigorous methodological execution of pre-determined steps, then perhaps we can take advantage of the institution's relaxation in the problem setting stage. Once the problem has been defined in a new way, we can then use the pre-determined methods to our advantage.

Creative imagination is clearly essential for theoretical advances in science. For this to happen, the scientist needs to experience an imaginary representation of a possible world in which previously inexplicable phenomena can be logically explained and predicted. How can the human brain accomplish this? For a brief account, see *Creativity*, pp. 301 -302 in *Overview and Reflections* on my Research Gate page. Details of the putative brain mechanisms and systems that do the job are given in other chapters of *The Cognitive Brain*.

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering "like" stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.[7]

THE AVATAMSAKA SUTRA

FRANCIS H. COOK: HUA-YEN BUDDHISM : THE JEWEL NET OF INDRA 1977

All entity, all atoms, all organisms in the universe forms a net of nodes and each nod (monad) mirrors the whole universe from a particular perspective. Maybe imagination is our capacity to look inward at the jewels in the net of Indra.

Absolutely, imagination is very important as imagination can turn anything from scratch to a beautiful marvel, however knowledge is just a mere collection of facts. knowledge without imagination is useless because imagination applies knowledge in a particular domain to make that thing come alive. and also we can take example of einstein , when he was asked to set up a laboratory for his work ,he was told to give list of accessories, he simply asked for lots of papers and table and chair. That's it , imagination is above all. It's due to imagination which is responsible for the present status of mankind.

I like Matthew Cohen's focus on the problem setting stage -- new ways of interpreting an existing problem. I think also that works well in tandem with a general valuing, in the background of one's career, of certain objects and conjectures.

In my own career, as a math student I came to value the elegant mathematical system of quaternions partly because they were described in linear algebra lectures as of being of little use to current scientists because they were supplanted by matrices. I began to think they might have uses in new domains such as cognitive theory. (It tuned out later that Piaget had used them both early and later in his career.)

Ten years later I entered a graduate program in cognition and computers. My imagination speculated that proto-humans, who had recently come down off trees, might be using mental rotation (executed somehow by cognitive embodiments of quaternions) -- and other mental transformations -- to compensate for their no longer having a top-down view of the forest.

I had reinterpreted the fact that quaternions are the preferred tool for computing 3D rotation to imagine a new evolutionary usefulness for them. And from this early-existing specialized advanced-primate cognitive mechanism may have later evolved a wide array of other cognitive mechanisms based on use of hypercomplex numbers in various situations, helping to develop logic in cognition. I called quaternions the possible "Engines of Thought."

Ironically, recent experiments in music cognition by Marina Korsakova-Kreyn and Jay Dowling have shown that mental rotation of both melody lines and visual objects produce activity in the parietal lobe -- also the location of imagination activity!

So we have gone full circle in our discussion -- from imagination use and valuing/highlighting to cognitive mechanisms and quaternions to mental rotation to music to supramodal (sensory-modality-free) mental rotation to the biological root of imagination mechanisms.

Antonio Damasio describes a close cousin to imagination -- the cortex mechanism of Disposition Spaces. These are copies of Action Spaces but they are not committed to execution -- rather, they read the brain for possible execution, to save critical setup time. These Disposition Spaces are Constructivist in nature, referring to Piaget's belief about the nature of intelligence. (This mirrors his "bourbaki" attitude towards mathematical objects -- you must be able to build them, not just characterize them, for them to be valid.)

Poincare and Bohr took radically different positions toward using metaphors and models in advancing science. Poincare said they were essential, at least for himself, so that he could use intuition. De Broglie, later, agreed and said they were great sources for generating hypotheses to test.

(In opposition, Bohr, like Skinner later, said they were of little value and that certain things were either unknowable or, in Skinner's black box view of the brain, too hard to know to be practical to pursue today.)

My own conclusion: Imagination, construction, intuition, and problem interpretation are all interconnected, and are vital for science.

In his book "A Mathematician's Mind, Testimonial for An Essay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field" (Princeton University Press, 1945) Jacques S. Hadamard quoted a letter he received from Albert Einstein:

"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily' reproduced and combined.

...

The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

According to what has been said, the play with the mentioned elements is aimed to be analogous to certain logical connections one is searching for. Visual and motor. In a stage when words intervene at all, they are, in my case, purely auditive, but they interfere only in a secondary stage, as already mentioned."

