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I recognize this is one of my longer posts. It doesn't have to be read all at one setting. However, reading it I think will help give yet another perspective. I try not to allow myself so much time to type because it runs into page after page, but some things need fleshed out and expanded, and in my thinking this is one of the most important things that needs to be said in our day and age of skepticism. One cannot just always rely on short and sweet tweeting, sometimes one must engage for a little bit of time to get a new grasp of our potential. Thanks for understanding, and I hope this is enjoyable reading for you all. It was pure unadulterated pleasure for me to research and write up. If it helps, print this off and read it, it might be easier on the eyes than reading it all on screen. It's not that many pages and I think it has an important theme.
The Power and Need for Imagination
We want facts. We want clear, understandable objective data, experimental verification and analytical coupled with mathematical reasoning along with critical thinking, not to be guided by feelings. Imagination is for sissies and those afraid of having their worldview refuted. Right? Isn’t that what we want in order to find reality? Scientific fact is anathema to imagination, feelings, intuition and prayer where woo woo rules and reality takes a back seat to wishful thinking. Right? Lets look into this for a minute or two.
In what is one of the still most outrageously stunning scientific popular books for the public ever written, Kip Thorne, Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, gave us perhaps a more startling revelation than anything he ever said on part of Einstein’s “outrageous legacy” in science thanks to his revolutionary Theories of Relativity. His 1994 book was “Black Holes and Time Warps, Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy,”(1) But in my considered opinion, no one really stopped to ponder the most astonishing thing he said in the book, among the many dozens of mind bending, soul warping, intellectually challenging, scintillating things he talked about. And I aim on making good capital on it in this paper because, without question, it really is the screamingest part of Einstein’s legacy of everything he turned topsy turvy in science, and it’s rarely recognized or talked about in science, let alone many other disciplines. It’s time to put the balance back into our intellectual lives. Here is what Thorne said.
“How did Einstein arrive at such a radical description of space and time? Not by examining the results of experiments.”(2) Because there weren’t much of any, and nothing with overly reliable scientific precision. Einstein was on the front end of life when he literally rewrote the universe. “Instead, Einstein relied on his own innate intuition [and imagination] as to how things ought to behave. After much reflection, it became intuitively obvious to him that the speed of light must be a universal constant, independent of direction and independent of one’s motion…not only was experiment unimportant in Einstein’s construction of a new foundation for physics, the ideas of other physicists were also unimportant. He paid little attention to other’s work. He seems not even to have read any of the important technical articles on space, time, and the aether that Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincare, Joseph Larmor, and others wrote between 1896 and 1905… the principle of Relativity is actually a metaprinciple in the sense that it is not itself a law of physics, but instead is a pattern or rule which (Einstein asserted) must be obeyed by all laws of physics, no matter what those laws might be, no matter whether they are laws governing electricity and magnetism, or atoms and molecules, or steam engines and sports cars. The power of this metaprinciple is breathtaking.”(3)
Realize this is a 25 year old who single handedly completely revolutionized Newtonian physics. Now come on, seriously, he literally changed everything we knew about every everyday facet of life in a physical cosmos, from time, space, motion, gravity to universal reality, and without any experimentation or mathematics!! Grasp the sheer arrogance and chutzpah here. This is jaw dropping out of this world unrealistically impossible, yet he did it, and not after 50 years of hard research and work, as a mere youth. Let that sink in… let that sink in deeply. He did it by intuition?! He felt in his heart it was correct?? Come on, no one can do that and expand valid reality and knowledge... can they? Lets keep eyeing this.
Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics City University of New York, and bestselling science author for decades, with dozens of books to his credit educating the public, noted that hurrying and getting the boring stuff out of the way in his absolutely dead end job in the patent office, “Einstein would sit back and return to a dream he had when he was a child. In his youth, Einstein had read a book, Aaron Bernstein’s “People’s Book on Natural Science,” ‘a work which I read with breathless attention,’ he recalled. Bernstein asked the reader to imagine riding alongside electricity as it raced down a telegraph wire. When he was sixteen, Einstein asked himself a similar question: what would a light beam look like if you could catch up to it?... As a child, Einstein thought that if you could race alongside a light beam it should appear frozen, like a motionless wave. However, no one had ever seen frozen light.”(4) So he imagined it. He imagined it!!! He had no way of discussing it mathematically, he was way, way out of his league mathematically at this time in his life. There was literally nothing science could do to back him up, there was no science for him to lay hold of that could help him learn what would happen. All he could do is imagine it up in his head, and hopefully not come up with anything too wild. Imagination leads to train wrecks scientifically. Or at least, that is sometimes what is imagined.
Einstein recalled on another occasion, “I was sitting in a chair in the patent office in Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me. If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight. I was startled This simple insight left a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation.”(5) Hadn’t Newton already worked that out? Was Einstein crazy or drunk or what?
So he imagined things up in his mind? Isn’t that for poets and science fiction and romance and fantasy authors like J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Goodkind and Robert Jordan and Stephen King and Katie Cross? And that’s supposed to be a valid way of learning using imagination?! You really think that’s a legitimate way to arrive at truth? Contrast that in experiment after experiment after long tedious hours of testing and experimentation Newton using all kinds of apparatus, inventing a new mathematics of Calculus, writing a tome of many hundreds of pages with complex analysis and mathematics and charts and diagrams and gathered some scientifically valid ideas, and some young kid imagining things up in his head, outdid Newton and completely changed everything we had known, as actual reality and knowledge, what space, and time, and motion, and reality is by imagining something different?! The audacity here is inutterably arrogant and audaciously ridiculous. Subjectively imagining things is not scientific and cannot possibly arrive at objectively testable knowledge.
