Saving My Revised GRE Issue GRE Issue(Manuscript under Review) Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang.

g. All Rights Reserved Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012

Supplementary Ref

016

Knowledge and Imagination

Is imagination more important than knowledge? Written by Dr Kathleen Taylor; This Article appeared in the Times Higher Education Supplement on 20 December 2002 http://www.taylorsciencewriter.com/wsp_images/theswebii.pdf

Berlin, 1929. The poet and journalist George Sylvester Viereck has charmed an interview out of an initially reluctant superstar physicist. He asks: "How do you account for your discoveries? Through intuition or inspiration?" Albert Einstein replies:" Both. I sometimes feel I am right, but do not know it. When two expeditions of scientists went to test my theory I was convinced they would confirm my theory. I wasn't surprised when the results confirmed my intuition, but I would have been surprised had I been wrong. I'm enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination, which I think is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." Einstein favored imagination: colorful, creative, antiauthoritarian. Artists, geniuses and other rebellious spirits have often claimed it as their territory. Knowledge, that dull conviction resulting from a brush with reality, is black-and-white, logical, stable, conservative the domain of ordinary scientists, museums and accountants. In other words, your view of which is more important will depend on your personality. Metaphors are plentiful. Knowledge is a stepping stone to imagination; it stands to imagination as honeycomb does to honey; knowledge and imagination are enemies, or independent strands in the web of our mental lives. Einstein's words place imagination and knowledge in opposition, implying that knowledge should concern what is present to the senses. But knowledge is also a stored and shared repository of publicly acceptable thoughts, many frozen into

physical symbols (written or spoken), transmitted through time and space. Knowledge coded, stored and expressed using symbols can, because of the entrancing flexibility of symbol systems, be broken up and reassembled in a myriad novel combinations. It is this act of recombination which underlies the power to imagine. As thinkers from Hume to Chomsky have concluded, our imagination is and must be grounded in our knowledge. The more memories we accumulate, the more material we have to work with, the richer and stranger are the fruits of our imagination. We see the complementarity of imagination and knowledge. At both group and individual levels, knowledge facilitates community and continuity, while imagination facilitates change. For those who feel they have no community, knowledge may be devalued relative to imagination. Knowledge binds us to a sometimes oppressive existence; imagination helps us escape it. However, imagination evolved as a tool for facilitating survival. Imagining, we take a step beyond what we know into the future or into another world. We see alternatives and possibilities; we work out what we need to reach our goals. Unhooked from reality, imagination no longer serves these life-enhancing purposes. Without new knowledge to feed it and keep it in check, it can become sterile and even dangerous: in Hume's words, "naught but sophistry and illusion". The Wright Brothers imagined flight before they knew it was possible. When design after design failed to see them soaring through the clouds, the brothers imagined how they could improve this

Saving My Revised GRE Issue GRE Issue(Manuscript under Review) Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang. All Rights Reserved Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012

aircraft until one day they established the world's first sustained flight. On the 20th July 1969 the world witnessed a hypothetical phenomenon become a milestone in space flight and aeronautics. On this day Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon and so the imagined vision of lunar walking became a part of human knowledge. The ancient use of imagination resides in a field of great importance to the ancient world: war. In approximately the 12th century BC the Trojan War between the Greeks and the Trojans began. Although the Greeks had the knowledge of how to fight the Trojans, for nine years their siege could not penetrate the city itself until, they imagined a trick with a wooden horse containing soldiers that they placed outside the gates of Troy as a gift. This gift supposedly heralded their surrender. Actually, this innovative deception ensured ultimate victory. the field of invention In imagination is often a prerequisite of knowledge. Imagination stirs the desire to generate new knowledge to make an idea a reality. Intriguingly, the microwave was invented after researcher Percy Spencer (1894-1970, an American engineer and inventor of the microwave oven) passed a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket. It was Spencer's formulation of new ideas that led to the conventional cooking oven we use every day. Television was invented by John Logie Baird (1888-1946, a Scottish

engineer and inventor of the world's first practical, publicly demonstrated television system, and also the world's first fully electronic color television tub) in 1925 and was constructed originally from a lamp inside a biscuit tin with lenses, wood and string. The first television transmission aired in 1930, although it didn't produce color images until 1958 in the USA. Models continue to be upgraded; constantly higher quality picture and audio are available because flaws can be resolved as imagination develops. Knowledge about how to resolve a problem is not a prerequisite of imagination however; imagination is a prerequisite of problem solving. Without imagination, government would not be able to respond to society's changing needs and so development would cease. A government that cannot contemplate solutions for society's problems is not fit to rule. In addition, solutions can be imagined in the absence of what is already known about a problem. One can be knowledgeable about a problem yet never be able to imagine a solution. In the business arena, world markets strive to compete, depending on imagination to create original, appealing advertisements to promote their goods and services. According to many international experts, most beer tastes the same. So what is it that distinguishes the different brands and varieties? It is advertising that gives the beer its market power and potential for successful sale. Many of the most imaginative writers are employed in the advertising industry.