So for Einstein other forms of thinking were even more important than word-based reasoning. At the Parmenides Foundation for the Study of Thinking we call this type of thinking "constellatory thinking". It is a kind of thinking where all mental elements simultaneously have impact on each other and by that generating a new mental object - and now this emerging mental object re-interpretes the basic constituents. From the introspective view this semantic power house emerges in a kind of inner picture.

So "thinking in images" means "thinking in constellations".

And the underlying mechanism is constellatory thinking.

Every conceptual breakthrough and even every inspiration is based on this fundamental constellatory process.

The logic of images (and pictures) is always constellatory. This is, why our mind uses this kind of mental container when searching for new solutions.

And "Imagination" is the conscious activation and use of this methodology of our mind.

So for me not imagination but the underlying constellatory process is crucial whenever conceptual breakthroughs or new ideas or creativity is needed.

Good question, and some good answers (not all of which I've had time to read :-) ), but I would endorse Arnold Trehub's comment.

Science is pretty well in two halves: creating (Generating) theories (which is where imagination comes in) and Testing theories. (A less glamorous "third category" is basically measuring, or honing current theories.)

Theories are models of the world. Testing those models is the more straightforward, and I cover that there:

http://sciencepolice2010.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/sciencepolice-14-latest.pdf

Creativity is very different, and I investigate it here:

http://sciencepolice2010.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/plasmap_abials_2006.pdf

Cordially...

http://sciencepolice2010.wordpress.com

Dears

Thank you all for your comments.

I agree with most of you.

None since Einstein is nonsense. Then there was Roddenberry!

“Imagination is more important than knowledge", but phantasy is more important than imagination!

Imagination is more important than knowledge , because it opens the way for access to the new possibilities of understanding, unexpected ways , to different ways of doing something. Knowledge is generally more static , more accurate, more rigid , where procedures or are preset or are being established , while imagination is out of these systems , enabling the emergence of new ideas, other perspectives , methodologies and theories, often analyze the knowledge in a wider context . It is not to devalue the importance of knowledge, but places it as a product of the imagination , as something that can be improved. Imagination is looking for new ways to understand and contemplate the same knowledge .

Agree with Einstein, but the problem is how do you teach this to our students? It is important to develop skills in this direction when we built grad and undergrad programs. Are our teachers ready for this challenge?

Francisco,

If the educational process is emphasizing only the retention of knowledge using exams then this educational process is not encouraging creativity? We cannot teach creativity but we can encourage and stimulate its use during the educational process.

It is a muscle, we do not understand it but we know that using it make it stronger.

Dear Francisco

Thank you for your nice comment.

Dear Louis

Thank you for your nice comment.

Martin’s comments above on emergent phenomena (in terms of constellatory thinking) are quite interesting and have stuck with me – I think they are near the heart of imagination and intuition. I also think they invite being connected to other processes and perhaps broadened in their characterization and scope:

[Martin quote:] ‘So for Einstein other forms of thinking were even more important than word-based reasoning. At the Parmenides Foundation for the Study of Thinking we call this type of thinking "constellatory thinking".'

'It is a kind of thinking where all mental elements simultaneously have impact on each other and by that generating a new mental object - and now this emerging mental object re-interprets the basic constituents. From the introspective view this semantic power house emerges in a kind of inner picture.'

'So "thinking in images" means "thinking in constellations".’ [End of Martin quote.]

Here are several comments on how this concept of constellatory thinking might be connected to other domains and broadened in its characterization:

• Aesthetics – I see connections to the mechanisms employed in aesthetic endeavors, such as poetry writing (and poetry reading as well). Some say that every word in a rich poem potentially connects with every other word across the network of words – through dimensions of imagery, sounds of words (e.g. alliteration, rhyming), texture, theme, allusion. The emergent effect is the impact of the poem as a whole, as an organizing of experience driven by every element’s interaction with every other.

• The same can be done in recorded music program design. I have explored and worked with the design of music CD informal programs in which each music track potentially serves to relate to many other other tracks along one or more similar dimensions to poetry – to texture, theme, tempo, rhythm, and composer. Programs I created of eclectic music with this design were played periodically for several years on Estonia Radio as part of their nightly eclectic music presentations. They were quite effective with both listeners and staff.

