Science Needs Imagination

The scientific method: hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion.

This is how I understood science at a Texas high school; this is also a notion that most people, disillusioned with the motions of the scientific method, leave high school with. I myself chose the humanities. But the notion that we must associate science with a strict adherence to method and materialism limited what I thought I could contribute to the scientific process.

Children see the material universe as the ancients perceived before their imagination is restrained: lacking fundamental facts and methodical rules, with no prior scientific foundation to stand upon. Without predecessors and modern instruments, how did the ancients once frame the material universe?

I turn to the Romantic poet, William Blake, to describe the child’s imagination in a series of poems titled “Songs of Innocence and Experience.” Blake’s poems represent innocence as youth and naivety; experience as mature and rational. The opposition between imagination and materialism resembles the irreconcilable nature of innocence and experience.

Blake wrote in reaction to the rise of Francis Bacon’s, Sir Isaac Newton’s, and John Milton’s emphasis on materialism. Blake viewed their emphasis on materialism and exclusion of imagination as the creation of a “false deity” of Enlightenment scientific realism, which limits our vision and understanding of the material universe. Such a perspective disavowed our access inward to what Blake elucidates as “Worlds of Thought” — the imagination — limiting us to sense perception.

Without a full science education to teach how imagination and materialism have complemented each other in Aristotle’s to Einstein’s theories, I fear the end of scientific progress and echo Blake’s ultimate concern about the destruction of existence.

Do we turn less and less inward as more is discovered? High school nurtured the intuition that there was no step, if science can be reduced to steps, to be imaginative. I prepared before each lab under the guidance of a laminated scientific method poster, sliced scientific fact from a textbook to stitch into my hypothesis, and recorded data into tables and models to affirm the textbook in my conclusion.

Behind the fascination of each marvel outside the classroom was a calculable conclusion. I wondered how the scientific discoveries of Nicolaus Copernicus’ heliocentrism and Friedrich Miescher’s identification of “nuclein,” or DNA, were possible without the essential elements of imagination and surprise. How do we progress without imagination to complement materialism?

I thought access to “Worlds of Thought” were exclusive to the humanities. It often feels as though the main prerequisite for humanities, as a subjective discipline, is experience and imagination, whereas that of science, as an objective discipline, is an intensive understanding of fact.

Why is the imagination not associated with science education more often? I became disillusioned with science. I chose the route of humanities because the worlds within had high potential to provide insight on the one I inhabit.

I see a friend’s exhaustion from a p-set, their mind overwhelmed and fried. How does science seem to vacuum the imagination from their eyes? The narrator of Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” expresses their tiredness of “proofs, figures [...] charts and diagrams.” What more can the imagination — beyond facts and models — comprehend about our universe? The narrator wanders outside of the astronomer’s lecture into an immersion of night air, captivated by the mysticism of the universe’s appearance of infinite stars and coordinates. The narrator turns away from modern science.

In Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” Professor Krempe reproaches Victor Frankenstein’s interest in the imaginative theories of the ancient Agrippa and Paracelsus; their theories represent “exploded systems” and “fancies” that modern science falsifies. Indeed, the ancients’ theories cannot withstand modern science; but the professor’s exclusion of their theories as “sad trash” dismisses imagination as a relic, obsolete to modern science without credit to the discoveries made possible due to their theories. Victor turns away from the demands of modern science.

I do not foresee a Nobel surfacing in a high school lab. But I resonate with Walt’s narrator and Victor’s wishes. I wish authorities in education were equally invested in the individual’s intuition, emboldening peers and me to wonder with what is known and largely unknown about our material universe. To be pro-imagination is conflated to be anti-science, but this contradiction inhibits the harmonious and irreconcilable nature of imagination and materialism.

Progress in science is thought to be the slow retirement of the imagination. But science needs the imagination to see within and outside our reliance on scientific fact. The ancients’ imaginative theories assisted in their successor’s wonder and addition to impermanent systems. With this perspective, I plan to enroll in more science courses. If progress depends on imagination and materialism, science education should embolden the intuition and potential of each to see within “Worlds of Thought” to collaborate and contribute to knowledge.

Matthew A. Thompson ’26 lives in Matthews Hall.