"The greatest scientists are artists as well," said Albert Einstein (Calaprice,

2000, 245). As one of the greatest physicists of all time and a fine amateur
pianist and violinist, he ought to have known! So what did Einstein mean and
what does it tell us about the nature of creative thinking and how we should
stimulate it?

In our last post, we suggested that community singing might be a simple way
to introduce creativity into one's life. In the post before that Einstein's
musical hobbies served as an example of personal creativity providing the
kind of recreation that enables professional innovation. And in an even earlier
post on Einstein, we introduced the idea that creative thinking can be done
with your body as well as your mind. In this essay, we want to link all these
themes through Einstein's experience to suggest that the daily practice of
music might actually stimulate not only everyday creativity, but genius-level
creativity as well.

For Einstein, insight did not come from logic or mathematics. It came, as it
does for artists, from intuition and inspiration. As he told one friend, "When I
examine myself and my methods of thought, I come close to the conclusion
that the gift of imagination has meant more to me than any talent for
absorbing absolute knowledge." Elaborating, he added, "All great
achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge. I believe in
intuition and inspiration.... At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing
the reason." Thus, his famous statement that, for creative work in science,
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" (Calaprice, 2000, 22, 287,
10).

But how, then, did art differ from science for Einstein? Surprisingly, it wasn't
the content of an idea, or its subject, that determined whether something
was art or science, but how the idea was expressed. "If what is seen and
experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, then it is science. If it is
communicated through forms whose constructions are not accessible to the
conscious mind but are recognized intuitively, then it is art" (Calaprice, 2000,
271). Einstein himself worked intuitively and expressed himself logically.
That's why he said that great scientists were also artists.

musical architectureEinstein first described his intuitive thought processes at

a physics conference in Kyoto in 1922, when he indicated that he used

images to solve his problems and found words later (Pais, 1982). Einstein
explicated this bold idea at length to one scholar of creativity in 1959, telling
Max Wertheimer that he never thought in logical symbols or mathematical
equations, but in images, feelings, and even musical architectures
(Wertheimer, 1959, 213-228). Einstein's autobiographical notes reflect the
same thought: "I have no doubt that our thinking goes on for the most part
without the use of symbols, and, furthermore, largely unconsciously" (Schilpp,
pp. 8-9). Elsewhere he wrote even more baldly that "[n]o scientist thinks in
equations" (Infeld, 1941, 312).

Anyone in science education reading this?!

Einstein only employed words or other symbols (presumably mathematical) -in what he explicitly called a secondary translation step -- after he was able
to solve his problems through the formal manipulation of internally imagined
images, feelings, and architectures. "I very rarely think in words at all. A
thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards," he wrote
(Wertheimer, 1959, 213; Pais, 1982).

Einstein expanded on this theme in a letter to fellow mathematician Jacques

Hadamard, writing that "[t]he words of the language, as they are written or
spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The
psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain
signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily' reproduced
and combined.... The above mentioned elements are, in my case of visual
and some of a muscular type.... Conventional words or other signs
[presumably mathematical ones] have to be sought for laboriously only in a
secondary stage, when the associative play already referred to is sufficiently
established and can be reproduced at will" (Hadamard, 1945, 142-3).

In other interviews, he attributed his scientific insight and intuition mainly to

music. "If I were not a physicist," he once said, "I would probably be a
musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in
terms of music.... I get most joy in life out of music" (Calaprice, 2000, 155).
His son, Hans, amplified what Einstein meant by recounting that "[w]henever
he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in
his work, he would take refuge in music, and that would usually resolve all his
difficulties" (quoted in Clark, 1971, 106). After playing piano, his sister Maja

said, he would get up saying, "There, now I've got it" (quoted in Sayen, 1985,
26). Something in the music would guide his thoughts in new and creative
directions.

No historian of science seems to have taken these musical and intuitional

comments of Einstein seriously, but we think there is something very
important to be gleaned from his personal testimony. What did Einstein mean
when he told Wertheimer that he often thought in terms of musical
architectures? We can't know for certain at this far remove, and Wertheimer
never asked, but the engineer-composer Robert Mueller investigated further.

space time fabricAccording to Mueller, Einstein's friend Alexander Mozskowski

"says that Einstein recognized an unexplainable connection between music
and his science, and notes that his [Einstein's] mentor Ernst Mach had
indicated that music and the aural experience were the organ to describe
space" (Mueller, 1967, 171). Music also embodies time. Could music have
therefore provided Einstein with a connection between time and space
through its combination of architectonic, or structural, nature combined with
its spatial and temporal aspects? Mueller has conjectured that the physicist's
"disposition to architectonic logics of abstraction was formulated by Einstein's
early musical experiences, and even enlarged by a constant struggle for
musical experiences which helped him build a rich mental perceptual fabric of
space and time in which to perform his scientific theorizing" (Mueller, 1967,
171).

These speculations about music, space and time in Einstein's imaginative

thinking certainly fit with something the physicist told the great pioneer of
musical education, Shinichi Suzuki: "The theory of relativity occurred to me
by intuition, and music is the driving force behind this intuition. My parents
had me study the violin from the time I was six. My new discovery is the
result of musical perception" (Suzuki, 1969, 90).They also fit with the manner
in which Einstein expressed his greatest praise for a fellow scientist. Neils
Bohr's work on the structure of the atom, Einstein said, was "the highest form
of musicality in the realm of thought" (Schilpp, 1979).

Wow! Anyone looking for connections between music, mathematics, and

physics? How about intuition and reason? Einstein shows us how it all
connects. But what do our students typically get, especially in high school

and college? They get math without music. They get science without images,
feelings and intuition. They get knowledge without imagination. Not only does
intuition go undeveloped, many math and science teachers do not give credit
to answers (even though they may be correct) that are not explicated by
detailed logic. What these teachers appear not to understand is that
translating intuitive insights into words or mathematical symbols is a
secondary process that can - and should be -- be taught just as explicitly as
translating from one language and another.

So much for Einstein's admission that he often had a feeling he was right
without being able to explain it. So much for experiencing space-time through
music. So much for working out ideas in images and feelings and musical
architectures for which there are no words or symbols. So much for sitting
down at the piano and letting the music show the way.