In designing them, I worked with a tentative overall program theme, and often found that in the later stages of design a new theme emerged to replace the old one, reorganizing the elements and reinterpreting their significance in the new “story.” At this point, several program tracks were often dropped and replaced by more appropriate ones.

• Broadening of concept – the concept is already fairly broad by seeing that "thinking in constellations" is a higher level than "thinking in images" – our operation is on relationships among collections, not just on single entities.

• We can broaden the scope further by considering not just images and collections of them, but operations on images, leading us toward the possibility of using mathematical modeling tools with special desirable properties, such as projective geometry and its self-dual mappings, and hypercomplex numbers like quaternions (good for computing rotations) and octonions (containing both quaternions and projective geometry in a blend).

• Antonio Damasio describes images as mappings and says that the brain is, at root, a mapping tool.

• Piaget found that hypercomplex numbers were great conceptual tools for representing structures and relationships in intellectual development. He used quaternions in his work throughout his career (they had been very big in late-19th Century higher mathematics studies. He represented adult skill in manipulating logical propositions (converse, inverse, negation operations) by means of a simplified quaternion cousin, the Klein-4 group. These three operations form a triangle (imaginary numbers i,j,k and become a tetrahedron with the addition of the identity element (1).

It would appear that imagination, constellatory thinking, rich mappings, and the constructivist, nested structures of intellectual development are all interrelated.

Who would have 'imagined' that a single simple question would have inspired such a diversity of responses!

Dear Mathew

Nice question you asked about "Diversity of Responses" !

I am a strong advocate of the phenomena of synergy and emergence in complex systems.

But getting back to imagination and science, It occurs to me that conventional thinking in science (or any other endeavor) is founded on a kind of "template matching" algorithm in which stored knowledge in the form of features or patterns are used to scan the universe of the problem at hand to see if any matches occur. If enough matches do occur, then the solution is assumed to have been found and existing knowledge is applied to the problem. This saves time, money, and effort. BUT IT'S WORTH IT.

ERROR IN THE ABOVE ANSWER - COMPUTER ERROR

"BUT IT IS WORTH IT" comment was supposed to apply to the alternate approach which was lost.

THE ALTERNATE APPROACH:

On the other hand, if one gives serious attention to each datum and the peculiarities of the problem context, then one may uncover relationships, patterns, similarities to well-understood exogenous models. This is the way that breakthroughs occur, new paradigms are offered, or more efficacious solutions are found. The cost is more time, money, and effort. BUT IT'S WORTH IT IN THE LONG RUN.

Imagination is most important in field of Science & Technology and Research because first any idea comes into our mind and then we collect knowledge to execute that idea. If we will stop our imagination we cannot do anything new or innovative because when the matter of innovation comes, the first and most important thing is imagination or idea then it requires knowledge to execute it.

Knowledge you can gain from books or from others but no one can give you the power of Imagination.

Regards

Nitish

As Einstein implied with his famous quip, imagination must obviously precede knowledge. For humanity, everything begins with imagination, allowing what Einstein called his "groping" for knowledge.

What is most interesting is that you can have all the imagination, and be well

versed in the skills of writing and presenting your ideas, and the chance of

being successful and having your ideas become the norm, or paradigm

are infinitesimal.

Why do a handful of (mostly) Men attract a loyal following for centuries,

when we know that others conceived of the same or similar ideas, and

rarely if ever get any credit. The ideas may be blatently wrong yet they are

repeatedly quoted.

The process is puzzling.

Michael Clark, you ask "Why do a handful of (mostly) Men attract a loyal following for centuries,"

Perhaps patriarchy, politics, historians, religion, culture, gender etc that impact opportunities through the centuries..

Do read Polanyi, M. (1966). 'The Creative Imagination.' Chemical and Engineering News, 44: 85-93. Nice introduction into your question.

There is practically no creativity without imagination. This is especially easy to be seen in computer science: nearly everything you can think of (in this area) will be most likely done soon. The bad news is that nasty ideas are implemented equally fast as very useful ones.

The real question is then: can we improve our own imagination? How?

I think it is good to read, at very young age, many fantastic stories, full of strange creatures and events never seen in everyday life. Young age is important, since later we simply don't believe in magic, we somehow *know* all this is impossible. Science-fiction literature, in addition to fairy tales, seems also helpful.

"All great scientists have, in a certain sense, been great artists; the man with no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make great discoveries."

--- Karl Pearson

The Grammar of Science (1892), 37.

