The Role of Imagination

There are two kinds of researchers:
some for normal science, others for revolutionary science.
 
For the normal periods (say within a paradigm),
one needs researchers who work effectively
by controlling all the technical tools;
they are ‘master craftsmen’.
 
Today, 95 per cent of the researchers in string theory are master craftsmen.
 
It is they who were always
the best students in maths and physics,
from college until the PhD thesis,
able to solve mathematical problems
more quickly and better than the others.
 
But for the revolutionary periods, one needs visionaries.
 
Einstein was one of them, like Niels Bohr.
 
Kepler and Newton are very rare examples who had both qualities.
 
The visionaries decide to do science
because they raise questions
which their textbooks do not answer.
 
If they had not become scientists,
they could have become
painters, writers or musicians.
 
And indeed there are many similarities
between artistic and scientific creativity.
 
I’ll just recall the famous Einstein quotations:
‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world’,
and also ‘Man tries to make for himself in the fashion
that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world;
he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his
for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it.
This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher,
and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion.’
 
In: Is Science Nearing Its Limits ? Summarizing Dialogue
Jean-Pierre Luminet
Laboratoire Univers et Théories, CNRS-UMR 8102,
Observatoire de Paris, F-92195 Meudon cedex, France
jean-pierre.luminet@obspm.frhttp://arxiv.org/pdf/0804.1504v1