Albert Einstein
Imagination is more important than knowledge
Intro
When you hear the name Albert Einstein, you automatically think “Genius”. Albert Einstein was a physicist, philosopher, mathematician, Nobel-prize winner, violinist and a scientist. He is most notably known for his theory of relativity, which has become one of the two pillars of modern physics. Einstein was one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century because he recognized the importance of taking risks and was not afraid to make bold knowledge claims. Even though his left-field ideas were initially met with skepticism, Einstein is now credited to have completely revolutionized our understanding of space and time.
Einstein approached science through an atypical method, often grounding his claims in thought-experiments instead of relying on abstract equations. He understood that imagination and thinking outside of the box were vital ingredients to innovation. The ‘box’ that had come to be accepted by most was Isaac Newton’s theory of classical mechanics, which suggested that matter and energy have definite attributes that do not change, irrespective of speed or location.1 Classical mechanics seemed like a “common-sense” approach to physics, but Einstein showed us that the world as it appears to human beings may not be the world as it functions at all.
Out yonder there is this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, internal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking.
– Albert Einstein [2]
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
