Nor could one measure imagination as certain psychologists try to do, by displaying a picture and asking what will happen next. For Feynman the essence of the scientific imagination was a powerful and almost painful rule. What scientists create must match reality. It must match what is already known. Scientific creativity, he said, is imagination in a straitjacket. “The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines,” he said. “They overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we
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