"There is practically no creativity without imagination. This is especially easy to be seen in computer science: nearly everything you can think of (in this area) will be most likely done soon. The bad news is that nasty ideas are implemented equally fast as very useful ones.

The real question is then: can we improve our own imagination? How?

I think it is good to read, at very young age, many fantastic stories, full of strange creatures and events never seen in everyday life. Young age is important, since later we simply don't believe in magic, we somehow *know* all this is impossible. Science-fiction literature, in addition to fairy tales, seems also helpful" Marek Gutowski in researchgate.

In ''On Creativity'', David Bohm wrote:

''a child learns to walk, to talk and to know his way around the world just by trying somthing out and seeing what happens, then modifying what he does (or thinks) in accordance with what haas actually happened. In this way, he spends his first few years in a wonderfully creative way, discovering all sorts of things that are new to him, and this leads people to look back on childhood as a kind of lost paradise. As the child grows older, however, learning takes on a narrower meaning. In school, he learns by repetition to accumulate knowledge, so as to please the teacher and pass examination. At work, he learns in a similar way, so as to make a living, or for some other utilitarian purpose, and not mainly for the love of the action of learning itself. So his ability to see something new and original gradually dies away. And without it there is evidently no groud form which anything can grow.

It is impossible to overemphasize the significance of this kind of learning in every phase of life, and the importance of giving the action of learning itself top priority, ahead of the specific content of what is to be learned. for the action of learning is the essence of real perception, in the sense that without it a person is unable to see, in any new situation, what is a fact and what is not.''

Interesting question: Creativity vs. imagination; I think that there is no idea or initiative without innovation and finding. Creation arises from reflection, contemplation, attention and observation which build inspiration and sometimes revelation or originality from imaginative ingenuity

It seems to me that imagination and creativity have many relationships. For example we talk about a scientist like Albert who through imagination created (or discovered actually) secrets of the universe. However, there is another more subtle creative aspect to the imagination/creation relationship which I alluded to when I threw out Gene Roddenberry's name earlier. Here was a soul who's imagination spurred others to create. He did not invent the cell phone yet the creator of the cell phone gives credit to Gene for planting the seed in his mind. Gene did not create any of the startling things we saw in Star Trek but yet through his imagination, his ideas effected others who created and as a result those things became reality. We as a species were endowed with powers that set us apart from the rest. Power of speech, power of choice, power of reason and many others and also the power to imagine and thus create. Pretty cool skill set. I can't imagine how anything could be created without a spark of imagination.

We would be unable to imagine a world as it might be if we were unable to experience the world as it appears to us -- what we think of as the real world. Our conscious experience of this world, open to our imagination for possible change, is a fantastic gift of biological evolution.

"Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently ... It is that which feels & discovers what is, the REAL which we see not, which exists not for our senses... Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things... Imagination too shows what is ... Hence she is or should be especially cultivated by the truly Scientific, those who wish to enter into the worlds around us!"

— Countess of Lovelace Augusta Ada King

In contrast to Eric's Tangumonkem view:

The task is … not so much to see what no one has

yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought,

about that what everybody sees.

/-/ Erwin Schrődinger (1887 – 1962), Dublin Lectures 1943

''The scientist, like the artist, interprets the world around him and within him by making images. The creation of perceptual models, of course, is not the scientist's only occupation. A physicist, a biologist, or a sociologist spends much effort on collecting data, checking their validity, measuring and counting them, and testing his predictions. But all these operations serve only to prepare and confirm his discoveries and his explanations. And to discover and to explain requires perceivable models. ''IT IS BY LOGIC THAT WE PROVE',says Henri Poincaré, ''BUT BY INTUITION THAT WE DISCOVER'' Unless an image is organized in forms so simple and so clearly related to each other that the mind can grasp them, it remains an incomprehensible, particular case. Only through the generalities in its appearance is the imaged thing seen as a kind of thing, and thus made understandable.''

Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking

I wonder if there is a difference between sciences on this point. For example, when I first read the question a week ago, I immediately thought of James Clerk Maxwell and his seminal work in electromagnetism. While I am not an expert, I still can't believe that he took the work of his predecessors and imagined some spectacular world; I am thinking of his "On Physical Lines of Force." He asks us to imagine that a magnetic field is produced by spinning hexagonal vortices! and that electrical particles fill the interstitial spaces!! Really bizarre, imaginative stuff which I only partially understand. Swirling hexagonal vortices and magnetism!!??