Astrophysicist Donald Goldsmith says “we cannot reasonably expect the universe to behave in accordance with our intuition. Formed by our limited experiences on this planet, our intuitive conclusions have no logical claim to include far-reaching truths about the universe as a whole.”(6) Amazingly enough, world renowned Quantum Physicist David Bohm bluntly put it “every kind of thought, mathematics included, is an abstraction.” He also noted Einstein appreciated mathematics and beauty but did not start from that point. “Instead, he started with unspecifiable feelings [feelings!?] and a succession of images out of which more detailed concepts eventually emerged.”(7) Professor of Physics at Dartmouth College Deloe E. Mook wrote “Albert Einstein’s work on Relativity was guided by a series of simple even childlike questions.”(8) Banesh Hoffmann, professor emeritus at Queen’s College of CUNY intoned “A lesser man would at once have dismissed this general principle of relativity as a pleasing fantasy that unfortunately conflicted with elementary facts of everyday experience. [ya think?] But Einstein trusted his aesthetic sense.”(9) His aesthetic sense? What is this?! This is Einstein imagining is what this is. In essence he said everything has to behave the way I say so because I imagined it, and I gotta hunch on this, I really have a strong intuition here.
Of the twin paradox, where one twin stays home, the other flies off into outer space at almost the speed of light and then comes back and finds he is 1 year older and aged from only 35 to 36 years while his twin is 96 years old, “That imaginary story may seem fantastic.”(10) May seem?? Stan Gibilisco said “he set out to discover, mathematically, in the privacy of his own mind, things that have affected the course of human history to an extent previously unparalleled.”(11) Author Necia H. Apfel wrote “Einstein was fond of using ‘thought experiments’ to help explain his concepts both to himself and to others. By imagining specific situations which would be impossible actually to create, he derived solutions to the problems he was working on.”(12)
Professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester and professor of theoretical physics at the University of Manchester Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw said Einstein used thought experiments since they were his favorite technique and “therefore, our goal for the next few pages is to work out the consequences of Einstein’s axioms,” using thought experiments also since the mathematics simply lose us. We have to use thought experiments (our imagination) in order to grasp the astonishing truths of relativity that began as imagination!(13) Professor A. Zee wrote “Einstein imagined an elevatorlike box floating in space far from any gravitational field…”(14) Einstein blew common sense completely out of the universe of 1905 and ever since then according to Benjamin F. Wissler Professor of Physics at Middlebury College, author Richard Wolfson, and all in 6 major physics papers in just one year, 1905, with preciously sparse mathematics or physics.(15) I’ll believe it when I see it is impossible now with Einstein, since it isn’t about seeing and using common sense, since common sense is wrong; it is about intuiting and feeling and imagination, all of which have been fundamentally verified after Einstein’s imagined ideas in multiple experiments have been performed according to Clifford M. Will, Professor of Physics and member of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.(16)
Lets grasp how his imagination on traveling as fast as light worked. “Albert tried to form a simple picture of how light works.”(17) I am going to paraphrase Schwartz and McGuinness, since the issue here and the discussion in the book I am using is difficult. It is a cartoon book and they add a lot of extra fun and funny ways of saying things, with lots of zany pictures, but the idea is well explained. I will indicate the pages where the ideas are found after I am done explaining this incredible imagined scenario Einstein came up with. I’m picking out the entire thought from many of their side remarks and interruptions that make you laugh. Their cartoons are spectacular by the way. Get the book, it’s very well done.
Suppose I was holding a mirror and riding along with a light wave at the speed of light, and then held the mirror out in front of me, would I see my reflection? If I were moving at the speed of light, then the light from my face couldn’t catch up to the mirror. Because, if you are moving at the speed of light and the mirror is moving at the speed of light the light can’t catch up to the mirror! The light isn’t moving with respect to you and can’t catch up to the mirror to get reflected. But no matter whether there was an aether or not, my image should not disappear. But, then an observer on the ground would see the light leaving Albert’s face twice its normal velocity! Albert thinks If I’m moving at 186,000 miles per second and the light leaves my face at 186,000 miles per second, then relative to the ground the light should be moving at 186,000 + 186,000 = 372,000 miles per second, right? That doesn’t make sense though.
The speed of waves (light was thought of as waves at this time) depends only on the medium and not on the source. So sound, traveling on waves, from a passing train covers the distance to the observer in the same time no matter how fast the train is moving. The equations for electromagnetism of Maxwell said the same thing. The observer on the ground should always see the light leaving Albert’s face at the same speed no matter how fast Albert was moving. But if the observer on the ground were to see the same speed for the light leaving Albert’s face no matter how fast Albert were moving, then Albert should be able to catch up to the light leaving his face and his image should disappear. But if his image shouldn’t disappear, then light leaving his face should travel toward the mirror normally. But then the observer on the ground should see the light traveling toward the mirror at twice its normal speed. But if the observer on the ground….. you get the problem. Albert began to try and see if there were any way for the speed of light to be the SAME for BOTH the moving and the ground observers! And that’s when he went to the principle of relativity that Galileo had shown. You can’t tell if you are moving smoothly without looking outside. In a box with no windows, you can’t tell if you are moving or not without an outside reference. So, Einstein argued he should be able to see his face even while moving at the speed of light. Why? Because if your image disappeared when you were moving at the speed of light, you could tell you were moving at the speed of light smoothly just by looking at the mirror. You wouldn’t need to look outside, which would violate the principle of relativity!
Since light always travels at the same speed no matter what, whether you are moving with it or away from it, or toward it, that means space and time shrink depending on how fast you are traveling! Light speed is the absolute, not space and not time. They are relative to speed. And there are no instantaneous interactions in nature. That means there must be a maximum possible speed of interaction. That maximum speed must be the same for every observer no matter how they are moving.(18) Pretty dang amazing isn’t it for a youth?
We see here the incredible a priori power of imagination first, calculation, math, and experiment second. We have to include imagination, it cannot be left out in our search for reality and truth and our place in the universe.
