The Value of Creativity and Imagination

The Value of Creativity and Imagination

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SciAm excerpts Maria Konnikova’sMastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes“:

“It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science,” Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman once told an audience. Not only is that view patently false, but “it is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has already been seen, and that is different from what has been thought of; furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition.”

Imagination takes the stuff of observation and experience and recombines them into something new.