“If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” Albert Einstein

The willingness to imagine something that at first glance might appear to be absurd is perhaps one of the keys to innovation and scientific discovery.

I recently came to appreciate that one of the key features of  18th Century Enlightenment was a willingness to adopt a skeptical eye, challenge authority, convention and the status quo – and see the world through a fresh pair of eyes.  In many cases this through up ideas that to those who inhabited the world of the status quo appeared quite absurd.  Only for those new ideas to eventually take hold and become the norm.

All this came back to me recently when I encountered the concept of ‘poetical science’, a term conjured up by Lord Byron’s daughter Countess Ada Lovelace in the 1840s.

Ada Lovelace was born December 10, 1815 the daughter of the illustrious poet, Lord Byron. Five weeks after she was born Lady Byron asked for a separation from Lord Byron, and was awarded sole custody of Ada who she brought up to be a mathematician and scientist. Lady Byron was worried that Ada might end up being a poet like her father.

Yet the influence of her father could not be resisted and in her 30’s she wrote to her mother, if you can’t give me poetry, can’t you give me “poetical science?”

For Ada had a rare capacity to understand the beauty of mathematics, and argued that it could be poetic at times.

She worked with Charles Babbage, the inventor who created a calculating machine called the Analytical Engine. To give it instructions, he adopted the punch cards that were being used by the textile looms of the time.

Ada’s love of both poetry and maths enabled her to see “great beauty” in the machine, which led her to write a set of notes that showed how it could be programmed to do a variety of tasks, which is what earned her the title of first programmer.

Countess Ada Lovelace, then, brings together those two unlikely fellow travellers – her father, the romantic poet, and the mercurial technological entrepreneur who was Steve Jobs. By connecting the world of mathematics and science with the world of imagination she preceded Einstein by over 100 years followed her lead when he proclaimed:

 “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Fast forward to the present day and we hear Michio Kaku, Professor of Theoretical physics, claim that:

“Imagination is the rocket fuel of science”

It is this intersection between science and the arts that so excited Steve Jobs and informed his own journey of discovery that has so influenced our modern world.

‘It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology isn’t enough, it’s technology married to liberal arts and the humanities that yields the result that makes our hearts sing” Steve Jobs

If there is something that appears to connect all of these remarkable people it is the notion of ‘rebellion’ i.e. the action or process of resisting authority, control, or convention.

Or, as Lord Byron put it – through what appears, at first glance, to be an ‘absurd point of view’.

My turn of mind is so given to taking things in the absurd point of view, that it breaks out in spite of me every now and then.

Lord Byron

If only more of us could attempt to adopt that alternative, and at times possibly absurd, perspective rather than that which limits our horizons.