Then on the other hand, I struggled to really recall something that is unambiguously imaginative in Darwin. I don't mean to suggest that the argument is, say in the Origin, anything but magnificent, but there wasn't any one thing that I could point to in the same way the Maxwell image jumped out for me. Then it occurred to me that large parts of his argument may be meant to appeal to my imagination. I now think that Darwin is asking his reader to imagine along with him. For example, consider the discussion of moral faculties in the Descent (Chapter 5): "A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection." Would Darwin say that I can only understand if I imagine the scene with him? Would I say that it was his imagination that allowed his insights?

For me, maybe there is a difference in the imaginative quality of a diagram (spinning vortices) and a likely story as told in the Descent. But maybe this doesn't make any sense. I'd like to give this some more thought.

"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination.”

— John Dewey

"Countless great advances in science have contained elements of luck and skill but for the most part were consumed by imagination. We cannot discover what we do not know or explain what we do not understand without the creativity of envisioning what we cannot see. From Joseph Priestley’s finding of oxygen in the 1770s to Mendel’s rules of heredity in the 1850s coupled with the discovery of oncogenes in 1975, these breakthroughs exemplified great imagination but scientific researchers at Yale have been taking it a step further.

Despite that these aforementioned discoveries are deemed some of the most important research of our time, it took many years until this knowledge could be used to help human kind or our environment. There seems to be a progression of science where there is the starting discovery, extensive research in between, and then finally, the innovation that leads to something tangible and profitable. In many fields, we have seen much progress for the research that lies in between and are at the verge for the ending advance.

In science, much recognition is lost for everything in between. For example, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Drs. de Duve, Palade, and Claude for their discovery of the ribosome in 1974. 35 years later, Drs. Steitz, Yonath, and Ramakrishnan received the Nobel Prize for their work elucidating the structure and function of the ribosome which has lead to the development of Rib-X Pharmaceuticals, a business that develops commercial antibiotics for highly-resistant bacterial infections. Thousands of researchers must have worked on the ribosome in that 35 year time span, making vital discoveries that each unveiled one more piece of knowledge but they were never awarded Nobel Prizes. Perhaps it is imagination that enables a scientist to make that starting or final advance and separates his or her research from all the rest."

Melissa Stone, Imagination in Science, Yale Scientific Magazine, Issue 83.3, October 2, 2010

There is no doubt that imagination is very important. But to creative, you must get the necessary knowledge first. And it may depend in disciplines, for example, in theoretical research imagination is obviously more important.

All that is written above is great and I want to enrich it by sharing with you my emotional personal story...

I аm an engineer, not an artist nor a poet ... but I think as an artist and poet ... I don't know why but for some reason my thinking is based exclusively on imagination, intuition and emotions rather than on formal logical reasoning... Sometimes I think my brain is damaged and I have no left hemisphere, and my right hemisphere is two times bigger:) Here are some of my favorite mental techniques based on using imagination.

To reveal the circuit secrets (my pursuit is electronics), I look for everyday situations in which a human being has a similar behavior. Then I place myself mentally or even actually in their place (empathy). For example, I replace real electronic elements (transistors, op-amps, etc.) with “manual” ones and begin performing their functions (these are my favorite experiments with my students in the laboratory). Thus I get a taste of what the device “feels” and a picture of its behavior revealing cause and effect relations in its operation. I do that mostly using my imagination rather than my reasoning, visualizing in my mind’s eye how potentials rise and drop, currents flow from high to low potential point, resistors "shorten" and "lengthen", etc.

My thinking is extremely visual and I am trying by any means to extract the images from my head and to show them to my students. For this purpose, I visualize the invisible electrical quantities by voltage bars and diagrams, current loops, etc. (see the attached picture below). I even embed my educator's imagination into measuring instruments to make them show the "sterile" results in an attractive way:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Circuit_Idea/Walking_along_the_Resistive_Film#How_to_visualize_the_voltage_diagram_on_the_screen

Thus I have gradually developed a heuristic approach for teaching electronic circuits:

http://www.circuit-fantasia.com/my_work/conferences/ewme_2006/paper.htm

I have first implemented this philosophy on my site of circuit-fantasia.com by means of interactive Flash animations

http://www.circuit-fantasia.com,

then on Circuit Idea wikibook:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Circuit_Idea

and finally, I apply it here, in RG discussions...

