Imagination vs Knowledge

OK, I admit, I’ve been looking through Twitter for various quotes.  Yup, it’s filler for the blog, but it’s interesting (to me) filler.

Here’s one from one of the last century’s greatest minds.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Albert Einstein, of course.

This ties into a previous post of mine, where I stated that education doesn’t cover every possibility.  Well, neither does experience, the other major source of personal knowledge.

If we, as a people, had no imagination, there would be nothing to learn.  Without the imagination to spark investigation, we would not learn anything that wasn’t spoon-fed to us.  And if nobody had imagination, who would do the spoon-feeding?

During the Dark Ages, everybody knew that the sky was the absolute limit to existence; Earth was the center of all being, and that’s that.  That was knowledge.

Galileo disagreed.  He imagined a greater world.  Yes, I know it was based on his observation of planetary movement.  But if he had worked with the knowledge available in the day, he would have dismissed them as the hand of God working in mysterious ways.  Instead, he allowed himself to imagine worlds beyond our own; through his (and his successors’) imagination, the common-knowledge world-view was expanded.

But without imagination’s contribution, knowledge would never have grown.