In her remarkable study of ancient Greek religion, Jane Ellen Harrison, one of the first ever women university professors, discussed the various “imaginary” little beings called “keres,” which have been interpreted variously as ghosts, bogeys, spirits, and other descriptions. She notes that in the 5th century B.C. they were “little winged sprites.”(19) They were thought of as sources of evil since they brought evil. What kind of evil? They engendered corruption and pollution. A key theme here and hint is that they were “like a sort of personified bacilli.”(20) So instead of our judging the ancient Greeks as simpleton minded superstitious peasants, lets think through this. “The primitive Greek leapt by his religious imagination to a forecast of the truth that it has taken science centuries to establish, i.e., the fact that disease caused by little live things, germs – bacilli we call them, he used the word keres.” She continues “To the primitive mind all diseases are caused by, or rather are, bad spirits.(21) So instead of letting the mythological language throw us of and cause us to give unjustified superiority judgment on the ancient silly religious imagination, let us remember “The Keres are still physical actual things not impersonations. So when Aeschylus puts into the mouth of his Danaid women the prayer
Nor many diseases, noisome swarm,
Settle upon our heads, to harm
Our Citizens,
The ‘noisome swarm’ is no ‘mere poetical’ figure, but the reflection of a real primitive conviction of live pests. The little fluttering insect-like diseases…” even though they are drawn as little people with wings, that is merely an artistic representation of something harming them that they cannot see, but imagine to be real.(22)
Mark Booth, an editor for his entire life, educated in philosophy, in one of the most stimulating books I have read in many a year, has asked his audience to “imagine what it would feel like to believe the opposite of what you have been brought up to believe. This inevitably involves an altered state of consciousness to some degree or other, which is just as it should be. Because at the heart of all esoteric teaching, in all parts of the world lies the belief that higher forms of intelligence can be accessed in altered states.”(23) The reason why the ancients gave us stories in myths is because they were giving us “an account of history – with its mythical and supernatural happenings – of how human consciousness evolved.”(24) Their view is that the world is first mind, then matter, which science has fought against since Newton (one reason William Blake was so adamantly against Newton’s worldview). In our minds, “a thought is never still. It is a living thing that can never be identified definitively with the dead letter of language. That is why Schopenhauer said that as soon as you try to put a thought into words it ceases to be true… when we try to imagine ourselves into the mind of someone about two and a half thousand years ago, walking through woodland to a sacred grove or a temple such as Newgrange in Ireland, or Eleusis in Greece, to such a person the wood and everything in it is alive.”(25)
Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, and the recipient of over 40 honorary degrees from 40 different universities, has noted “Everywhere around us we see the emergence of structures that bear witness to the ‘creativity of nature,’ to use Whitehead’s term.”(26) He is also aware that science has been heading down the road for many decades now to the feeling of alienation in our lives, “the negation of everything that gives meaning to human life.” But it need not be that way, because creativity and imagination in his work has spurned him onto some great and exciting discoveries. But notice he says “Human creativity and imagination” is what led him to wonderful discoveries!(27) David Bohm, a world renowned Quantum Physicist, reminded us that “our theories are not descriptions of reality as it is, but rather, ever changing forms of insight…”(28) In conjunction with this the important point of Werner Heisenberg, one of the founding fathers of Quantum Physics, who formulated the uncertainty principle, wrote that “mathematics… played only a subordinate, secondary role,” in the revolutionary physics he helped create. “Mathematics is the form in which we express our understanding of nature; but it is not the content of that understanding.”(29)
The Cosmos is beauty. Beauty is a value, a “qualia,” which defies purely rational analytic thinking. But we certainly can and do say rational things about it, but “the rational intellect, at its highest, only establishes facts. Conversely, the cognitive power through which we experience beauty establishes value and meaning. Beauty ultimately transcends reductive analysis – at its fullest it may only be experienced, and through the experience of beauty we become truly human.”(30) I think this is what Heisenberg was getting at.
“To think creatively is first to feel. The desire to understand must be whipped together with sensual and emotional feelings and blended with intellect to yield imaginative insight. Indeed, the intimate connections between thinking, emotions, and feelings are the subject of a startling book by neurologist Antonio Damasio who finds [against Rene Descartes separation of mind (and thinking) from body (and being or feeling)] that neurological patients whose emotional effect is grossly altered due to strokes, accidents, or tumors, lose the ability to make rational plans. Because they are unable to become emotionally involved in their decisions, they fail to make good ones. Our feelings – our intuitions – are not impediments to rational thinking, they form its origin and bases. For Damasio, body and mind, emotion and intellect are inseparable… creative thinking and expression in every discipline are born of intuition and emotion.”(31) Max Planck, the founder of Quantum Mechanics, said it plain – “’the scientist needs an artistically creative imagination.’ Indeed, scientist and artist are kin, for their insights begin in the same realm of feeling and intuition and emerge into consciousness through the same creative process.”(32)
David Fideler, a classical scholar and founder of Phanes Press and Alexandria, a classic journal of the Western Traditions, has described what we need to do to re-begin our own creative thinking and finding experiences which fill our lives with meaning, with joy, with profound satisfaction to overthrow the stale banality that life has become for so many millions of people, in large part because science in the last several centuries has, if not killed, then severely crippled spirituality for the West.
