Imagine there is no math!

Was it in an episode of Star Trek, or was it The Twilight Zone, in which aliens were plants?  If only I were a science fiction junkie; I would then have retained this earth-shattering (get it?) detail!

Aliens don't have to be like us at all.  Their shapes and sizes could easily be beyond our wildest imaginations.  It is like that fourth-dimension that Carl Sagan sketched out a long time ago: As much as two-dimensional "people" would have no way of imagining the three-dimensions of ours, we might be incapable of understanding four dimensions, or sixteen for that matter!

Which is why there is nothing about the "natural" numbers that we are taught in math:

Counting “only exists where you have stones, trees, people—individual, countable things,” he says. “Why should that be any more fundamental than, say, the mathematics of fluids?” If intelligent creatures were found living within, say, the clouds of Jupiter’s atmosphere, they might have no intuition at all for counting, or for the natural numbers

That excerpt is from an essay that asks: What, exactly, is math? Is it invented, or discovered?

When they teach math, they don't make us think about these things, right?  They simply march us on through numbers, multiplication tables, fractions, angles, calculus, ... 

Instead, imagine if they asked kids in, say, the third grade whether aliens would do the same math that we do.  If aliens and their kids do not have fingers and toes, then will their counting and numbers be different?  Why don't they spark imagination and creativity in children, even as they teach numbers and multiplication tables?

The older I get, the more I value imagination and creativity.  We seem to systematically kill it.

Remember this from not too long ago?

We need to rethink the way we teach our children and the things we teach them. Creativity will be increasingly be the defining human talent. Our education system should emphasise the use of human imagination to spark original ideas and create new meaning. It’s the one thing machines won’t be able to do. We should aim to teach our kids about the power of creativity in every area.

I know I am ranting. I am getting old, I guess.  So, I will wrap up ;)

To imagine a different and better world

As a huge fan of short stories, I always look forward to the fiction in my favorite magazine.

Imagined worlds they are.  

As a kid, I read Enid Blyton's books, and I had to imagine pretty much everything that I read there.  Bacon, for one, about which I had no idea, and the kids in those books were always having bacon with breakfast.  After breakfast, they wandered about by the stream.  Imagine that!

Nonfiction essays, too, require imagination on my part.  Even now.  To read an essay like the one that masterfully describes the story of globalization via Chinese merchants selling sexy lingerie to Egyptian women wrapped up in niqabs, in a remote small town by the Nile, requires imagination on multiple dimensions.

Reading is, thus, more than mere reading:

When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed.

There is no denying the fact that Enid Blyton's stories changed me. They informed me that there were people and cultures that were far removed from where I existed.  The local stories too, whether by Sujatha or Kalki or Jayakanthan, changed me.  So did the serious and gossipy reporting in Blitz, Illustrated Weekly, or India Today.  Words and sentences were like magical spells.

The power to imagine is also the power to create.  

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I'm going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It's this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things. They daydreamed, they pondered, they made things that didn't quite work, they described things that didn't yet exist to people who laughed at them..

Whether a fictional world, or the real world with problems of real people, reading them developed in me a sense of empathy.  Empathy then leads to wondering how the world can become a better place for you and me, which is why I rant--to make a case for doing things differently.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.
You're also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it's this:
THE WORLD DOESN'T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS. THINGS CAN BE DIFFERENT.

Sometimes, I think that there are only two kinds of people on this planet--those who willingly read, and those who would way prefer not to read unless they were compelled to.  I have always believed that the world will be a better place if more people read on their own.  I am always shocked at how much even those who used to read quite a bit are so distracted by social media that they now do not spend some of their down-time reading.

    

Imagine if more of us read!

Imagine!

Read the following:

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Who do you think said that?

Even if you can't name the person, any guesses on what that person--a famous one--was known for?

The keyword there is "imagination," right?  And this imagination is linked to knowledge. And the quote begins with "artist."

We might be tempted to think that it was a famous person in the arts.  That's what I would have thought.

Think again.

It was Einstein!

Aha, you say, because we are immediately reminded of Einstein's famous thought-experiment approach to big questions.

It is not only Einstein.  Science itself requires imagination.

[It] doesn’t take an Albert Einstein to observe that, without the essential first step, without a creative reimagining of nature, a conceiving of hypotheses for what might be going on behind the perceived surface of phenomena, there can be no science at all.

Now think about your own science classes.  Did you ever get a feel that science called for imagination?  To the contrary, chances are great that the classes came across as one boring thing to memorize after another boring thing, right?  I tell ya, every day I am amazed that we humans have progressed this much despite our best attempts to kill curiosity, learning, and imagination.  As Picasso--another imaginative mind, though a thoroughly flawed human--said, through schooling we make sure that students do not become artists!

Science education favours the presentation of results, and a focus on knowledge, rather than the human stories of wonder, imagination, failed ideas and those glorious and uninvited moments of illumination that thread through the lives of all who actually do science.

The older I get, the more I am frustrated by our screwed up approach to education.

I have blogged before on the role of imagination in science.  Like here, in which I quote Freeman Dyson:

Science is a creative interaction of observation with imagination. ... Imagination by itself can still enlarge our vision when observation fails. 

Of course, the imagination is cross-checked by experiments and evidence, which is why string theory, for example, hasn't broken through--great imagination, but no proof. At least, not yet.

I have always known that I lack that kind of imagination.  But, as I noted here:

Education and learning are perhaps also about stretching one's imaginations.  It is easy to walk around with a limited view of the world, but is a challenge to expand that view.

I try my best to get that view across to students and colleagues alike, even though I know fully well that I am not winning.