Issue 73 我的第一篇issue

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Issue 73 “In most professions and academic fields, imagination is more important than knowledge.”


By examination of the original work of great minds throughout human history, many people are apt to conclude that imagination is more important than knowledge. However, this illusion emphysizes imagination too strongly and its supporters fail to recognize the fundamental importance of knowledge.

Knowledge is the sum of facts, truths, conditions and principles that mankind gather through experience and association. Almost every activities conducted by human race are done in the light of some sort of knowledge, some already known facts and principles. We cannot build a house or bridge without a blueprint, nor produce any products without the protocol of the right procedure. To grow vegetables and to raise cows, pigs and chicken are neither possible if there is little knowledge of plants' or farm animals' growing regular pattern. Basic knowledge is so indispensable that people often overlook its importance unintentionally.

However, lacking of imagination means the disability to create new ideas that lead to the formation of new knowledge. In the frontiers of science, scientists need imagination to design novel experiments and come up with explanation for new phenomena they discovered. For example, when the physicist Albert Einstein looked into Brownian motion, a phenomenon which contradicts to the classical theories of physics, he finally find out a quantitative explanation by abandoning those rigid ideas that matter can be divided infinitely. The result led to the construction of the existence of atom, which has a totally different point of perspective into the physical world. Nevertheless, without new knowledge coming up, the human sociality can still sustain itself and survive.

Conceding that imagination can facilitate the process in which new knowledge arises, it does not necessarily mean that imagination overshadows the solid knowledge. In the field of science, knowledge is esteemed of less importance just because the scientists have already learned most of the known knowledge in their particular subject, so what becomes the bottleneck is imagination, the ability to think different and bring about new concepts. This is also true in other creative work area. But for persons on non-creative jobs, such as accounting and secretary service, the key to success is to do their assignments promptly and precisely. There is no need for them to create original masterpieces and no room for free-style imagination.

To sum up, the knowledge lays it function in almost every profession and academic field, while imagination, one of the most important functions of which is to generate new knowledge, only dominates in creative works and scientific frontiers.