I was also deeply impressed by the great Einshtein's thoughts and put his winged thought about the intuitive mind as a motto in my Wikipedia profile:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Circuit_dreamer

This was my story about the role of imagination in my life, Cyril

The underlying purpose of scientific advances is to create knowledge. That is what imagination is all about, creating knowledge.

Imagination is very useful in learning as well as teaching! It is impossible, not to imagine! Science , I believe, must have originated from imagination! There has to be some base on which logic, assumptions and theories are based! Hence, imagination may be that base , on which the structure of science stands !

Interesting Topic Question.

The following attachment refers to workpiece conceived in the street.

Regards from Athens,

Panagiotis Stefanides

I is contained in the second attachment [Book 1997].

Similar work to this is found in:

Book Eur Ing Panagiotis Stefanides "GOLDEN ROOT SYMMETRIES OF GEO...

In the philosophy of science, the clearest statement about the role of imagination in science is found in Karl Popper. He opposed to the earlier positivist view that hypotheses are generated from observational data. Instead he pointed out that our problem is usually that we have data for which we have no explanation—they just appear bizarre—or we have too many and incompatible explanations for them—They cannot all be right. Typically the situation in which we have no explanation, is the one were we have falsified all the explanations we initially had. This is when a scientific discipline is in crisis. When this happens, in Popper's view, the imagination comes to the rescue. The creative mind can here think up a possible explanation, which is then put to the test. Typical examples given in the literature is Kekule's discovery of the circular form of the benzene molecule. He was struggling to model it and one night he sat in front of the fire, dozing off after a long day, when he saw as in a dream a snake wriggling in the flames which finally bit itself in the tail and, Eureka, Kekule realised the molecule could be circular. Now, Kekule didn't "discover" the shape of the molecule in the dream, he discovered the hypothesis that it could be shaped like a circle. This hypothesis then had to be tested. This is the distinction between what Popper calls the 'Context of Discovery' and 'Context of Justification', i.e. the context in which we discover hypotheses (not necessarily a 'scientific' context) and the context in which we justify them. The general idea is that hypotheses normally come first and only later become justified. One can then perhaps say that imagination feeds us testable (and sometimes untestable) ideas about how to explain data, which then need to be further justified.

Sticking to Philosophy of Science, there is another interesting auctor who spent much time and energy considering the role of imagination in science: Gaston Bachelard. I strongly recommend his works about this topic. His point is that imagination, more than other kinds of knowledge, is grounded on reality, on matter, and therefore it's the condition of possibility of every other form of science. Studying the compositive "logic" of imagination could help to improve this fundamental epistemological virtue.

Greetings from Rome

http://www.nsu.ru/filf/rozov/publ/imagination.htm

N.S.Rozov "About imagination in science": Imagination is one of the means of scientific discovery in the process of creative learning. Especially on the stages of intuitive search, in comparative research. Imagination is one of the functions of conscience, which is used in thinking. A thought is appeared from the past thoughts and experiences. The genre of thought experiment is very productive.Generally speaking, thinking is impossible without imagination and fantasy.(To Dewey, "Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination"). Nevertheless (to Rozov), irresponsible gush of "discourse"(for ex. in culturology or political studies) fights back the charges in "recurrence to trivial police scientism".

Imagination in an inherent capacity but cannot be acquired otherwise. In Indian context, it is called 'pratibha'. As you rightly mentioned Einstein's quote, knowledge is acquired through cognitive faculty. But imagination goes beyond the horizon. Sometimes, it happened in science that it unravels the invisible link between macro to micro world.

"Where oil is first found, in the final analysis, is in the minds of men" (Wallace Pratt, 1952).

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Pratt and http://archives.datapages.com/data/gcags/data/022/022001/0033.htm .

Roberto,

I find that quote inspiring because maybe we will also find in the minds of men how to get rid of oil.

Louis,

what you mention is very close to my other chosen mission, i.e. getting rid of the CO2 generated by using oil, gas and coal. The process is called Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).

I often joke with my friends about being a "repented geologist", because now I would like to use the techniques and knowledge used in finding oil to find instead secure places where to geologically store at least all the CO2 that would be generated from all the hydrocarbons I helped discoverying in my professional life (plus all CO2 my family and I caused to be emitted into the atmosphere because of direct and indirect use of fossil fuels), and possibly more anthropogenic CO2.

