Imagination and thought-experiments
In 2018 I attended a public lecture at the University of Western Australia (with my physics teacher wife) about Photons and Gravitational Waves, as you do on a Tuesday night.
I had several assumptions about the class; I thought the lecture would be lengthy, technical (too advanced), focussed on physics laws and mathematical expressions.
The last thing I was expecting is that the presentation would be about creativity and imagination.
I was shocked, and pleased.
At the very beginning, the first speaker showed us a page of one of Albert Einstein’s books with one of his sketches. Einstein drew a horizontal line to represent our tangible domain of observations (the real world) and then he had a line branching out, pointing to a theory.
This line represented his thought-experiments, fueled by imagination and creativity. Not dogmas, rules, laws or maths. He was striving to be free and innovative, making up unreal and dreamlike scenarios in his creative mind.
He believed that only through a creative and imaginative process he would be able to create theories and come up with innovative ideas. Once he had a theory ready in his mind, he would then be able to bring it back to the observation line and start measuring, observing, running physical experiments and building the mathematical foundations of his discovery.
The lift experiment
I’ll give you an example. Einstein pictured himself being in a lift in a free fall. He would float inside the lift as the elevator raced downwards and the books and papers he had with him would float as well, in the exact same way. As if all the objects in the lift had no weight at all. Just like in space, with no gravity.
Then he pictured the lift going the opposite direction, rising. He would be accelerating upwards with his feet glued to the floor, feeling his body mass. Basically like he would everyday, anywhere on the planet. It would be the exact same feeling as gravity.
That’s when he realised that gravity and acceleration are the same thing.
Without creating and testing his unrealistic scenario in his mind, Einstein wouldn’t have come up with this truly ground-breaking theory.
Imagine and create
When looking for an innovative solution in whatever profession; space out, don’t be present, let your mind wander, picture scenarios and explore them. Use this as part of your process and come up with new ideas. Just like Einstein did.
Some ideas will spark something, they’ll stick. They will make you question things and build your theories and hypotheses. Bring them back into the real world, apply them, test them and make your own discoveries. Often they will inform your work disguised as analogies or metaphors and that’s fine too. Culture, stories and metaphors add so much value to ideas.
Foster your imagination and let it thrive. Amazing things will happen.