Agreeing with Einstein, who said “I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research,” Fideler notes “The order and beauty of nature awakens wonder, awe, and amazement. Thus, the sense of wonder is the cosmological impulse, the common seed from which religion, philosophy, and science emerge.”(33) Using Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fideler gives us something deliciously startling. “The underlying reality of the world is not matter, whatever that might be, but nonmaterial patterns of relationship. Coleridge, “in a famous passage, explained how nature’s creative power and humanity’s creative power are one and the same, for ‘the rules of the IMAGINATION are themselves the very powers of growth and production.’”(34)
In discussing the overwhelmingly gorgeous Navaho sand paintings, used for healing, prophecy and other uses, Joseph Campbell, the world renowned mythologist noted the meticulous details, the astounding lengths of time it takes to make truly perfect, absolutely perfect sand paintings using only their hands, and they always leave one thing out. They leave it incomplete. The reason why is to complete it is to imbue it with incredible power. And once they are done with them, after their use they are not just brushed away, but the sand is very carefully put into a special container and taken away where to no one knows. It is sacred. It is powerful. It is imaginative and gloriously thrilling to look over those fabulous beautiful creations. It opens one up to transcendence. “the deity opens, you have a religion of identification with the divine.”(35) “The hidden order of life would reveal itself to those who approach it with an affirmative mind and an open heart.”(36) One of Campbell’s favorite sayings was “The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast.”(37) Another mythologist, Mercea Eliade advocated “it is the religious vision of the world and the ideology derived from it which have enabled the man to bring his individual experience fulfillment, to ‘open’ it towards the universal.”(38)
This opening, this awakening, is our personal initiation into the knowledge that our imagination repowers us as “ultimately the entire universe is holy and there is nothing which is without a share of soul.”(39) He indicates a sublime truth known as we awaken to a new reality of dream, vision, excitement, and above all creative imagination in order to tune up ourselves. “Our individual souls, rooted in the cosmic soul, feed on beauty. In order to feel fulfilled as humans we need to taste and deeply savor our relation to the greater whole from which we have emerged. Nature’s elegant patterns of sharing radiant beauty and goodness, a beauty and goodness that we embody in the most profound ways. When we can sense the vitally exuberant power of the World Soul and perceive its radiance shining through the forms of nature, we become tangibly aware of our innermost bonds with the living universe.”(40)
Our imaginations will reanimate our spirituality which will once again revitalize life as it is supposed to be. Imagination is spirituality, the processing ourselves back into the ground of our existence, the living universe as the ancients understood it to be. Their vital discoveries, their astonishing accomplishments were made precisely because they were animated with their hearts, their souls, their connections spiritually, psychologically, and physically with the real home of which we are all, the universe, the most creative process there has ever been. We are that process.
Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, Mother
And Spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto thee. – T.S. Eliot
Endnotes
1.Kip Thorne, “Black Holes and Time Warps, Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy,” W. W. Norton, 1994, a whopping 600 page text on the zany craziness of black holes, worm holes, warping time and space, weird, quirky time machine ideas, all because of Einstein’s proven science in Relativity. Besides, it was great fun to read!
2.Thorne, “Ibid.,” p. 78.
3.Thorne, “Ibid.,” p. 81, 82.
4.Michio Kaku, “Parallel Worlds,” Anchor Books, 2005: 31-32.
5.John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin, “Annus Mirabilis, 1905, Albert Einstein, and the Theory of Relativity,” Chamberlain Brothers, Penguin Group, 2005: 111-112.
6.Donald Goldsmith, “Einstein’s Greatest Blunder? The Cosmological Constant and other Fudge Factors in the Physics of the Universe,” Harvard University Press, 3rd printing, 1997: 3.
7.David Bohm and F. David Peat, “Science, Order, and Creativity,” Bantam Books, 1987: 7, 9.
8.Delo E. Mook and Thomas Vargish, “Inside Relativity,” Princeton University Press, 1987: 54.
9.Banesh Hoffmann, “Relativity and Its Roots,” Scientific American Books, 1983: 130.
10.Michael Chester, “Relativity,” W. W. Norton, 1967: 24.
11.Stan Gibilisico, “Understanding Einstein’s Theories of Relativity, Man’s New Perspective on the Cosmos,” Dover Publications, 1991: 1.
12.Necia H. Apfel, “It’s All Relative, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity,” Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books, 1981.
13.Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, “Why Does E=MC2?” Da Capo Press, Perseus Press Group, 2009: 41-42.
14.A. Zee, “Fearful Symmetry, The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics,” Macmillan Publishing, 1986: 78.
15.Richard Wolfson, “Simply Einstein, Relativity Demystified,” W. W. Norton, 1973: 80-83.
16.Clifford M. Will, “Was Einstein Right? Putting General Relativity to the Test,” BasicBooks, 1986.
17.Joseph Schwartz and Michael McGuinness, “Einstein For Beginners,” Pantheon Books, 1979: 71.
18.Joseph Schwartz and Michael McGuinness, “Einstein for Beginners,” pp. 71-109.
19.Jane Ellen Harrison, “Prologomena to the Study of Greek Religion,” Princeton University Press, 1991: 165.
20.Harrison, “Ibid.,” p. 166.
21.Harrison, “Ibid.,” p. 167. The Etymologicon Magnum explains Hepialos as a shivering fever and a daimon that comes upon those that are asleep. Hepialos is a disease caused by the keres, the nightmare bacillus. (p. 167).
22.Harrison, “Ibid.,” p. 170. See figure 16, p. 166, figure 20, p. 177, figure 40, p. 207, figure 44, p. 211.
23.Mark Booth, “The Secret History of the World,” Overlook Press, 2008: 27.
24.Booth, “Ibid.,” p. 44.
25.Booth, “Ibid.,” p. 52, 53.
26.Ilya Prigogine, “The End of Certainty, Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature,” The Free Press, 1997: 62.
27.Prigogine, “Ibid.,” p. 188.
28.David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order,” Routledge, 1980: 17.
29.As found in Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein, “Sparks of Genius, The 13 Tools of the World’s Most Creative People,” Houghton Mifflin, 1999: 5.
30.David Fideler, “Introduction,” in “Alexandria, The Journal of the Western Cosmological Traditions,” Phanes Press, 1991: 8.
31.Bernstein, “Sparks of Genius,” p. 6.
32.Bernstein, “Sparks of Genius,” p. 10.
33.David Fideler, “Restoring the Soul of the World, Our Living Bond with Nature’s Intelligence,” Inner Traditions, 2014: 10.
34.Fideler, “Restoring the Soul of the World,” p. 161.
35.Joseph Campbell, “Transformations of Myth Through Time,” Harper and Row Publishers, 1990: 31, 35.
36.Stephen and Robin Larsen, “Joseph Campbell, A Fire in the Mind, The Authorized Biography,” Inner Traditions, 2002: 457. Campbell understood the difference between religion and spirituality. It is the living of your life in openness to the unseen world which is truly the essence of religion. (p. 550-551).
37.Larsen, “Fire in the Mind,” p. 254.
38.Mercea Eliade, “Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries,” Harper Torchbooks, 1960: 19.
39.David Fideler, “Restoring the Soul of the World,” p. 68. “By realizing our true identity, we become one with the fundamental power that orders the universe and brings the world to creative fruition.” (p. 68).
