The Age of Imagination

Galileo once said that one cannot understand the universe without comprehending its language: mathematics. Unfortunately, most individuals will approach physical sciences with dread, due in part to the difficulty with speaking the language of the universe, and for this reason may fail to perceive its breathtaking beauty. When we look deeper than the letter of reason, we encounter a flow of imagination that appears to be integral to the cosmos. The Enlightenment of the 18th century was an Age of Reason that deeply shaped our modern society. By following the movement of ideas from classical physics to quantum mechanics, passing by chaos theory and Einstein’s special and general relativity, it is argued that a new Enlightenment might be in sight, an Age of Imagination, wherein the creatures that we are will consciously re-enter the flow of imagination. This exploration concerns classical physics and its repression of imagination; the difficult emergence of deterministic chaos is viewed as a return of what was left behind, so to speak: the shadow of reason.

The one-after-another is a bearable prelude to the deeper knowledge of the side-by-side, for this is an incomparably more difficult problem.—C. G. Jung (1970 Jung, C.G. (1970). The collected works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 14: Mysterium coniunctionis (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, &; W. McGuire, eds.). Bollingen Series XX. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar], par. 206)