INTRODUCTION Berlin, 1929. The artist and writer George Sylvester Viereck has enchanted a meeting out of an at first reluctant superstar physicist. He asks: "How do you account for your discoveries? Through intuition or inspiration?" Albert Einstein replies: "Both. I sometimes feel I am right, but do not know it. When two expeditions of scientists went to test my theory I was convinced they would confirm my theory. I wasn't surprised when the results confirmed my intuition, but I would have been surprised had I been wrong. I'm enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination, which I think is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." At least that is what Einstein supported . But is it what …show more content…
The ancient dichotomy between what we know and what we dream, intuit or sense by instinct is found, in some form, in every field of human intellectual endeavour. It is found in the contrast between rationalist and mystic interpretations of the world's great religions, between realism and surrealism in the visual arts and between the merciless number-crunching of much experimental physics and the feathery abstractions of superstring and membrane theory.
Imagining is often contrasted with knowing. When you don't know anything about something, you need to imagine it. Knowledge bargains in actualities, imagination in fictions. A long way from being the inverse of knowing, imagining has the fundamental capacity of giving a way to knowledge— and not principally to knowledge of the deep, slippery sort that we may would like to pick up from extraordinary works of fiction, however knowledge of significantly more mundane, across the board matters of prompt handy significance. The digestion of imagining and knowing is a card that can be played for either realist or idealistic ends. The idealistic needs to move our origination of knowing towards our origination of imagining: by one means or another knowing deals in fictions. By difference, the realist needs to move our origination of imagination towards our conception of knowing: some way or another notwithstanding imagination arrangements in