Tim Lott: Scientists need to use their imagination

I sometimes wonder that science is not as given to prejudice and taboo as any other discipline. After all, to my layman's mind, to posit endless (unproven) universes seems to be no more unlikely than the idea that the forces that produced the universe had, at root, the potential to be intelligent. Apart from which, since all we human intelligences are products of the universe, is it cogent to argue that intelligence really arises from stupidity? Do thorns grow on grapevines? The narrowly rationalist view doesn't seem to add up.

I am as much an anti-theist as Dawkins. Or at least an anti-monotheist. But I also think the universe is stranger than the scientific imagination - which is a much inferior thing to the scientific intellect - can grasp.

Is he being serious? Not enough imagination? Scientists? Really? Did Galileo really lack imagination? Was Einstein just using his 'far superior scientific intellect' when he daydreamed about riding a beam of light, while travelling on the tram to his boring job at the patent office? Tim Lott wouldn't even be speculating on the complexity of the universe if scientists, using imagination AND intellect, hadn't established the reality of that complexity in the first place.

Numbskull

Perhaps we need fewer scientists and more 'imaginative' people like, say, erm, Damien Hirst. Which leads me nicely to this little exchange between Benji and George Szirtes on that hoary old standby 'is it art?' in which Benji gets stuffed, sliced and pickled. 

But was it art?

Via