Stimulated by your comment, I may be the first person saying that "a safe CO2 geological storage site is first found in the minds of men (and women)".

Roberto,

You make me remember David Bohm remarks that all the problems we are facing wars, pollution, etc. are problems of the division of our mind, they are all mind problems. All the problems we see out there are just the consequences of our fragmentated mind.

Not only are all of the world's problems in our brain-mind, our phenomenal world itself, within which our problems exist, is a creation of our brain.

Surely, you take into consideration,"A universe smells with oil"(B.Russel).How can humanity cope with greed as division of greedy mind? It's utopia.

Dear Louis and Arnold,

Be careful about the use of absolutes: "the world .. is a creation of our brain" and "all the problems we see out there are just the consequences of our fragmented mind." I know we can all get carried away and use absolutes when we feel strongly about something. So ...

Please don't forget that the mapping from the physical world to our brain-mind is a homomorphism. It is not an isomorphism. That is, when we map aspects of the physical world to our brain-mind, we leave an enormous number of aspects behind - our brain-mind can only handle a small portion of reality at one time.

Regarding the word "problems": As former president Harry S. Truman once said "It is a recession if your neighbor is out of work; It is a depression if you are out of work." In other words, from the point of view of humanity, what we see as problems are problems for us; but not necessarily for Nature: In the vast timeline of evolution, we may be viewed as an ephemeral species that can be discarded along with the dinosaur - some forms of life can continue to form a new ecology on this Earth without us.

Don't get me wrong, being a human, what is being done to the planet by our species is a crime and must be halted as soon as possible.

Just a word of caution with the rhetoric.

By the way, I love the use of the hyphenated word "brain-mind".

Antonio,

These were not my thougts but a vague memory of

from this video of a dialogue of David Bohm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vtD1HhlIls

`` some forms of life can continue to form a new ecology on this Earth without us.:: I am sure it is true but I do not see how this outcome could be reassuring for us. I do not care if the bacteria will survive, I care for ourself and for the capacity of the planet to sustain our development.

It is an interesting discussion. My contribution is the following:

The imagination connects the left and right side of the brain. Both are used in a language which has profoundly deep image roots. I know about two communication systems which have deep image roots: one is the Chinese writing system (characters), the other is the Hungarian language (the root system in it). Both communication systems, the Hungarian language and the Chinese writing use both brain sides. In the case of synthesis mutual support from both sides of the brain is helping the imagination. In theoretical research such imagination is important and can help the evolution of the embryo-idea, or idea-embryo. Imagination is the way how you can develop your first initiative of idea in the solution of a problem. Even abstract actors get images in this developing process. Sometimes I use Hungarian folk tales in my lectures (planetary science, mathematics, planetary science, etc.) because teaching is helped by the images expressed in a visual- and story-thinking of the old tales but these images are excellent summaries (compact grains) of the complex systems (later developed by the students from the embryo-idea, embryo-level image).

Popper made his statement speciffically about imagination in the logical procedure of science. But I find Gaston Bachelard's statements are a greater contribution, looking at one of his many statements: imagination as the principal engine of scientific progress (in the concrete scientist's work as in science as a whole), emphasizing progress in terms of moving away from immediate reality to a higher abstraction,

A very beautiful thought by R.Tagore,"Your feet must touch the ground, and your head must be up to heaven"

Hmmm!!! Very, very profound thoughts and ideas here.

I'd say that knowledge and creativity both have their roles. In today's complex world, when many things have been already discovered, require that we know some basics before we come up with something new. But sure, many people can acquire knowledge and information but to create something new is the real challenge that few succeed in. I agree that no discovery or idea as revolutionary as Einstein's has been noticed in many decades. Part blame is to be shared by the 'publish or perish' philosophy as indicated by Karishma. Einsten would have been perhaps fired by a university today had he taken his time to reach his 'miracle year discoveries' in 2005, for wasting time, if not for his disheveled look!

Today's worker needs sophisticated equipment, super computer time and so on and is in a hurry to write something that can be published to justify further term. Acceptance of science as a career has perhaps done serious harm. Few people made discovery under pressure though the self motivated ones really toiled. Today, very few can afford to work at their pace to allow emergence of new ideas unless they reach a senior position by which time they have stopped getting creative ideas.

