envelopedinhisglory

sagansense: Einstein On Creative Thinking: Music and the...

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 20:17:10 -0800

Einstein On Creative Thinking: Music and the Intuitive Art of Scientific Imagination

For Einstein, insight did not come from logic or mathematics. It came, as it does for artists, from intuition and inspiration. As he told one friend, “When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come close to the conclusion that the gift of imagination has meant more to me than any talent for absorbing absolute knowledge.” Elaborating, he added, “All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge. I believe in intuition and inspiration…. At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason.” Thus, his famous statement that, for creative work in science, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”.

But how, then, did art differ from science for Einstein? Surprisingly, it wasn’t the content of an idea, or its subject, that determined whether something was art or science, but how the idea was expressed. “If what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, then it is science. If it is communicated through forms whose constructions are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively, then it is art”. Einstein himself worked intuitively and expressed himself logically. That’s why he said that great scientists were also artists.

Einstein first described his intuitive thought processes at a physics conference in Kyoto in 1922, when he indicated that he used images to solve his problems and found words later. Einstein explicated this bold idea at length to one scholar of creativity in 1959, telling Max Wertheimer that he never thought in logical symbols or mathematical equations, but in images, feelings, and even musical architectures. Einstein’s autobiographical notes reflect the same thought: “I have no doubt that our thinking goes on for the most part without the use of symbols, and, furthermore, largely unconsciously”. Elsewhere he wrote even more baldly that “no scientist thinks in equations”.

Anyone in science education reading this?!

Einstein only employed words or other symbols (presumably mathematical) — in what he explicitly called a secondary translation step — after he was able to solve his problems through the formal manipulation of internally imagined images, feelings, and architectures. “I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards,” he wrote.

Einstein expanded on this theme in a letter to fellow mathematician Jacques Hadamard, writing that “the words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined…. The above mentioned elements are, in my case of visual and some of a muscular type…. Conventional words or other signs [presumably mathematical ones] have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the associative play already referred to is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will”.

In other interviews, he attributed his scientific insight and intuition mainly to music. “If I were not a physicist,” he once said, “I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music…. I get most joy in life out of music”. His son, Hans, amplified what Einstein meant by recounting that “whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music, and that would usually resolve all his difficulties”. After playing piano, his sister Maja said, he would get up saying, “There, now I’ve got it”. Something in the music would guide his thoughts in new and creative directions.

No historian of science seems to have taken these musical and intuitional comments of Einstein seriously, but we think there is something very important to be gleaned from his personal testimony. What did Einstein mean when he told Wertheimer that he often thought in terms of musical architectures? We can’t know for certain at this far remove, and Wertheimer never asked, but the engineer-composer Robert Mueller investigated further.

According to Mueller, Einstein’s friend Alexander Mozskowski says “that Einstein recognized an unexplainable connection between music and his science, and notes that his [Einstein’s] mentor Ernst Mach had indicated that music and the aural experience were the organ to describe space”. Music also embodies time. Could music have therefore provided Einstein with a connection between time and space through its combination of architectonic, or structural, nature combined with its spatial and temporal aspects? Mueller has conjectured that the physicist’s “disposition to architectonic logics of abstraction was formulated by Einstein’s early musical experiences, and even enlarged by a constant struggle for musical experiences which helped him build a rich mental perceptual fabric of space and time in which to perform his scientific theorizing”.

These speculations about music, space and time in Einstein’s imaginative thinking certainly fit with something the physicist told the great pioneer of musical education, Shinichi Suzuki: “The theory of relativity occurred to me by intuition, and music is the driving force behind this intuition. My parents had me study the violin from the time I was six. My new discovery is the result of musical perception”. They also fit with the manner in which Einstein expressed his greatest praise for a fellow scientist. Neils Bohr’s work on the structure of the atom, Einstein said, was “the highest form of musicality in the realm of thought”.

Wow! Anyone looking for connections between music, mathematics, and physics? How about intuition and reason? Einstein shows us how it all connects. But what do our students typically get, especially in high school and college? They get math without music. They get science without images, feelings and intuition. They get knowledge without imagination. Not only does intuition go undeveloped, many math and science teachers do not give credit to answers (even though they may be correct) that are not explicated by detailed logic. What these teachers appear not to understand is that translating intuitive insights into words or mathematical symbols is a secondary process that can - and should be — be taught just as explicitly as translating from one language and another.

So much for Einstein’s admission that he often had a feeling he was right without being able to explain it. So much for experiencing space-time through music. So much for working out ideas in images and feelings and musical architectures for which there are no words or symbols. So much for sitting down at the piano and letting the music show the way.

No wonder so many of our students don’t like math and science: what is there to imagine and feel? Where is the art in their learning?

sources/references.

The Astonished Heart by Robert Farrar Capon. It will blow your mind by page 2. Wow. Thanks...

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 20:50:20 -0700

The Astonished Heart by Robert Farrar Capon. It will blow your mind by page 2. Wow. Thanks @jimmyaceino for posting about this book.

"Many misunderstandings come when we pursue what others ignore."

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 10:44:40 -0700

“Many misunderstandings come when we pursue what others ignore.”

- Bill Johnson

Jesus Pahhty.: Top ten myths about introverts

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 21:23:17 -0700

Jesus Pahhty.: Top ten myths about introverts:

jerrybrito:

Myth #1 – Introverts don’t like to talk.
This is not true. Introverts just don’t talk unless they have something to say. They hate small talk. Get an introvert talking about something they are interested in, and they won’t shut up for days.

