Imagination and Knowledge

WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN-ish, a friend who was a couple years older was giving me a ride home, late at night, with hardly any traffic, and we came to a four way stop sign a couple of seconds after another car came to a stop on the other side of the intersection.

Ever the law abiding teen aged boys, we paused at the stop sign, waiting for the other car to move. But it didn't move. Determined to obey the law, my friend waited at the intersection, and offered a possible explanation for the person's behavior.

I immediately offered another, while he gently eased across the street, past the motionless car, and on down the road. We rattled theories back and forth for several minutes, trying to outdo each other in crazy implausibility, and humorousness.

I remember my friend suggesting that the poor man was having a heart attack. I responded that perhaps the final paragraph of his masterpiece suddenly came to him, and he just had to scribble it down before continuing down the road.

I even hinted that perhaps the final notes of a masterpiece symphony suddenly formed in his mind, requiring instant notation. Obviously i was the one imagining happy circumstance to explain the driver's behavior, while my friend took a more morbid approach.

We were both laughing loudly when i got out of the car at my mom's house. I never found out how long the car remained at that intersection; i can only hope that all was well that night for the driver at the stop sign, forty years ago, and still is, wherever he is now.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge" said einstein, and after thinking about it, I'm inclined to agree. As crucial as knowledge is to intelligence, imagination is even more so. Einstein said he never committed anything to memory that he could look up in a book.

That seems rather extreme, an open admission of proud ignorance, but, hey, it worked for him. Maybe he wanted to keep his mind free for imaginative theory creation. STill, einstein repeatedly demonstrated that he in fact possessed a head full of factual information - knowledge. Accidents do happen.