Imagination is more important than Knowledge

It's Monday again. Had a relaxing weekend reading "Crime & Punishment" by Dostoyevsky. Still some more to go. Went swimming on Saturday but was mostly at home.

But now back to work. Forget the relaxing times, it's time to bury your head in the books, or does it have to be that way?

The funny thing is that some of the greatest discoveries in science were actually made "out of the field", either by accident or when the person was not really thinking about his work. The concept of gravitation hit the mind of Newton when he was relaxing under an apple tree. Rontgen bought some rock material and wrapped it up in a photosensitive plate, and later found some weird patterns in the film, and not knowing what, he named them as X-rays. Alexander Fleming discovered Penicilline while doing some other experiment (which was not successful).
The structure of Benzene which baffled scientists for years was resolved after a Stradonitz had a bizzare dream. Maxwell first thought about electromagnetism when he was up in a mountain, and a lightning strike caused his compass to run wild. and the list goes on.

However, I guess that it doesn't mean that you should just sit around until something strikes you. If someone else encountered what Newton did under an apple tree, what might have probably crossed his mind would have been to eat the apple, but Newton had an inquisitive mind, and he went far beyond what was visible. And so did Maxwell and many others. So, to come up with bright ideas and new discoveries you still have to do the ground work while keeping an open mind. And as Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge".