导读

　　我们全新的系列issue观点来啦。在每期Issue观点中，我们都会遴选与GRE issue相关话题的国外优质文章，通过阅读这些文章，帮助大家塑造形成issue中的观点和立场。

　　本期话题

　　In most professions and academic fields, imagination is more important than knowledge.

　　Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.

　　科学研究中想象力更重要还是知识更重要。这个讨论似乎来自于爱因斯坦的名句“imagination is more important than Knowledge“。不可否认两者都是科学研究中重要的元素，但是也许因为我们大部分人没有参与过科学研究，以及中国基础教育中重facts轻creativity的方式，限制了我们体会想象在科学探究中的角色。今天的issue观点时间，我们来读两篇优秀的文章，他们都在证明imagination的重要性。

　　Passage ONE - Why Science Needs Imagination and Beauty

　　Albert Einstein famously said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” They’re both important, says physicist and Nobel Prize recipient Frank Wilczek, but knowledge without imagination is barren. Take his subject of theoretical physics. As Wilczek says a lot of what you do is to try to understand Mother Nature’s mind and her sense of beauty to see how the laws of physics could be more beautiful.

　　Not many people truly appreciate what happened in physics in the last part of the 20th Century. We understood at a level whose profundity would be difficult to exaggerate what matter is. We really have the equations for the different fundamental building blocks of matter – the different particles have mathematical characterisations that are precise and elegant. They have no secrets, in principle we have the equations.

　　The bad news, however, is we are not so good at solving them. There are still gaps in fundamental understanding, we have very good equations or practical purposes, but they are kind of lop-sided; they are beautiful but not quite as beautiful as they should be given they are close to God’s last word in some sense. We’re trying to think of better ways to solve the equations, which takes a lot of imagination because they describe an unfamiliar world – it’s a very small world and things behave differently in it. The only way to get experience is to play around with the equations and imagine how they might behave in different circumstances, it’s more like imaginative play than anything else.

　　The laws we have discovered, especially in the quantum world are so strange you have to play with them in your mind. Usually what you envision is wrong, but its mind expanding and every once in a while you see something that may be right. Sometimes it even is right.

　　The questions we are now able to ask are so compelling, so extraordinary. What is most of the Universe made of? Are the laws of physics ultimately unified? What was the Big Bang like? You just say them and they have such grandeur. The more you learn about the equations, the more you learn about physics, the more you learn how beautiful it is. That’s the real value, it’s an ornament to the human mind.

　　source:

　　https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20131127-secret-to-thinking-like-a-genius

　　Passage TWO - ONCE UPON A TIME IN SCIENCE: IMAGINATION’S ROLE IN SCIENCE

　　There is often a question of whether or not science should be purely evidence based or should utilize more creative outlets for learning, discussion and writing. For Aldo Leopold, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, widely considered the father of wildlife management, there is a need for science where nature is concerned, but there is also need for experience and imagination. According to Helen Longino, a modern American philosopher of science, there are constitutive as well as contextual values in science. (2) Constitutive values are those integral to and backed by scientific inquiry, while contextual values are unrelated to a scientific understanding.

　　This discussion of the dichotomy between scientific reasoning and creativity seems to downplay the importance of imagination in the scientific method. Although scientists exhibit much constitutive creativity in designing experiments and studies, the wonder and excitement involved is often lost in publication. When was the last time anyone wanted to read a research paper to a child as a bedtime story, bring a scientific work to a book club, or was so captivated by the words on the page that they could not set the work down? Yannis Hadzigeorgiou, a professor of curriculum theory at the University of the Aegean in Mytliene, Lesbos explains that imagination brings order to sense experience and deductive reasoning, and that imagination has a centrality in science, not just an internality, when imagining experiments. (3) He notes that while scientists value creativity in their works, they often do not exploit the sense of wonder and awe that imagination can add to scientific publications. (3) By adding a little imaginative stimulation, scientific works become much more accessible to the public and can foster a sense of care and urgency toward the topics at hand. While there is a need for the traditional style of scientific writing to ensure that experiments are replicable and verifiable, scientists would likely benefit from engaging in additional forms of writing and communication that incorporate a more imaginative tone. This can go a long way in informing and engaging the general public, which is important both for the acquisition of new knowledge and societal progress. The articles posted on The Dish on Science and other blogs, magazines, and podcasts like it are a great way to share an imaginative view of science. As a reader of our website, you are proof that this method is effective at sharing science with the general public.

　　This type of imaginative translation need not only apply to science articles. Applying creative techniques to science education in a school setting is a way to effectively inform and engage a younger audience.

　　In a study done by Hadzigeorgiou et. al., researchers looked at how a romantic teaching style, emphasizing the teaching of scientific content through stories, would affect different aspects of learning in a school curriculum. The researchers used a story describing Nikola Tesla’s discovery and application of alternating current to teach students between the ages of fourteen and seventeen about electricity. They compared the students’ retention of the material to another group of students taught with typical direct instruction. The researchers wanted to know if teaching with the Tesla story helped students to learn specific scientific content more effectively than direct teaching and whether students taught with the Tesla story developed a romantic, emotional understanding of the science content. They found that significantly more students in the Tesla group kept journal entries, an optional activity. This finding suggests that learning through story kept the students more engaged and motivated to give extra thought about the material. On a test given about alternating current, the Tesla group scored significantly higher than the direct teaching group. These findings suggest that a romantic teaching framework encouraged emotional involvement with science and facilitated learning. A storytelling approach enriched the learning and instruction by stimulating imagination and curiosity. This study provides tangible evidence that imagination and emotion are important in the understanding of science.

　　In another example, a researcher from Roger Williams University developed a learning activity template to teach biodiversity lessons to high school students. The researcher developed a role playing activity where students had to “become” an organism in an ecological web. The students interacted with one another and had to determine the identity of other students to eventually build an ecological web with the knowledge they gained from the exercise. Through this activity, the students were better able to understand the multitude of species in different ecosystems and their complex interactions. Not only could the students build an accurate ecological web, they could, and - were more excited to - answer questions about their systems. While these examples of interactive, imaginative teaching only apply to the settings in which they were conducted, they are an encouraging implementation of the employment of imagination as a centrality in science.

　　In conclusion, to have an effective system in which the public is informed and active in conservation biology, there needs to be a release from the “either or” type thinking about the place of creativity in science. There should be a system in place where people are encouraged to learn facts AND stimulate their imaginations, where they are given information but in a way that is memorable and engaging, and where multiple disciplines work together. By implementing creative pieces in science learning and writing, stories, and journaling, the public would be much more informed and engaged in the future of conservation biology, leading to increased environmental action.

　　source:

　　https://thedishonscience.stanford.edu/posts/imagination-in-science/

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