The most advanced imagination is not free

Einstein said a lot of things in his life, and I don't know when and under what circumstances he said "imagination is more important than knowledge", and as a result, Chinese children's educators remembered it. In Zheng Yuanjie's generation, this statement has evolved into: "Imagination and knowledge are natural enemies. One's imagination disappears in the process of acquiring knowledge. Because knowledge conforms to logic, while imagination has no rules to follow. In other words, the essence of knowledge is science, and the characteristic of imagination is absurdity."

　　I don't know what people without knowledge can imagine. In her book "Babies are Philosophers Too - Surprising Discoveries in Early Childhood Learning and Thinking," Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, presents the findings of modern cognitive science on human imagination: imagination comes from knowledge. It is after understanding the knowledge of the cause-and-effect relationship between things that children's imagination becomes possible.

　　People can imagine themselves flying in the sky because they see birds flying in the sky. We can compare the science fiction movies of 30 years ago and the science fiction movies of today, which depicts the future world hundreds of years later more similarly? Obviously it is the current science fiction movie.

　　In a very old science fiction movie, the main character actually needs to use one hand to hold the handset when making a video call. In those older sci-fi movies, the control room of the spaceship in the future world was covered with buttons and indicators, while the current movies are full of oversized, ultra-thin, transparent touch screens. You don't invent a touch screen for them in real life, these film makers specializing in imagination can't forget the buttons.

　　Kong Qingdong once had an argument, ancient Chinese martial arts novels are also a lot, but "concealed weapons" almost never appeared, while the current martial arts novels almost all mentioned concealed weapons. Why can't the ancients imagine concealed weapons? Because the concealed weapon is a modern novelist inspired by the pistol and imagined. Without knowledge, even if you just think, you can not think.

　　Regarding this kind of imagination in science fiction and fairy tales, I think there are two levels.

　　The primary imagination is to play the game of "what if" in daily life. If a mouse can talk, if a mouse can fly a toy plane, if a mouse can drive a toy train ...... Zheng Yuanjie's imagination is this level, he said: "What if a smile swallows the nucleus into its stomach? If swallowed into the stomach will not grow cherry trees? At this point I remembered that during elementary school, my classmates gave me the nickname 'Jujube Kernel'." This particular nickname stuck with Zheng Yuanjie, and when he started writing, he always hoped to create a work with this name for the main character.

　　Note that this imagination is not free from the causal knowledge that "there are nuclei to grow into trees". A person who asks "what if" all the time can write a whole bunch of fairy tales, not about mice, but about people dressed as mice. Children think they are hearing a story about a mouse, but Zheng Yuanjie is actually telling the children's own stories, and "children's own stories" do not become world famous. We note that this imagination is completely free, you are not obliged to explain how a cherry tree can grow in your stomach, because no one will ask this question, no one cares about this story.

　　To write a story like The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or Avatar that a lot of people care about requires a different level of imagination, an imagination that is not free.

　　To write a fantasy masterpiece of the world, one must build a completely autonomous imaginary world. "Autonomy" is a very high requirement. You have to explain why some mountains can levitate on Pandora - because the ore on the mountain contains superconducting substances at room temperature, and the magnetic field of the planet is disturbed. And the reason why humans are coming to this planet is for this substance. The magnetic field of Pandora is disturbed, which is the reason why the animals on the planet have a certain ability to sense. The magnetic field is disturbed because there are several other planets nearby, and you can see them all in the sky ...... Several things must be able to explain each other, and they are a complete logical system.

　　In addition to this, you have to estimate the atmospheric density of Pandora, you imagine these plants and animals must be in line with the planet's environment, you have to ask linguists to invent a language specifically for the natives of Pandora ...... you compiled yourself an "Encyclopedia of Pandora".

　　The same goes for The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. In addition to a self-contained worldview, these two books also have the characteristic that the author should have a fairly deep study of European mythology. Various magic, races and props cannot be imagined haphazardly, but must conform to certain traditions. Our "Journey to the West" is also a good example of this.

　　May I ask if this imagination is a pie-in-the-sky harebrained imagination? Quite the contrary, they are carefully calculated. The various magical plants in Avatar are the result of inspiration from sea creatures, the shape of the mountain probably comes from China, and even the storyline is a rehash of colonization events that have played out countless times in human history. Why does imagination have to have a connection to reality? Because people are not interested in things that don't make sense.

　　Therefore, the highest level of imagination is actually not free. It is because it is not free that it is so difficult. In this sense, Chinese directors cannot make Avatar, what they lack is not "freedom", but the brain power and material power behind this "unfreedom".

　　Behind the "cult of freedom of imagination" is the "cult of epiphany". This is the idea that people are bound by their own knowledge all day long, and that once they break out of this bondage, they can make major breakthroughs. This idea is actually a vulgar interpretation of scientific discovery.

　　Once an invention comes along that the average person did not expect, it is explained that the inventor was able to make the invention because he was free to imagine it. As if there are countless terrible "no-go areas" in science, other researchers never dare to think in this direction. In fact, what you can think of, the professionals have already thought of.

　　I was reading the Feynman Lectures on Physics, and there was a small section called "Relativity and the Philosopher". Feynman said that after relativity became popular, many philosophers jumped in and said, "Isn't it the most natural philosophical requirement that the coordinate system be relative? We've known this for a long time!" But if you tell them that the speed of light is constant in all coordinate systems, they will be dumbfounded. So a real scientist has more imagination than an "imaginer". A theoretical physicist may have a million weird ideas every day, and the real difficulty is not in generating "weird" ideas, but in generating "right" ideas.

　　Let me conclude this article with a quote from Niels Bohr. All those who think they are particularly imaginative should read it carefully: "The madness of your theory is an indisputable fact, but the key to our disagreement is whether it is so mad that it is possible to be right."