Zapperz said:
“My feelings on people who think that imagination is more important than knowledge is well-known. These people simply are parroting Einstein’s phrase without understanding the context and implications.”
Perhaps we should have an article about this "quote" of Einstein’s.
The quote attributed to Einstein was first published in 1929 in an article in Saturday Evening Post by George Sylvester Viereck based on an interview conducted with Einstein at his home in Germany (“
What Life Means to Einstein”, Sat. Evg. Post, Oct. 26, 1929). Here is the quote that was attributed to him:
"I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
First of all, one should point out that Mr. Viereck may not have made an accurate quote. He was not recording it, obviously. And he was not even taking very good notes. It appears that the author relied on his memory:
"I tried to secure an explanation of the fifth dimension. I regret to say that I do not remember the answer clearly. Einstein said something about a ball being thrown, which could disappear in one of two holes. One of these holes was the fifth, the other the sixth dimension."
The author, Viereck, also quoted Einstein as saying:
"No man," as Einstein said to me, sitting comfortably on the couch of the sitting room of his Berlin home, “can visualize four dimensions, except mathematically. We cannot visualize even three dimensions."
I am betting that there was something lost in the translation of that last sentence.
Since Einstein was interviewed while he was living in Germany he probably never saw a copy of the article. He may never have seen the quote that had been attributed to him. The article was published in the same week as the stock market crashed (which began Oct 24, 1929) so there may have been some distractions.
If Einstein did say something like the words that were attributed to him, what could he have been saying?
If he was using the word “knowledge” in the sense of physical facts or experimental data, and “imagination” in the sense of theory, then his statement is a bit bewildering. Both are important and he certainly knew that. Theory has to fit the experimental data. Experimental data can destroy a theory. How can an imaginative but wrong theory be more important than real physical data?
The only sense that I can make of a general statement that imagination is more important than knowledge would be the distinction between knowing facts and understanding what they mean. Example: as Feynman noted, the Mayans had amassed a great deal of very accurate data tracking the positions of Venus in the morning and night skies and could relate the time between those appearances to the length of a year. They could predict the appearance of Venus with this data. But they did not understand why these events occurred. They had no idea that Venus and Earth are planets orbiting the sun with Venus having an orbital periods roughly 5/8th that of the earth.
If it is accurate (and it likely is not), it is possible that Einstein wanted to say that understanding of the physical world is more important than just knowing facts about the physical world. If so he chose a poor way to express himself.
AM
