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(Applause) (Cheering)
Thank you, good evening.
(Applause)
As you can see, I was given an armchair
because, usually, grandpas and grandmas
tell tales while sitting in armchairs.
I had asked for a couch though, with a seat next to me
for Thanos the Courgettie, Pikos Apikos and more of my characters.
(Applause)
But one cannot have it all.
I would much rather tell you a tale,
but I am going to talk to you about the main ingredient of tales,
that is, imagination.
Imagination is the first to chart the uncharted waters.
Our imagination is where, initially, the boldest journeys take place.
In the photograph you can see on the screen,
there is a real statue, 7 meters high, in Oslo, Norway.
Soon, I will tell you about the significance of this paperclip
and its connection with my talk.
The title of the talk "Let us imagine"
has been taken from a lecture given by James Maxwell,
on the molecular structure of gases.
In front of him, in this lecture, he had a series of small bottles of gases
and he showed their content to his audience
for them to observe, though both the gases and molecules were invisible.
For this reason, Maxwell kept repeating the sentence
'Let us imagine. Let us imagine the gases and the molecules.'
In science, we've got to imagine
even more, even more boldly.
Erwin Schrödinger, the Austrian physicist,
in order to explain what an electron is,
had described it as a pulse on an invisible rope.
At the Gounaropoulos museum, there is now an art exhibition
inspired by heroes from my books, paintings, sculptures and other works,
among which we exhibit the invisible green kangaroo, for the first time.
(Laughter)
There is a show case and a sign that says
'Invisible Green Kangaroo. Do not touch.'
(Laughter) (Applause)
Children find this entertaining.
An old teacher, however, rebuked me. She said,
'What is all this? Where is the kangaroo?
What is the point of telling children there is an invisible green kangaroo?'
I should' ve answered, the point is to help children tomorrow understand
what an electron is, according to Schrödinger's definition.
(Laughter) (Applause)
But I didn't. Instead, I said the kangaroo had gone to the loo
and would be back soon.
There is also another issue. We also exhibit an ice cube
made of chrysanthemum dewdrops, which also did not exist.
She says, 'Where is the ice cube?' I reply, 'It just melted.
Had you come a little earlier, you would have seen it.'
Imagination, that is, the ability to grasp
images and ideas beyond empirical reality,
I believe, is directly connected with technological progress,
with scientific thinking
and, today's issue, financial development.
The most important factor of production,
Kenneth Baldwin, the economist, had said,
is not the earth, not the manpower,
not the capital. It is imagination.
He justifies this because,
contrary to all the other factors of production,
which have certain limits,
imagination, says Baldwin, is limitless.
Therefore, its benefits are immeasurable. May I also add
that imagination is not only limitless, but it is also cheap.
We do not need to borrow to use it.
For someone to employ their imagination
in order to invent something original, or solve a problem,
neither advanced technology, nor high research funds are required.
Edison, who made more than a thousand inventions, put it very simply:
'To invent you need just a good imagination and a pile of junk'.
Sprangler's is a characteristic example; a janitor
who had asthma and, when dusting, he was disturbed by the dust.
He was trying to find a way, instead of recycling the dust,
to get rid of it.
So, he invented the first vacuum cleaner,
by initially using a fan and a pillow case.
He named this 'sweeper' and gave some away to friends
and relatives, on holidays.
He gave one of these sweepers to his cousin, Susana Hoover...
(Laughter)
His cousin's husband, William Henry Hoover,
manufacturer of leather goods at the time, saw the sweeper,
thought the idea interesting and in 1912, founded, with Sprangler
the famous vacuum cleaner company 'Hoover'.
This is not the only case.
There are so many cases in which, for an invention,
neither expertise, nor high funds or organised teams are required.
For example, the Swiss Joseph de Maistre,
when going hunting with his dog,
he got angry because afterwards he had to clean the dog's fur
from the burrs that caught on to its body.
As a result, by observing the burrs, he invented Velcro.
Velcro is nothing but industrialised burr.
Something similar happened with Arthur Fry, a pious man,
because, when he went to church,
he dropped the bookmarks from his book of hymns,
so he invented Post-it, which is easy to come off.
I was reading in the paper only a couple of days ago, you also saw it,
about an Argentinian car mechanic, who
- by using material that he found at home,
that is, a glass jug, a doll, a plastic bag and a sleeve -
invented a childbirth device expected to
reduce Caesarean sections and save many newborns.
One with a pillow case and a fan, the other with a jug and a sleeve,
they create something new.
If we had such inventions, such people in our country,
we would exit the crisis sooner, I believe.
So, to innovate, pioneering scientists
employ their imagination more than their knowledge.
Einstein had put it clearly:
'Imagination is a more essential requisite than knowledge,
'as knowledge is limited to all we understand
'at a given point in history,
'while imagination embraces all we will comprehend in the future.'
Here's something that I deeply believe in,
which I say over and over again, that
the goal of the education system should not be knowledge transfer so much
as cultivation of a child's creativity and imagination.
I've said it to politicians, to Ministers of Education,
but they do not seem to understand it.
