“Imagination is always an experimental process…whether we are experimenting with logical concepts or with the fancy free material of art… Many people do not find it as pleasurable to read a theorem as to read a poem… But no creative work, in art or in science, truly exists for us unless we ourselves help to create it.”
Philosophical Engineering Design Point
Jacob Bronowski suggests those who dread reading about science fail to appreciate the creative work and insights which lend meaning to the scientific enterprise. When reading a poem, for instance, we can often find in the text something which relates it to a universal human experience. However, when confronted with a derivation of mathematical symbols, we often find ourselves uninspired, lacking the adequate motivation to find for this kind of meaning in the medium.
Bronowski reminds us that “reasoning is constructed with movable images just as certainly as poetry is.” His example, E=mc^2, lies, he claims, between imagination and reason. Energy, mass, and speed of light are all images for absent things or concepts, just as are words like “tree” and “love.”
The moral: Lovers of poetry and other art forms should equally be lovers of science and should not discount the creative processes which give rise to scientific progress. Despite the great advances we have made in developing sophisticated languages of symbols to represent the complex phenomena of nature, we must remember that, before these languages became meaningful, someone first had to imagine such concepts as energy, mass and the speed of light and offer creative suggestions regarding their relations.
From Chapter 6 of Bronowski, J. (Ed Piero E. Ariottini and Rito Bronowski), The Visionary Eye: Essays in the Arts, Literature and Science. MIT: 1979