Imagination is more important than knowledge

Anyone know who said that? Anyone?

Remember I loooooove quotes. They are just so darn thought provoking. Well if you didn't get it I'll give you a hint. Theory of relativity or E=MC2 ring a bell?
That's right Albert Einstein.

One of my most favorite people. He was such an interesting guy. He just fascinates me. He was a scientist that had such a respect for imagination, art and God.

I came by this article yesterday that I had ripped out of one of my Wired magazines. The article was called "The World Needs More Rebels Like Albert Einstein." It talks about what a rebel he was and how he struggled so much in school. He was even slow to speak as a child. He had a defiance for authority and strict learning. His school teachers thought he was lazy and stupid. When he was asked how he came up with the theory of relativity this was his response - The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up.

Apparently there's something to keeping that child-like wonder. When Einstein was 26 he landed a job as a third-class examiner at the swiss patent office. He alienated him self so much from professors he was unable to earn his doctorate or get any kind of self-respecting academic job. But this was the perfect place for him...

This was the launching pad for his theory of relativity... he saw trains rolling by that had been synched with clocks at the nearby train station and the rest is history. Other scientist had come close but they were too blinded by the dogmas of the time. Einstein discarded the notion of absolute time, one of the sacred tenants of classical physics since Newton.

Einstein knew how to think outside the box and because he had imagination he could take his knowledge and come up with something absolutely impossible (or so we thought) !

Here are some other quotes by him. Really interesting fellow. Encourage that child-like wonder in yourself and your children - who knows maybe they will grow up to be geniuses or have names synonymous with the word.

"The only real valuable thing is intuition."

"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."

"God is subtle but he is not malicious."

"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."

"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."

"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."

"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."

"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."

"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."

"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."

More related to this subject later...