What Should We Be Worried About?

THE DANGEROUS FASCINATION OF IMAGINATION

CARLO ROVELLI

Theoretical physicist, Centre de Physique Theorique de Luminy, Marseille; author, The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy

Worries about imagination might seem odd in a context like Edge, where intelligent creativity shines. I myself have often praised visionary imagination and those who can think what nobody else could. But I worry that free imagination is overvalued and carries risks. In theoretical physics, my field, technical journals are replete with multiuniverses, parallel dimensions, scores of particles nobody has ever seen, and so on. Physicists often look down on philosophers, but they are influenced by philosophers’ ideas more than they admit. Most have absorbed from Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and other philosophers the idea that science advances by throwing away the past and entertaining novel visions.

The heroes are Copernicus, who dared to send Earth flying around the sun, and Einstein, who dared to imagine space as curved and fused with time. Copernicus and Einstein turned out to be right. Will the current fantasies be equally successful? I feel a strange sense of unease. It is one thing to have ideas; it is another to have good ideas. There is value in producing ideas. There is value in screening them.

A number of my colleagues in theoretical physics have spent their life studying a possible symmetry of nature called supersymmetry. Experiments in laboratories, such as Geneva’s CERN, seem now to be pointing more toward the absence than the presence of this symmetry. I have seen lost stares in the eyes of some colleagues: “Could it be?”—how dare nature not conform to our imagination?

The task of separating the good thoughts from the silly ones is hard, of course, but this is where intelligence matters: What should be nurtured? Today many say that, after all, there are no “good ideas” or “bad ideas”—that all ideas can be good. I hear this in philosophy departments from very smart colleagues: “Every idea is right in its own context” or “We don’t have to suppress ideas that might turn out to be better tomorrow” or “Everything is better than lack of creativity.” We often have to choose between realizing that we do not know or making up pretty stories. To a large extent we live in narrations that we weave ourselves. So why not just go for the sweetest of these? After we have freed ourselves from the close-mindedness of the past, why not feel free? We can create enchanting explanations, images of ourselves, of our great country, of our great society. We can be fascinated by our dreams.

But something tells me we should worry. We live in a real world, where not all stories are equally good, equally effective. One dream out of many is the good one. Few explanations are the correct one. Einstein used to say, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” His curiosity led him to find the diamonds on the dusty shelves, not dreams out in the blue sky. The difficulty is that more often than not, our wild imaginations turn out to write poor drafts with respect to the surprising variety of reality.

Scientific intelligence met the triumphs that have led us here by positing theories and being extraordinarily suspicious about its own products. My worry is that we are going overboard in our contemporary fascination with imagination; in so doing, we risk losing track of the harsh independence of the world from the weakness of our minds.