Second thing is we have few moments of observation in isolation even though a lot is happening in nature that needs explaining, take lightning for instance. Understanding of atomic structure was helped by technology that allowed breaking of atoms. Higgs Boson require far more complex and expensive machine to be confirmed. However, I strongly believe that sparks come from individuals; teams or environments can only stimulate. Idea should come, the rest may follow though may be constrained by facilities. We are still following the horizontal line from molecule to atom to electron- neutron- proton to quarks and now string theory which doesn't seem to be complete yet.

Knowledge and horizontal thinking adds to knowledge but to discover, one has to rise above the routine plane of thought.

And thanks Irina- for reminding of the great thought by Tagore.

In short, knowledge is like scattered grains of gold grains but it's imagination that builds a sculpture out of them, lending them meaning. Neither is dispensible.

Chandra Mohan Nautiyal added a very brief but imaginativa summary. Congratulations.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” - Albert Einstein

@Sverre Johnsen:

Excellent quote. What Einstein says dovetails my own view of the role of imagination. I guess we can imply, from what Einstein has said, that imagination is quite important in achieving scientific advances.

In my words, I start imagine before I understand what is science?

I hate to be a stickler, but it seems to me that Einstein was somewhat confused when comparing imagination and knowledge, and saying that imagination is much more important. To my mind, he is comparing apples with pears, or rather, comparing the tool or method of production with the product. Imagination is a faculty of the mind; it is an ABILITY difficult to distinguish clearly from the other intellectual abilities we make use of in our attempts to understand the world. Knowledge is not an ability. Knowledge is in one sense a product of our attempts to understand the world, and in another it is the base of data that our intellectual abilities use when working towards further knowledge (and simply in the practical application of knowledge in various human activities such as building houses, computers, resolving social and psychological problems). We do talk of knowing methods and logic and maths, but this knowledge is not itself an ability but a question of having data about how to use our cognitive abilities. Knowledge of methods and logic is still data that our abilities make use of, rather than something that itself constitutes some independent form of ability.

So, in answering the question of what is the role of imagination in our scientific activities, then surely we don’t have to compare the role of imagination and knowledge, but rather to ask about the different roles of our different cognitive abilities, such as imagination and logic (on the assumption that they somehow are distinct modes of thinking, which I am not convinced is true).

In a previous answer I mentioned how Popper described the role of imagination, notably that it is something that enables us to think creatively about possible explanations that may not be implied in any way by the data. The contrast here is between imagination and logical inference (inductive, deductive, or abductive), not between imagination and knowledge.

I am not sure however whether it is sensible to be making too many judgements about which of our cognitive abilities is more important, or valuable, rather than simply becoming clear on their different roles. They may have different roles to play and yet be equally important. However, maybe the purpose of the very positive judgements about the importance of imagination in this discussion is only meant to even out the balance; there is a tendency to downplay the role and importance of imagination in science. If the purpose here is just to even the balance, then I am all in favour of saying how important imagination is.

Dear Magdalena,

There have been episodes in history where established religious dogma has, in fact, held back scientific progress and understanding within the scientific community and Critical Thinking within many societies. In general. Religion and religious faith is best kept out of discourses regarding science.

Dear Antonio and Magdalena,

One can postulate that a scientist with faith is stronger, more confident in pursuing unexplored paths in science and mathematics, than a scientist without any faith.

'our imagination tires before the nature' - albert einstein.

Human thinking represented an image. Authentic thinking is up to creativity, as to a first (grand-grand) language of poetry of the historical folks.- Dichtung To M. Heidegger, "thinking (Denken) is etymologized from memory (Gedenken)- Memory- from gratitude (Dank)- gratitude-from benediction, prayer (Andacht) - Gedanc (soul, heart). Truth is a truth of Being. It must be embeded, listened attentively. It sounds in the poetical language, in the artists' pictures. We can come to it through transcendence. Being is like listening attentively to a language. A thought gives a birth to Gestell, a thought of heart gives a birth to Geviert. N.Rerikh predicted transformation of civilization on this foundation: "cult-ure" - from Sanskrit- worship to light. "A language is House of Truth of Being...A language is a language of Being like the clouds in the sky".Thinkers and poets are inhabitants of this House. Their sphere is to ensure the openness of Being. To understand himself , truth of Being, you must listen to a language, speech. To reflect means to poeticize. A human being must live poetically on the Earth.