Imagination vs. Knowledge

Blog #2

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” - Albert Einstein 

What is imagination? Does it have limits? What is knowledge? Does knowledge have a punch line? Albert Einstein once said that imagination is more important than knowledge. Is that true? Lets start with Albert Einstein and his history.

   Albert Einstein explained his theories and thought process in an amazing way. Instead of just knowledge being the only thing running through his mind, he let his imagination run wild. He included his knowledge because knowledge without imagination is nothing, it's completely useless.

   Think of it in this way, if I were to ask you to draw a tree in a certain way everyone would draw a tree a bit differently than the next person. You will start to process the image in your brain, but my image is going to be different from yours, because your mind has a different perspective on trees than I do. I normally draw a tree with a hole in the tree trunk for small mammals and birds to live in because that's how I imagined what all trees looked liked (even though I’ve never seen a tree with a trunk hole), but you might have imagined a tree perfectly green with a natural brown trunk with no holes. It might be perfectly smooth almost making it a non-natural tree. When in reality a tree always look like that. 

   Now what is imagination in general? It's what you think and there is no boundary to your thought process. Knowledge on the other hand has limits. Look at a math problem for instance. You have a certain way of solving the problem. Your limited. Though imagination doesn't win over knowledge. 

   I do believe that imagination is more important than knowledge, because imagination has no limit. Though that doesn't mean knowledge is not important, because knowledge just shows us a certain way of doing things, not the wrong way.

   When I said knowledge without imagination is useless, I meant it. There was no source of knowledge in the earlier times. Knowledge was created by imagination. How do you think shapes were created, how people learned to swim, how things we have now, like the laptop or phone you're using to read this. It was made from one single persons mind running wild from imagination. 

Now, obviously it wasn’t just creative thinking that has created everything. Everything did however start from imagination, but with the help of knowledge, it evolved into what we have now. Although knowledge is undeniably important, there would have been no advancement without imagination. Imagination is key to innovation and creativity. 

   People tell me to do things in a knowledgeable way and tell me to stop daydreaming. They tell me I shouldn't imagine things in an absurd way and they tell me to imagine them in the way they actually are, nothing more. They tell me to stop imagining things because it's all fantasy and not true. Even people like Benjamin Franklin have been told to stop daydreaming and imagining things. Without his imagination, he wouldn’t have created electricity. When Thomas Edison was a kid, his school sent a letter home to his parents. It said that Edison had a disorder and that he couldn't be taught at the school. His mother then became the one that taught him and now he is one of the most famous scientists known. The board of people at his school just judged him based off how much they thought knowledge he had, or didn’t have in that case. They didn’t care for what his imagination could do for the world. This shows how much of an important role imagination can play. 

   But what if we were in a situation where our imagination couldn't help us. We had to save our selves from what we already knew. Then our imagination becomes a bit useless. For an example, think about when you would take a test. Your imagination can't just come up with the answers, it would take time. That's the beauty of imagination, it just doesn't come to us, it expands as we think more. During a test you are tested upon how knowledgeable you are on the topic. 

You do however need knowledge to imagine things in depth. If you were born looking at one single thing you’re all whole life, your brain would know nothing but that specific thing, therefore you could not imagine anything but that thing. You need knowledge of experience to be able to imagine things. Your brain cannot imagine things it has never seen, it can put pieces of what you have seen together but it will not imagine unknown.

   I'm not saying that knowledge is more important than imagination. Though I'm not saying that imagination is more important than knowledge, even though that's what Albert Einstein said. I'm saying they both come hand in hand and have an equal balance in what we do and how we think.