40.Fideler, “Restoring the Soul of the World,” p. 51. “Through the power of beauty, the universe conspires to ignite our vision and passion, to awaken our essential nature. At their root, both human love and the unquenchable wonder aroused by the beauty of the cosmic pattern are part of a common erotic movement to grasp and participate in the deepest levels of reality.” (p. 45).
The Power and Need for Imagination
We want facts. We want clear, understandable objective data, experimental verification and analytical coupled with mathematical reasoning along with critical thinking, not to be guided by feelings. Imagination is for sissies and those afraid of having their worldview refuted. Right? Isn’t that what we want in order to find reality? Scientific fact is anathema to imagination, feelings, intuition and prayer where woo woo rules and reality takes a back seat to wishful thinking. Right? Lets look into this for a minute or two.
In what is one of the still most outrageously stunning scientific popular books for the public ever written, Kip Thorne, Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, gave us perhaps a more startling revelation than anything he ever said on part of Einstein’s “outrageous legacy” in science thanks to his revolutionary Theories of Relativity. His 1994 book was “Black Holes and Time Warps, Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy,”(1) But in my considered opinion, no one really stopped to ponder the most astonishing thing he said in the book, among the many dozens of mind bending, soul warping, intellectually challenging, scintillating things he talked about. And I aim on making good capital on it in this paper because, without question, it really is the screamingest part of Einstein’s legacy of everything he turned topsy turvy in science, and it’s rarely recognized or talked about in science, let alone many other disciplines. It’s time to put the balance back into our intellectual lives. Here is what Thorne said.
“How did Einstein arrive at such a radical description of space and time? Not by examining the results of experiments.”(2) Because there weren’t much of any, and nothing with overly reliable scientific precision. Einstein was on the front end of life when he literally rewrote the universe. “Instead, Einstein relied on his own innate intuition [and imagination] as to how things ought to behave. After much reflection, it became intuitively obvious to him that the speed of light must be a universal constant, independent of direction and independent of one’s motion…not only was experiment unimportant in Einstein’s construction of a new foundation for physics, the ideas of other physicists were also unimportant. He paid little attention to other’s work. He seems not even to have read any of the important technical articles on space, time, and the aether that Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincare, Joseph Larmor, and others wrote between 1896 and 1905… the principle of Relativity is actually a metaprinciple in the sense that it is not itself a law of physics, but instead is a pattern or rule which (Einstein asserted) must be obeyed by all laws of physics, no matter what those laws might be, no matter whether they are laws governing electricity and magnetism, or atoms and molecules, or steam engines and sports cars. The power of this metaprinciple is breathtaking.”(3)
Realize this is a 25 year old who single handedly completely revolutionized Newtonian physics. Now come on, seriously, he literally changed everything we knew about every everyday facet of life in a physical cosmos, from time, space, motion, gravity to universal reality, and without any experimentation or mathematics!! Grasp the sheer arrogance and chutzpah here. This is jaw dropping out of this world unrealistically impossible, yet he did it, and not after 50 years of hard research and work, as a mere youth. Let that sink in… let that sink in deeply. He did it by intuition?! He felt in his heart it was correct?? Come on, no one can do that and expand valid reality and knowledge... can they? Lets keep eyeing this.
Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics City University of New York, and bestselling science author for decades, with dozens of books to his credit educating the public, noted that hurrying and getting the boring stuff out of the way in his absolutely dead end job in the patent office, “Einstein would sit back and return to a dream he had when he was a child. In his youth, Einstein had read a book, Aaron Bernstein’s “People’s Book on Natural Science,” ‘a work which I read with breathless attention,’ he recalled. Bernstein asked the reader to imagine riding alongside electricity as it raced down a telegraph wire. When he was sixteen, Einstein asked himself a similar question: what would a light beam look like if you could catch up to it?... As a child, Einstein thought that if you could race alongside a light beam it should appear frozen, like a motionless wave. However, no one had ever seen frozen light.”(4) So he imagined it. He imagined it!!! He had no way of discussing it mathematically, he was way, way out of his league mathematically at this time in his life. There was literally nothing science could do to back him up, there was no science for him to lay hold of that could help him learn what would happen. All he could do is imagine it up in his head, and hopefully not come up with anything too wild. Imagination leads to train wrecks scientifically. Or at least, that is sometimes what is imagined.
Einstein recalled on another occasion, “I was sitting in a chair in the patent office in Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me. If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight. I was startled This simple insight left a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation.”(5) Hadn’t Newton already worked that out? Was Einstein crazy or drunk or what?
So he imagined things up in his mind? Isn’t that for poets and science fiction and romance and fantasy authors like J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Goodkind and Robert Jordan and Stephen King and Katie Cross? And that’s supposed to be a valid way of learning using imagination?! You really think that’s a legitimate way to arrive at truth? Contrast that in experiment after experiment after long tedious hours of testing and experimentation Newton using all kinds of apparatus, inventing a new mathematics of Calculus, writing a tome of many hundreds of pages with complex analysis and mathematics and charts and diagrams and gathered some scientifically valid ideas, and some young kid imagining things up in his head, outdid Newton and completely changed everything we had known, as actual reality and knowledge, what space, and time, and motion, and reality is by imagining something different?! The audacity here is inutterably arrogant and audaciously ridiculous. Subjectively imagining things is not scientific and cannot possibly arrive at objectively testable knowledge.
Astrophysicist Donald Goldsmith says “we cannot reasonably expect the universe to behave in accordance with our intuition. Formed by our limited experiences on this planet, our intuitive conclusions have no logical claim to include far-reaching truths about the universe as a whole.”(6) Amazingly enough, world renowned Quantum Physicist David Bohm bluntly put it “every kind of thought, mathematics included, is an abstraction.” He also noted Einstein appreciated mathematics and beauty but did not start from that point. “Instead, he started with unspecifiable feelings [feelings!?] and a succession of images out of which more detailed concepts eventually emerged.”(7) Professor of Physics at Dartmouth College Deloe E. Mook wrote “Albert Einstein’s work on Relativity was guided by a series of simple even childlike questions.”(8) Banesh Hoffmann, professor emeritus at Queen’s College of CUNY intoned “A lesser man would at once have dismissed this general principle of relativity as a pleasing fantasy that unfortunately conflicted with elementary facts of everyday experience. [ya think?] But Einstein trusted his aesthetic sense.”(9) His aesthetic sense? What is this?! This is Einstein imagining is what this is. In essence he said everything has to behave the way I say so because I imagined it, and I gotta hunch on this, I really have a strong intuition here.
