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The Imagination of Science Dwarfs the Imagination of Fiction

We habitually credit novelists, screenwriters, and especially science-fiction authors with great "imagination." They invent worlds, we say; they dream up what never was. And we tend to think of scientists as the opposite sort of mind — careful, plodding, empirical, the very antonym of imaginative. This is exactly backwards. The imagination of science is incomparably more powerful, more surprising, and more genuinely creative than the imagination of fiction. Fiction's imagination is a small and tame thing wearing a large costume. The real wild creativity — the ideas that no human mind anticipated — comes almost entirely from science. And there is a second, harder difference: fiction's imagination exists to console us, while science's exists to find out what is true, including the truths we would pay any price not to hear.

Science Fiction Is Human Drama in a Costume

Consider the genre that supposedly represents imagination at its most unbound: science fiction, especially in film. Look closely at almost any of it and you find the same thing — an ancient human story with a novel backdrop painted behind it.

Star Wars is a feudal dynastic struggle: a deposed prince, an evil father, a wise old knight, a princess, a war of succession. Move it from a galaxy far away to medieval Europe and not one emotional beat changes. Dune is desert tribalism, resource geopolitics, and messianic prophecy. Avatar is a colonial frontier story you have seen a dozen times in Westerns. The overwhelming majority of "space" movies are war films, Westerns, or court intrigues with spaceships swapped in for galleons and blasters swapped in for revolvers. The setting is novel. The content — the actual human material the story is made of — is thousands of years old: love, betrayal, revenge, ambition, grief, the fear of death.

This is the giveaway. The fiction author's imagination reaches confidently into settings and almost never into ideas. It can put a familiar feeling on Mars. It cannot, and does not try to, imagine a piece of reality that is genuinely unlike anything a human has felt. The feelings are the point; the spaceship is set dressing.

What No Author Imagined

Now set that beside what science has actually found, and the asymmetry becomes embarrassing.

No science-fiction author imagined that the complete construction plan for an entire living organism is written out, in full, in a four-letter chemical alphabet, and stored redundantly inside every single cell of the body — and that it copies itself by the simple trick of complementary pairing, each strand a template for its partner. The double helix is more elegant, more surprising, and more beautiful than any device any author ever invented, and it has the one property no invented device has: it is real, and it is inside you, billions of times over, right now.

The list goes on, and every item on it outstrips fiction:

  • Evolution by natural selection. Design without a designer — the entire dazzling complexity of life assembled by a blind, mechanical process over billions of years. Darwin's idea is wilder than any creation myth ever told, and unlike the myths it is true.
  • Relativity. Time itself runs at different rates depending on speed and gravity; simultaneity is not absolute. Authors imagined time travel — a human wish. None imagined time dilation, because it answers to no human wish; it is simply how the universe is.
  • Quantum mechanics. Reality at its base is indefinite, non-local, probabilistic. Particles are entangled across distance in a way that has no analogue in any story, because it has no analogue in human experience at all.
  • The scale of the cosmos. Two trillion galaxies. A universe with a measurable beginning, whose faint afterglow we can still detect — the cosmos has a baby picture, and we found it.
  • Germ theory. Disease is caused by invisible living things too small to see. For all of human history this was imagined as curses, sins, and bad air. The truth — microbes — was imagined by no one until it was discovered.

Every one of these was, at the moment of its discovery, more astonishing than the contents of any novel. And notice the direction of borrowing. Science fiction took black holes, wormholes, genetic engineering, antimatter, and artificial intelligence from scientists. The traffic runs one way: the genuinely new ideas are discovered in laboratories and then decorated by authors. Authors illustrate; scientists invent. The most imaginative thing in any good science-fiction story is almost always the bit the author got from a scientist.

Unconstrained Imagination Is the Weaker Kind

Here is the part that inverts the usual intuition. We are impressed by fiction because its imagination is unconstrained — the author can write anything. But that freedom is precisely what makes it the lesser achievement. Anyone can imagine a dragon. It costs nothing and risks nothing, because a dragon cannot be wrong.

