Frazz by Jef Mallett for September 14, 2020

A foxymoron?

Einstein made a living (eventually) using his imagination to create NEW (potential) knowledge. And then generations of academics and grad students had to work to prove or disprove what he imagined.

Clever, Jef.

Finally, a sweet application for some words of Herr Professor “spooky action at a distance” Einstein!

Of course he didn’t know it for sure, he was just making an assumption based on the relativity of the input variables!

Trust but verify- sounds familiar

Einstein ALSO said that there were only two infinite things…the Universe, and human stupidity…and he wasn’t sure about the universe!

I think you need knowledge in order for your imagination to have something to build on.

People’s imagination often lead to our gaining more knowledge.

“The more you know, the more you can imagine.” – Frank Rutledge, Michigan State University.

Guess he knew there would be trump supporters

Our collective recorded knowledge is what makes amazing technical feats possible. No Isaac Newton, no Apollo 11 mission.

Actually, that line is the last in a page-long soliloquy about how a student should be taught to think (“imagine”) rather than simply filled with facts (“knowledge”).

This quote gets used often as a justification for not having knowledge – except that Einstein actually knew an extraordinary number of things about a wide range of topics. Far more than the people around him. He never advocated for ignorance – rather he advocated for people to DO something with knowledge.

I agree with that concept. Knowledge locks us in to only one possible solution whereas Imagination keeps all of the options open for consideration.

Einstein made his reputation by discovering and articulating reliable laws about how the Universe worked in a predictable manner. His supposed appreciation for imagination amounted to nothing more than lip service when it came to quantum uncertainty, which was contrary to his entire mindset about an orderly Universe. He set forth a series of challenges to Neils Bohr, and Bohr managed to overcome all of them, but still Einstein was not convinced. “God does not play dice with the Universe”, he famously said. (Religionists interpret this as Einstein believing in God with gambling as a metaphor, when actually God was the metaphor with probability as the main point.) And yet, counter-intuitive as it seems to those of us who’ve evolved in Average World (the middle of the smallest-to-largest continuum), there really are events that have no discernible cause or pattern. Several thousand of them have occurred within your very own body during the time you’ve been reading this.

However, they do go hand in hand…..

Einstein also “proved” that black holes can’t exist. I’d take anything he said with a grain of salt.

Because; who, what, where, when, why, how; Which holds hope for the future? Hint; where’s the wubbowoo.

All the Knowledge in the world is useless to you if you don’t have the imagination to use it.

I guess this school is neither closed nor open.

Einstein received the Person of the Century award from Time Magazine. His investigations led to research that gave us computers and other electronic gadgets we take for granted that shaped the 20th century. And it was well deserved. However, I wish there would be two awards for Person of the Century, the other going to a person whose work also affected the 20th century in just as important a way, if not more, for the lives it saved. I refer to Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin as the first real antibiotic. We marvel at the discoveries in the world of quantum physics and such, but let’s not forget it’s discoveries in medicine that really touches us where we live. Pun intended.

In a related quote Einstein is reputed to have said, “I don’t bother memorizing anything I can look up.”

Jef Mallett’s Blog Posts

Frazz15 hrs · And here’s one downside to being a professional imaginer: When someone tells you about something unimaginable and you say, quite truthfully, “I can’t imagine,” people don’t believe you.

I find “I can’t imagine, and I imagine things for a living” to work a little better. In addition to being true.