Of the twin paradox, where one twin stays home, the other flies off into outer space at almost the speed of light and then comes back and finds he is 1 year older and aged from only 35 to 36 years while his twin is 96 years old, “That imaginary story may seem fantastic.”(10) May seem?? Stan Gibilisco said “he set out to discover, mathematically, in the privacy of his own mind, things that have affected the course of human history to an extent previously unparalleled.”(11) Author Necia H. Apfel wrote “Einstein was fond of using ‘thought experiments’ to help explain his concepts both to himself and to others. By imagining specific situations which would be impossible actually to create, he derived solutions to the problems he was working on.”(12)
Professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester and professor of theoretical physics at the University of Manchester Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw said Einstein used thought experiments since they were his favorite technique and “therefore, our goal for the next few pages is to work out the consequences of Einstein’s axioms,” using thought experiments also since the mathematics simply lose us. We have to use thought experiments (our imagination) in order to grasp the astonishing truths of relativity that began as imagination!(13) Professor A. Zee wrote “Einstein imagined an elevatorlike box floating in space far from any gravitational field…”(14) Einstein blew common sense completely out of the universe of 1905 and ever since then according to Benjamin F. Wissler Professor of Physics at Middlebury College, author Richard Wolfson, and all in 6 major physics papers in just one year, 1905, with preciously sparse mathematics or physics.(15) I’ll believe it when I see it is impossible now with Einstein, since it isn’t about seeing and using common sense, since common sense is wrong; it is about intuiting and feeling and imagination, all of which have been fundamentally verified after Einstein’s imagined ideas in multiple experiments have been performed according to Clifford M. Will, Professor of Physics and member of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.(16)
Lets grasp how his imagination on traveling as fast as light worked. “Albert tried to form a simple picture of how light works.”(17) I am going to paraphrase Schwartz and McGuinness, since the issue here and the discussion in the book I am using is difficult. It is a cartoon book and they add a lot of extra fun and funny ways of saying things, with lots of zany pictures, but the idea is well explained. I will indicate the pages where the ideas are found after I am done explaining this incredible imagined scenario Einstein came up with. I’m picking out the entire thought from many of their side remarks and interruptions that make you laugh. Their cartoons are spectacular by the way. Get the book, it’s very well done.
Suppose I was holding a mirror and riding along with a light wave at the speed of light, and then held the mirror out in front of me, would I see my reflection? If I were moving at the speed of light, then the light from my face couldn’t catch up to the mirror. Because, if you are moving at the speed of light and the mirror is moving at the speed of light the light can’t catch up to the mirror! The light isn’t moving with respect to you and can’t catch up to the mirror to get reflected. But no matter whether there was an aether or not, my image should not disappear. But, then an observer on the ground would see the light leaving Albert’s face twice its normal velocity! Albert thinks If I’m moving at 186,000 miles per second and the light leaves my face at 186,000 miles per second, then relative to the ground the light should be moving at 186,000 + 186,000 = 372,000 miles per second, right? That doesn’t make sense though.
The speed of waves (light was thought of as waves at this time) depends only on the medium and not on the source. So sound, traveling on waves, from a passing train covers the distance to the observer in the same time no matter how fast the train is moving. The equations for electromagnetism of Maxwell said the same thing. The observer on the ground should always see the light leaving Albert’s face at the same speed no matter how fast Albert was moving. But if the observer on the ground were to see the same speed for the light leaving Albert’s face no matter how fast Albert were moving, then Albert should be able to catch up to the light leaving his face and his image should disappear. But if his image shouldn’t disappear, then light leaving his face should travel toward the mirror normally. But then the observer on the ground should see the light traveling toward the mirror at twice its normal speed. But if the observer on the ground….. you get the problem. Albert began to try and see if there were any way for the speed of light to be the SAME for BOTH the moving and the ground observers! And that’s when he went to the principle of relativity that Galileo had shown. You can’t tell if you are moving smoothly without looking outside. In a box with no windows, you can’t tell if you are moving or not without an outside reference. So, Einstein argued he should be able to see his face even while moving at the speed of light. Why? Because if your image disappeared when you were moving at the speed of light, you could tell you were moving at the speed of light smoothly just by looking at the mirror. You wouldn’t need to look outside, which would violate the principle of relativity!
Since light always travels at the same speed no matter what, whether you are moving with it or away from it, or toward it, that means space and time shrink depending on how fast you are traveling! Light speed is the absolute, not space and not time. They are relative to speed. And there are no instantaneous interactions in nature. That means there must be a maximum possible speed of interaction. That maximum speed must be the same for every observer no matter how they are moving.(18) Pretty dang amazing isn’t it for a youth?
We see here the incredible a priori power of imagination first, calculation, math, and experiment second. We have to include imagination, it cannot be left out in our search for reality and truth and our place in the universe.