Scientific imagination is constrained imagination, and that is what makes it hard. Paul Dirac wrote down an equation and was forced by it to imagine antimatter — and antimatter turned out to exist. Physicists imagined the Higgs boson decades before any instrument could find it, and then it was found, exactly as imagined. This is imagination that pays a price for being wrong: it has to guess what is actually out there, in a universe under no obligation to match the guess. To imagine freely is easy. To imagine something that no one has seen, and to have reality then confirm it, is a different and vastly higher order of creativity. Free invention that cannot be wrong is a parlor trick beside constrained invention that turns out true.

Even the best of literary science fiction — Lem's genuinely alien ocean in Solaris, Borges's metaphysical puzzles, Ted Chiang's careful thought experiments — only sharpens the point. These are the rare cases where authors try to imagine the genuinely non-human, and they are wonderful. But they remain thought experiments, untested and untestable, and the very best of them still does not match a single one of the discoveries listed above for sheer unanticipated strangeness made real. The author's most alien creation is still a human idea about alienness. The double helix is not anyone's idea. It is what was found.

Fiction Consoles; Science Indicts

There is a final difference, and it is the one that most cleanly exposes what fiction's imagination is actually for. Fiction is concerned with human feelings — that is its subject and its purpose — and so it tends, overwhelmingly, to tell us things we are glad to hear about ourselves.

Fiction reassures us that our inner lives are rich and meaningful, that our suffering has significance, that love redeems, that the self is real and unified and basically good, that our choices are our own, that there is a moral arc to events. Even its tragedies flatter us: they tell us our pain matters, that there is dignity in it. This is not a complaint — it is simply what the form is built to do. Its cosmic settings are instruments for delivering an emotional payload, and the payload is, at bottom, consolation.

Science's imagination offers no such comfort, and frequently offers the opposite. Because it is indifferent to how we feel about its findings, it is free to tell us things we hate:

  • Evolutionary biology tells us our behavior is substantially shaped by the cold logic of gene propagation — that much of our kindness is calculated reciprocity and much of our morality is machinery for managing reputation, not the pure conscience we flatter ourselves with.
  • Psychology tells us our introspection is largely confabulation — that we routinely invent reasons for choices we made for causes we cannot see, that memory is reconstructive and unreliable, that we are strangers to our own minds.
  • Cognitive science tells us the unified, continuous self in charge of our decisions may be a useful illusion the brain constructs after the fact.
  • The study of intelligence and behavior tells us uncomfortable things about how much of our capacities are heritable, unequal, and outside our control — findings people resist precisely because they are unwelcome.

These are exactly the things fiction will not say, because fiction is in the business of making us feel better, and these findings make us feel worse. That a body of imagination is willing to deliver them anyway is not a defect — it is the signature of the superior, reality-constrained imagination. An imagination optimizing for your comfort will never surprise you with a hard truth, because comfort and surprise pull in opposite directions. Only an imagination that does not care how you feel is free to discover what is actually the case. Fiction tells you what you want to hear about yourself. Science tells you what is true about yourself, and lets you deal with it.

Conclusion

We have the prestige backwards. The novelist who imagines a war among the stars has imagined a war — an old human thing — and moved it somewhere new. The scientist who imagined that every cell carries the whole plan of the body, or that time bends, or that life designs itself without a designer, imagined something no human had felt or feared or wished for, and then reality confirmed it. Fiction's imagination is unconstrained, anthropocentric, and consoling — and is the lesser for all three. Science's imagination is constrained by the demand that it be true, reaches past the human entirely, and is willing to tell us the things about ourselves we would most like to deny. That is the more impressive faculty by far. The most imaginative authors who ever lived have never matched what a careful look at a single human cell reveals — and unlike anything they wrote, that revelation has the distinction of being real.