Imagination is just intelligence having fun.
George Scialabba
The meaning of the quote
In 1997, physicist Andre Geim poured water into one of the powerful magnets in his lab in Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. It was a Friday evening, none of his projects needed the answer and he wanted to see what would happen.
The water didn’t drain out the bottom. Balls of it hung in the air inside the magnet. So Geim tried a live frog, and the frog floated too, unharmed.
The floating frog won him an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000, a prize for science that makes people laugh first and think second.
Geim turned that evening into a habit his team called Friday Night Experiments, odd side projects that probably wouldn’t work but would surprise everyone if they did. Out of about 24, only 3 worked.
One of them started with pencil lead and Scotch tape. In 2004, his team in Manchester used the tape to peel graphite thinner and thinner until they had a sheet of carbon just 1 atom thick, called graphene.
In 2010, graphene won Geim and his colleague Konstantin Novoselov the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Geim is still the only person to hold both prizes.
That Friday night play only paid off because Geim knew his physics.
We tend to sort people into the kid who doodles in the margins and the kid who aces the test, but the quote puts both kids in the same head. Intelligence is what you know and how well you think it through. Imagination is that same mind playing with what it knows, with no deadline, grade or boss checking in.
The more you know, the more your imagination has to play with.
Play can also restart a mind that has stalled. In the book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Richard Feynman tells how he burned out on physics at Cornell after the war and couldn’t get any research done. He decided to play with physics instead. By his own account, a wobbling cafeteria plate led him to his Nobel Prize.
Action steps
You can run your own Friday night experiment without a lab or a giant magnet. All it takes is something you already know and a little time with nothing riding on it.
- Pick something you already know well.
A school subject, a game you’re good at, a song you can play or a recipe you’ve cooked 20 times. - Ask it a silly question.
- What happens if you play the song in a minor key?
- Can you explain the math rule using a football match?
- How does the history essay read from the losing side?
- Give it 1 hour a week with no goal.
Most of your experiments will go nowhere, and that’s fine, since Geim’s hit rate was about 1 in 8. Keep going with the ones that make you grin.
Start this Friday.
About the author
George Scialabba was born in 1948 in East Boston, the child and grandchild of poor southern Italian immigrants. As a teenager he joined the strict Catholic group Opus Dei.
At Harvard he studied European intellectual history and handed some of his course reading lists to Opus Dei to be checked for heresy. The books won. Just after graduating in 1969, he marched into a meeting of his group and told them he no longer believed.
He then fell into a deep depression and dropped out of graduate school at Columbia. The academic career he had dreamed of ended before it began.
After years of odd jobs, he started managing an office building at Harvard in 1980, working from a basement office with no windows.
He stayed for 35 years.
No university paid him to think, so he did it on his own time. His book reviews and essays ran in The Nation, The Boston Globe and Dissent, and in 1991 the National Book Critics Circle gave him its first Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.
When he retired in 2015, the Cambridge City Council declared September 10 George Scialabba Day, and The Baffler magazine threw him a party where guests toasted him from plastic champagne flutes printed with his face.
The quote is the last line of an article he wrote for Harvard Magazine in 1983. Reader’s Digest reprinted it, and over the years people swapped “imagination” for “creativity,” credited the line to Albert Einstein and printed it on coffee mugs and T-shirts.
Einstein probably got the credit because the line sounds like something a famous genius would say. It actually came from a building manager who read and wrote for the love of it.
A full 14 years before Andre Geim’s frog floated, a man in a windowless basement at Harvard had already written the line that explains it.
Resources
- How did you get that frog to float? (Article)
- Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Book)
- Physics is fun to imagine (Video)
- Study hard what interests you (Article)
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