In her remarkable study of ancient Greek religion, Jane Ellen Harrison, one of the first ever women university professors, discussed the various “imaginary” little beings called “keres,” which have been interpreted variously as ghosts, bogeys, spirits, and other descriptions. She notes that in the 5th century B.C. they were “little winged sprites.”(19) They were thought of as sources of evil since they brought evil. What kind of evil? They engendered corruption and pollution. A key theme here and hint is that they were “like a sort of personified bacilli.”(20) So instead of our judging the ancient Greeks as simpleton minded superstitious peasants, lets think through this. “The primitive Greek leapt by his religious imagination to a forecast of the truth that it has taken science centuries to establish, i.e., the fact that disease caused by little live things, germs – bacilli we call them, he used the word keres.” She continues “To the primitive mind all diseases are caused by, or rather are, bad spirits.(21) So instead of letting the mythological language throw us of and cause us to give unjustified superiority judgment on the ancient silly religious imagination, let us remember “The Keres are still physical actual things not impersonations. So when Aeschylus puts into the mouth of his Danaid women the prayer
Nor many diseases, noisome swarm,
Settle upon our heads, to harm
Our Citizens,
The ‘noisome swarm’ is no ‘mere poetical’ figure, but the reflection of a real primitive conviction of live pests. The little fluttering insect-like diseases…” even though they are drawn as little people with wings, that is merely an artistic representation of something harming them that they cannot see, but imagine to be real.(22)
Mark Booth, an editor for his entire life, educated in philosophy, in one of the most stimulating books I have read in many a year, has asked his audience to “imagine what it would feel like to believe the opposite of what you have been brought up to believe. This inevitably involves an altered state of consciousness to some degree or other, which is just as it should be. Because at the heart of all esoteric teaching, in all parts of the world lies the belief that higher forms of intelligence can be accessed in altered states.”(23) The reason why the ancients gave us stories in myths is because they were giving us “an account of history – with its mythical and supernatural happenings – of how human consciousness evolved.”(24) Their view is that the world is first mind, then matter, which science has fought against since Newton (one reason William Blake was so adamantly against Newton’s worldview). In our minds, “a thought is never still. It is a living thing that can never be identified definitively with the dead letter of language. That is why Schopenhauer said that as soon as you try to put a thought into words it ceases to be true… when we try to imagine ourselves into the mind of someone about two and a half thousand years ago, walking through woodland to a sacred grove or a temple such as Newgrange in Ireland, or Eleusis in Greece, to such a person the wood and everything in it is alive.”(25)
Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, and the recipient of over 40 honorary degrees from 40 different universities, has noted “Everywhere around us we see the emergence of structures that bear witness to the ‘creativity of nature,’ to use Whitehead’s term.”(26) He is also aware that science has been heading down the road for many decades now to the feeling of alienation in our lives, “the negation of everything that gives meaning to human life.” But it need not be that way, because creativity and imagination in his work has spurned him onto some great and exciting discoveries. But notice he says “Human creativity and imagination” is what led him to wonderful discoveries!(27) David Bohm, a world renowned Quantum Physicist, reminded us that “our theories are not descriptions of reality as it is, but rather, ever changing forms of insight…”(28) In conjunction with this the important point of Werner Heisenberg, one of the founding fathers of Quantum Physics, who formulated the uncertainty principle, wrote that “mathematics… played only a subordinate, secondary role,” in the revolutionary physics he helped create. “Mathematics is the form in which we express our understanding of nature; but it is not the content of that understanding.”(29)
The Cosmos is beauty. Beauty is a value, a “qualia,” which defies purely rational analytic thinking. But we certainly can and do say rational things about it, but “the rational intellect, at its highest, only establishes facts. Conversely, the cognitive power through which we experience beauty establishes value and meaning. Beauty ultimately transcends reductive analysis – at its fullest it may only be experienced, and through the experience of beauty we become truly human.”(30) I think this is what Heisenberg was getting at.
“To think creatively is first to feel. The desire to understand must be whipped together with sensual and emotional feelings and blended with intellect to yield imaginative insight. Indeed, the intimate connections between thinking, emotions, and feelings are the subject of a startling book by neurologist Antonio Damasio who finds [against Rene Descartes separation of mind (and thinking) from body (and being or feeling)] that neurological patients whose emotional effect is grossly altered due to strokes, accidents, or tumors, lose the ability to make rational plans. Because they are unable to become emotionally involved in their decisions, they fail to make good ones. Our feelings – our intuitions – are not impediments to rational thinking, they form its origin and bases. For Damasio, body and mind, emotion and intellect are inseparable… creative thinking and expression in every discipline are born of intuition and emotion.”(31) Max Planck, the founder of Quantum Mechanics, said it plain – “’the scientist needs an artistically creative imagination.’ Indeed, scientist and artist are kin, for their insights begin in the same realm of feeling and intuition and emerge into consciousness through the same creative process.”(32)
David Fideler, a classical scholar and founder of Phanes Press and Alexandria, a classic journal of the Western Traditions, has described what we need to do to re-begin our own creative thinking and finding experiences which fill our lives with meaning, with joy, with profound satisfaction to overthrow the stale banality that life has become for so many millions of people, in large part because science in the last several centuries has, if not killed, then severely crippled spirituality for the West.
Agreeing with Einstein, who said “I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research,” Fideler notes “The order and beauty of nature awakens wonder, awe, and amazement. Thus, the sense of wonder is the cosmological impulse, the common seed from which religion, philosophy, and science emerge.”(33) Using Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fideler gives us something deliciously startling. “The underlying reality of the world is not matter, whatever that might be, but nonmaterial patterns of relationship. Coleridge, “in a famous passage, explained how nature’s creative power and humanity’s creative power are one and the same, for ‘the rules of the IMAGINATION are themselves the very powers of growth and production.’”(34)
In discussing the overwhelmingly gorgeous Navaho sand paintings, used for healing, prophecy and other uses, Joseph Campbell, the world renowned mythologist noted the meticulous details, the astounding lengths of time it takes to make truly perfect, absolutely perfect sand paintings using only their hands, and they always leave one thing out. They leave it incomplete. The reason why is to complete it is to imbue it with incredible power. And once they are done with them, after their use they are not just brushed away, but the sand is very carefully put into a special container and taken away where to no one knows. It is sacred. It is powerful. It is imaginative and gloriously thrilling to look over those fabulous beautiful creations. It opens one up to transcendence. “the deity opens, you have a religion of identification with the divine.”(35) “The hidden order of life would reveal itself to those who approach it with an affirmative mind and an open heart.”(36) One of Campbell’s favorite sayings was “The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast.”(37) Another mythologist, Mercea Eliade advocated “it is the religious vision of the world and the ideology derived from it which have enabled the man to bring his individual experience fulfillment, to ‘open’ it towards the universal.”(38)
This opening, this awakening, is our personal initiation into the knowledge that our imagination repowers us as “ultimately the entire universe is holy and there is nothing which is without a share of soul.”(39) He indicates a sublime truth known as we awaken to a new reality of dream, vision, excitement, and above all creative imagination in order to tune up ourselves. “Our individual souls, rooted in the cosmic soul, feed on beauty. In order to feel fulfilled as humans we need to taste and deeply savor our relation to the greater whole from which we have emerged. Nature’s elegant patterns of sharing radiant beauty and goodness, a beauty and goodness that we embody in the most profound ways. When we can sense the vitally exuberant power of the World Soul and perceive its radiance shining through the forms of nature, we become tangibly aware of our innermost bonds with the living universe.”(40)
Our imaginations will reanimate our spirituality which will once again revitalize life as it is supposed to be. Imagination is spirituality, the processing ourselves back into the ground of our existence, the living universe as the ancients understood it to be. Their vital discoveries, their astonishing accomplishments were made precisely because they were animated with their hearts, their souls, their connections spiritually, psychologically, and physically with the real home of which we are all, the universe, the most creative process there has ever been. We are that process.
Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, Mother
And Spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto thee. – T.S. Eliot
Endnotes
1.Kip Thorne, “Black Holes and Time Warps, Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy,” W. W. Norton, 1994, a whopping 600 page text on the zany craziness of black holes, worm holes, warping time and space, weird, quirky time machine ideas, all because of Einstein’s proven science in Relativity. Besides, it was great fun to read!
2.Thorne, “Ibid.,” p. 78.
3.Thorne, “Ibid.,” p. 81, 82.
4.Michio Kaku, “Parallel Worlds,” Anchor Books, 2005: 31-32.
5.John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin, “Annus Mirabilis, 1905, Albert Einstein, and the Theory of Relativity,” Chamberlain Brothers, Penguin Group, 2005: 111-112.
6.Donald Goldsmith, “Einstein’s Greatest Blunder? The Cosmological Constant and other Fudge Factors in the Physics of the Universe,” Harvard University Press, 3rd printing, 1997: 3.
7.David Bohm and F. David Peat, “Science, Order, and Creativity,” Bantam Books, 1987: 7, 9.
8.Delo E. Mook and Thomas Vargish, “Inside Relativity,” Princeton University Press, 1987: 54.
9.Banesh Hoffmann, “Relativity and Its Roots,” Scientific American Books, 1983: 130.
10.Michael Chester, “Relativity,” W. W. Norton, 1967: 24.
11.Stan Gibilisico, “Understanding Einstein’s Theories of Relativity, Man’s New Perspective on the Cosmos,” Dover Publications, 1991: 1.
12.Necia H. Apfel, “It’s All Relative, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity,” Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books, 1981.
13.Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, “Why Does E=MC2?” Da Capo Press, Perseus Press Group, 2009: 41-42.
14.A. Zee, “Fearful Symmetry, The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics,” Macmillan Publishing, 1986: 78.
15.Richard Wolfson, “Simply Einstein, Relativity Demystified,” W. W. Norton, 1973: 80-83.
16.Clifford M. Will, “Was Einstein Right? Putting General Relativity to the Test,” BasicBooks, 1986.
17.Joseph Schwartz and Michael McGuinness, “Einstein For Beginners,” Pantheon Books, 1979: 71.
18.Joseph Schwartz and Michael McGuinness, “Einstein for Beginners,” pp. 71-109.
19.Jane Ellen Harrison, “Prologomena to the Study of Greek Religion,” Princeton University Press, 1991: 165.
20.Harrison, “Ibid.,” p. 166.
21.Harrison, “Ibid.,” p. 167. The Etymologicon Magnum explains Hepialos as a shivering fever and a daimon that comes upon those that are asleep. Hepialos is a disease caused by the keres, the nightmare bacillus. (p. 167).
22.Harrison, “Ibid.,” p. 170. See figure 16, p. 166, figure 20, p. 177, figure 40, p. 207, figure 44, p. 211.
23.Mark Booth, “The Secret History of the World,” Overlook Press, 2008: 27.
24.Booth, “Ibid.,” p. 44.
25.Booth, “Ibid.,” p. 52, 53.
26.Ilya Prigogine, “The End of Certainty, Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature,” The Free Press, 1997: 62.
27.Prigogine, “Ibid.,” p. 188.
28.David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order,” Routledge, 1980: 17.
29.As found in Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein, “Sparks of Genius, The 13 Tools of the World’s Most Creative People,” Houghton Mifflin, 1999: 5.
30.David Fideler, “Introduction,” in “Alexandria, The Journal of the Western Cosmological Traditions,” Phanes Press, 1991: 8.
31.Bernstein, “Sparks of Genius,” p. 6.
32.Bernstein, “Sparks of Genius,” p. 10.
33.David Fideler, “Restoring the Soul of the World, Our Living Bond with Nature’s Intelligence,” Inner Traditions, 2014: 10.
34.Fideler, “Restoring the Soul of the World,” p. 161.
35.Joseph Campbell, “Transformations of Myth Through Time,” Harper and Row Publishers, 1990: 31, 35.
36.Stephen and Robin Larsen, “Joseph Campbell, A Fire in the Mind, The Authorized Biography,” Inner Traditions, 2002: 457. Campbell understood the difference between religion and spirituality. It is the living of your life in openness to the unseen world which is truly the essence of religion. (p. 550-551).
37.Larsen, “Fire in the Mind,” p. 254.
38.Mercea Eliade, “Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries,” Harper Torchbooks, 1960: 19.
39.David Fideler, “Restoring the Soul of the World,” p. 68. “By realizing our true identity, we become one with the fundamental power that orders the universe and brings the world to creative fruition.” (p. 68).
40.Fideler, “Restoring the Soul of the World,” p. 51. “Through the power of beauty, the universe conspires to ignite our vision and passion, to awaken our essential nature. At their root, both human love and the unquenchable wonder aroused by the beauty of the cosmic pattern are part of a common erotic movement to grasp and participate in the deepest levels of reality.” (p. 45).