Myth #2 – Introverts are shy.
…

This is good.

Pine and Yuba Streets, Redding, CA

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 17:52:51 -0700

Pine and Yuba Streets, Redding, CA

"Pardon the language. “What you northerners never appreciate… is that Texas is so big..."

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 17:35:11 -0700

“

Pardon the language.

“What you northerners never appreciate… is that Texas is so big that you can live your life within its limits and never give a damn about what anyone in Boston or San Francisco thinks.”

”

- James Michener

"For who could fail to admire their nobleness and patient endurance and loyalty to the Master? seeing..."

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 18:31:57 -0700

“For who could fail to admire their nobleness and patient endurance and loyalty to the Master? seeing that when they were so torn by lashes that the mechanism of their flesh was visible even as far as the inward veins and arteries, they endured patiently, so that the very bystanders had pity and wept; while they themselves reached such a pitch of bravery that none of them uttered a cry or a groan, thus showing to us all that at that hour the martyrs of Christ being tortured were absent from the flesh, or rather that the Lord was standing by and conversing with them.”

- The Martyrdom of Polycarp 2:2
Wow. Just incredible.

"And miracles of healing are manifestations of nature’s perfect health and wholeness, lucid intervals..."

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 19:29:00 -0700

“And miracles of healing are manifestations of nature’s perfect health and wholeness, lucid intervals granted to our deranged and suffering humanity. They are not catastrophes, but exhibitions of that divine order which shall be brought in when our redemption is completed. We cannot for a moment admit the complaint of sceptics that miracles are an infraction of the laws of nature. Alas! for them that they have lost their ear for harmony that they cannot distinguish earth’s wail from Heaven’s Alleluiah; and know not the difference between the groans of a suffering creation and the music of the spheres, as it was on that day when “the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” Miracles of healing and dispossession are reminiscences of an unfallen Paradise and prophecies of a Paradise regained. Though we call them supernatural, they are not contranatural. “For surely” as one has said, “it is plainly contrary to nature and indeed most unnatural that one should have eyes and not see, ears and not hear, organs of speech and not speak, and limbs without the power to use them; but not that a Saviour should come and loose his fetters. It was contrary to nature that ruthless death should sever the bands of love which God himself has knit between mother and son, between brother and sister but not that a young man of Nain or a Lazarus should be released from the fetters of death through a mighty word! And that was the climax of the unnatural that the world should nail the only righteous one to the cross; but not that the holy bearer of that cross should conquer undeserved death, should rise and victoriously enter into his glory.”

- A.J. Gordon in his book Ministry of Healing

Oak Forest Bridge, Gonzales, Texas

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 19:22:41 -0700

Oak Forest Bridge, Gonzales, Texas

"Warfare is not about taking authority over the devil. That is just a consequence. Real warfare is..."

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 08:45:09 -0700

“Warfare is not about taking authority over the devil. That is just a consequence. Real warfare is about discovering the sovereignty, supremacy and majesty of Jesus. It’s about being involved with Jesus to such an extent that when the enemy looks at you, he realizes he can’t win and creeps away before you even open your eyes!”

- Graham Cooke

: Erasing The Line between the "Secular" & the "Sacred" - An explanation of the new record and our name change.

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 07:39:29 -0700

: Erasing The Line between the "Secular" & the "Sacred" - An explanation of the new record and our name change.:

benjamindunn:

CHRISTIAN MUSIC-

Okay, so everyone knows where this one is headed, but first let me say that though it’s very easy to see and point out the obvious problems with “Christian music“, this blog is actually an attempt to discover answers and maybe even spur on some inspiration to something…

"Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically..."

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 19:57:03 -0700

“Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow. So one hundred worshipers met together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be were they to become “unity”-conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship.”

- A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God, 97 (via favoredgrace)
Wow! This is so good!!

classyliving: I first saw this a couple of years ago and it...

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:50:27 -0700

classyliving:

I first saw this a couple of years ago and it wrecked me. I encourage you all to watch this. It will blow you away. These are normal Christians with the same Holy Spirit as you who just wanted to show God’s love at Disneyland. And salvation and healing broke out on the youth.

I love it when I see this video going around. Jason, Jason, and Hannah are good friends of mine.

Love Is My Commandment: Christ is all

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:40:22 -0700

Love Is My Commandment: Christ is all:

People never know how to respond when you reply with scripture and bring everything back to the work of the cross. Especially when they realize that you’re standing on something solid and they’re never going to move you.

“Judgment in Isaiah!”

Forgiveness in Jesus.

“Separation in Adam!”

Reconciliation in Jesus.

Good word right there.

"Thus (Jesus), taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of..."

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:06:43 -0800

“Thus (Jesus), taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men. This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection.”

- Athanasius of Alexandria (via loveismycommandment)
Death is abolished! So let’s live forever!
(via hannahrinehart)
Good word.

I miss Hannah. :P

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:24:18 -0800

I miss Hannah. :P

dutchesswhitney: Chandler is my favorite… Hahaha!

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:45:38 -0800

dutchesswhitney:

Chandler is my favorite…

Hahaha!

Happy Valentines Day Honey!!!!!

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 04:33:22 -0800

@hannahrinehart

Shiner Bock Beer Bread

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:02:36 -0800

Shiner Bock Beer Bread

Gonzales Morning

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 07:42:28 -0800

Gonzales Morning