Albert Einstein’s View of The Significance of a Creative Mind in Science than Knowledge

According to Albert Einstein, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. To me this quote shows the need to keep a creative mind, especially in the field of science. Just because someone can memorize a plethora of facts does not mean that the facts will be of any use; without any creativity or imagination that person cannot apply what they know or connect concepts together. The inverse also applies—imagination is practically useless in the sciences without any sort of grounding in prior knowledge, as it cannot be practically utilized. Therefore, realistically, imagination and knowledge work hand in hand. This leaves the question: to what extent can imagination be relied on to be accurate? To clarify, in the essence of scientific knowledge, what we know and can regard as knowledge as people can be proven through empirical evidence and reproducibility. However, imagination, in the search for knowledge, cannot be proven or disproven until it is proven or disproven, thereby leaving conclusions aided mostly by imagination in a state of uncertainty-based limbo. With that in mind, how much can one rely on imagination to lead one to the true answer?

Imagination sometimes misses the mark in terms of what is now perceived as the true result. One example is in the ancient study of humors, the idea that the balance of four liquids in one’s body-the humors-determined one’s temperament and the presence of any disease. (Science Museum). This perception, held by the most regarded philosophers, quickly found its way into ancient medicine, with “treatments”, such as bloodletting to make someone less sanguine, the norm of the time. While the idea of differing temperaments, also known as personality, survives, few can be led to believe in this modern age that they are the result of an imbalance of bodily fluids. That still leaves the fact that for hundreds of years people were led astray by the belief that one could treat what we may have seen now as legitimate mental disorders with simply bleeding the person out, without attempting to gain proof for or against. The result of imagination unchecked by knowledge but accepted as such, combined with general ignorance of the truth, results in the scourge against scientific truth known as the pseudosciences.

However, imagination is able to come to the correct, currently accepted conclusion-after all, if it never did it would not be useful in the sciences. One example I learned is in modern atomic theory, which I learned in normal chemistry and revisited in AP chemistry. The idea first developed from John Dalton, who asserted that everything is made of atoms and atoms combine to make new things, and because of various scientists building off of his ideas, we are now at our modern atomic theory, including not only the proton, neutron, and electron, but the subatomic particles that make up those particles. It can be said therefore that our knowledge of the atom is a series of scientifically verified educated guesses originating from one novel idea by Dalton. Of course, there were a few mistakes in predictions (Dalton stated that atoms are indestructible, but the atom bomb says otherwise) but overall the end result was more or less close to the actual result. This is in contrast to the study of humors, where while the existence of one’s personality is obviously true up to today, one’s personality has never been determined by the amount of blood, bile, and phlegm in their body. However, the difference between the two is that unlike ancient philosophers, Dalton presumably had prior chemistry knowledge in which to draw his inspiration of atomic theory from. In summary, imagination is able to create accurate conclusions, though to have accuracy one’s imagination would require prior knowledge.

To conclude, while imagination works with knowledge in search for scientific truth, imagination is rather unreliable on its own. This realization is a testament to the reliance of imagination to knowledge as, like in the case of ancient humors, people can be led astray for hundreds of years when nobody bothers to verify a theory using their knowledge or the scientific method. This is not to say that imagination does not have a place in the sciences—after all, William Lawrence Bragg is quoted to have said, “The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them”. When accompanied by actual knowledge, or verified scientifically, imagination can create tangible, credible results. These results are what drives scientific discovery to further expand, alongside imagination and knowledge.