Imagination in Science
Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. Imaginative power is important not only for poets and novelists, for scientists also it is important. In this essay let us look at a few matters of Science from this point of view.
Let us start from Einstein's experience. When he was a small boy, his father gave him a magnetic compass as a toy. To the boy, it did not look like a toy only. In whichever direction you turn it, the needle shows the same direction. How is that? The boy imagined that an invisible force is holding the needle. We know that the force is due to the magnetic field of the Earth. It is this power of imagination that made Einstein into a great scientist.
We can say that it was Einstein's imagination that helped him to discover the theory of relativity which was a great revolution in physics. He imagined to be travelling with the speed of light. In that case, how do the things that we see and their motion change? Special Theory of Relativity was born in the attempt to find answers to such questions.
He imagined that the rope of an elevator was cut, the elevator was falling down and he was inside it. It is this imagination that that led to his General Theory of Relativity and changed Newton's gravitational force.
Those who learn special and general relativity will encounter many paradoxical phenomena. They have led to the creation of a lot of science fiction. We shall not talk about those here.
Whatever is imagined does not become Science. If one looks at the history of Science in the past 2000 years, it will be seen that many of the ideas were rejected as untrue. In this matter the role of Galileo who lived 400 years ago is very important. He is the one who demonstrated the importance of experiments. He showed how the ideas created by imagination must be subjected to experiments and only those that are proved by the experiments must be regarded as true.
We talk to somebody living hundreds or thousands of kilometres away using a hand-held gadget. Space-scientists control a space-craft moving million kilometers away, from here. Many more such marvels! All this is possible because of the electromagnetic waves originating from the Electrodynamics of Faraday and Maxwell. Electromagnetic fields pervade throughout the Universe. It came from the imagination of Michael Faraday who studied electromagnetic phenomena in many experiments. Einstein said that the greatest discovery in Physics is the electromagnetic field of Faraday.
When you speak through the cell phone, imagine how your words change into the dance of the electromagnetic waves that spread everywhere.
About 14 billion years ago, an unimaginably huge explosion called the Big Bang took place. The whole Universe originated from that. At that time the Universe consisted of elementary particles only and the temperature was billions of degrees. The Universe expanded and so the temperature decreased. After billions of years, when the temperature had become sufficiently low, the elementary particles joined together to form atoms. Atoms joined together to form stars. At still lower temperatures solid matter was formed and planets originated. On a planet going around a star, life started and it evolved into human beings. This is the story of the Universe according to Science. Picture this in your imagination.
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Let us next look at the secrets hidden inside matter through the eye of imagination. Whatever we see around us, animate and inanimate are
made of only three elementary particles, electron, u-quark and d-quark. It is not easy to imagine this.
In truth, there are two more elementary particles like the electron and four more quarks all of which were produced in the Big Bang. All of them are heavy and hence decayed leaving only the lightest particles, namely electron, u-quark and d-quark to make the Universe.
Further, particles and an equal number of antiparticles were created in the Big Bang. But all the antiparticles were destroyed. If they had not been destroyed, the Universe and ourselves would not exist.
Einstein said no intelligent person would not remain bewildered by the mysteries of the Universe and the strange ways of the laws of nature. Imagination is essential for this bewilderment.
Chemistry classified the 92 elements Hydrogen to Uranium according to their properties through the Periodic Table. Hundred years ago, the revolution in Physics called Quantum Mechanics explained the structure of these 92 types of atoms and solved the puzzles in the Periodic Table. But Quantum Mechanics itself has remained a puzzle.
'Anybody claiming to understand quantum mechanics deludes herself or himself' said Richard Feynman the famous theoretical physicist. One can explain the strange ideas of quantum mechanics only through the power of imagination. For instance, according to quantum mechanics,the well-known particle electron spreads like a wave also. How can a particle behave as a wave and a wave as a particle? Without imagination, nobody can digest this idea.
The basis of all living beings is the molecule called DNA which exists in all the cells making up the body of the living being. DNA is a long double helix made of atoms like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen. In both strands of the double helix four types of molecules C, G, A and T are arranged like the pearls in a necklace. Just as the order of the letters make up a sentence or an essay, the order of these four molecules determine the structure and functions of the various parts of the body.
In the ordering of the letters in the two strands, G occurs opposite C and T occurs opposite A. That is to say, C-G and A-T are pairs. It is because of this paired nature, one DNA is able to make another like itself. The two strands of DNA separate and each strand makes another strand in which the pairs match and then both strands join to make a double helix. Thus a new DNA which is a copy of the original is made.
So it is clear that the structure and functioning of the DNA is the basis for the growth and reproduction of living beings. Watson and Crick imagined all this and thus discovered the structure of DNA in 1952. It turned out as a very important milestone in the history of Science.
Our mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan has said that Goddess Namagiri appeared in his dreams and showed many of the mathematical equations not known to him.
An incident in the life of the great Mathematician Poincare. Once he was trying very hard to find the answer to a difficult mathematical question, but did not succeed. That night when he was in deep sleep, the answer came to him.
Kekule was the famous chemist who discovered the structure of the benzene molecule. This molecule is a ring made of atoms. Kekule dreamt the dance of atoms standing in a ring and this led to his discovery.
It is the imaginative power of these scientists that manifested as their creative power.
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We are talking about imagination in Science. Beauty in Science is a topic close to this and deserves to be considered together with it. Great physicists like Dirac and Chandrasekhar have described the beauty of ideas in Physics and explained how the true ideas can be discovered through their beauty alone.
GH Hardy, the great mathematician who was responsible for the spread of Ramanujan's fame, says emphatically that mathematics is great only because of its beauty and not because of its use. Although he said that, mathematics (including the Mathematics discovered by Ramanujan and Hardy) have been used in physics in many essential ways. This is a different matter. As Galileo said, Mathematics is the language of Science.
There is nobody who does not enjoy the sight of a rainbow. Everybody, young and old, are attracted by it. The famous poet Wordsworth sang: "My heart leaps up with joy whenever I behold a rainbow". There are many interesting stories about the rainbow. But the scientific explanation of how the rainbow is formed beats all those imagined stories.
How the small droplets of rainwater take in the Sun's rays at the correct angles, sends them back at slightly different angles for each of the seven colors and thus creates the half circle spread across the whole sky - this is the scientific explanation, which is supremely imaginative.
Once we understand this scientific explanation, our joy on beholding a rainbow must increase many fold. Feynman describes this very nicely and points out that there is no contradiction between Science and Art, there is only a unity between them.
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In a music concert, a famous singer is singing with great devotion the kirthanas of Saint Thiagaraja or Gopalakrishna Bharathi. We are listening to it in a rapturous manner. How do the vibrations of that music spread in the air and entering our ear immerse us in joy? As waves in the air, they come as tiny variations in pressure. No other organ in our body feels that, only our ear-drum converts that into a song with music. Is this not a wonder of wonders? Imagine how empty our life would be, if this did not happen. The atmosphere around the Earth gives not only oxygen needed for life, but also all the sounds including music.
Likewise, if light were not there, our life would become dark. Let the imagination run about this light. Light is nothing but a tiny part of the spectrum of electromagnetic waves running about the electromagnetic field discovered by Faraday and Maxwell. Only this small part reaches us from the Sun unobstructed by the atmosphere. Most of the electomagnetic spectrum is absorbed by the atmosphere. So it has been arranged that our eyes can see this small part. This is one of the wonders of evolution. When enjoying the many sights of this world, enjoy this wonder also, using your imagination.