Recently, in a book entitled 'Big Data' by Viktor Mayer,
in one of his reviews, Justin Webb writes:
'Why waste our time by learning facts?
'Whatever was necessary to be memorised from books
'can be available at any time literally in our pockets,
'in a small device, or tomorrow, even in our pair of glasses.'
Then again, Einstein,
'Never memorise something that you can look up.'
However, encouraging creativity
and cultivating imagination is one
of the most neglected aspects of modern education systems.
We stuff children, like turkeys, with knowledge, information, facts,
and allow their imagination to starve to death.
Children enter school gifted with a vivid imagination
and graduate with underfed, constricted imagination.
I can see it at the schools I go to.
The little kids with whom I communicate are full of imagination.
After a while, you see them act like pawns, like robots,
also stressed by all they need to learn.
The time of the paperclip has come.
In the study 'Break-point and Beyond: Mastering the Future Today',
the researchers present the results of research
concerning creative thinking.
To measure it, they use paperclips;
but also bricks and other strange objects.
The question concerning the clip is very simple.
What can a paperclip be useful for?
Most adults manage to think of
a maximum of 10-15 uses for a paperclip.
If someone lists more than 145-200 uses for a clip
they are considered a genius in this way of thinking.
The research was longitudinal.
They evaluated the same people at different stages of their lives.
At the age of five, the percentage of childern who reached
the highest score - more than 145 uses for a clip - was 98%.
When we talk about what to do with a clip, we mean unfold it
and turn it into a hook, or a bookmark, or a key ring,
or use a brick to keep a door open;
i.e., uses beyond the ordinary, standard use
of the specific object.
At the age of 8-10, the percentage drops dramatically to 50%
and so on, until by the time we reach adulthood,
the only use we can think of for a paperclip
is to bind sheets together.
Some adults also say that we use it to eject CD-ROM,
when you put it in that little hole and the CD-ROM comes out,
or maybe if one is a burglar,
they can use it to open locks or handcuffs.
I also tried this in a lecture I once gave on this subject,
and I handed out bits of paper where they could write uses of a clip.
They could hardly think of five, let alone 145 like little children.
We possess abilities which, instead of developing
through the education system, we strangle, we lose them.
We teach children to serve reality
rather than transcend it.
Υou won't be surprised, if I tell you, as a tale writer,
I believe the best food for your imagination is tales.
Let me call upon Einstein again:
'If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales.
'If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.'
(Laughter)
Alan Turing, the father of computer science
had been influenced in his work by tales,
tales with prophecies that he read as a child.
His love for tales went on until at an older age
and he shared this love with Gödel, the mathematician,
who had said that only myths convey reality
the way it should be.
Even Turing's tragic suicide in '54
was a representation of his favourite fairy tale, Snow White.
He killed himself by biting an apple soaked in cyanide.
Some believe, though this is not accepted officially,
that the bitten apple of Apple computers
is a tribute to the father of computer science.
Here I come to list the role of tales
in the lives of many important people.
But why are tales and myths so important?
Because the myth precedes.
Reality follows.
Mermaids have always swum in fairy tales,
just like centaurs have always galloped in fairy tales.
Now with the help of transgenic technology,
imaginative beings are created one after the other.
The French Institute of Agronomic Research creates the first GFB bunny,
that glows like a firefly.
Using spider DNA, researchers in Quebec create the first spider-billy goat,
whose milk produces powerful fibres for bulletproof vests.
The same goes for invisibility cloaks.
We have always read about them in fairy tales.
Now, Xian Zhang's scientific team at UC Berkeley
manages to render three-dimensional obects invisible
by covering them with the so-called "metamaterials".
They are like optical Teflon, repelling the light particles
making the object invisible.
So the tale has been telling us for a long time now,
and we now realise it, we materialise it.
And now, my humble contribution to science.
In my first fairy tale, which was published many years ago
in the journal "I Diaplasi ton Pedon", a mouse eats a page on zoology,
in a library, with the drawing of a cat.
This gives him the confidence to attempt to eat a real cat
named Scratchilda, for those who have read the book.
One of my students recently brought to me some photos
published by Reuters,
and told me 'Here, the story of Scratchilda and Ignatius comes true';
photos of a mouse fearlessly confronting an awkward cat.
(Laughter)
From a research of Japanese scientists on the sources of fear.
Also, in another book of mine, I had described,
what I called, the 'chameleon jacket',
a jacket changing colour on wearing it, depending on your whereabouts.
If, for example, you walk in a field of poppies
the jacket turns green with red dots.
If you walk by the sea,
it turns azure with white wiggly lines.
If shooting stars fall onto you, it turns silver.
You can imagine my satisfaction when I read the news
about the third generation of textiles called 'smart fibres',
which change colour either according to the environment
or other factors.
These might seem funny, but I have read that these researches
on these smart fibres changing colour
depending on some factors in the environment or whatever,
are funded by ministries of defence,
as this kind of textiles would fill the bill for camouflage.
You wear a uniform that takes the color of your environment.
I hope more of my inventions will have similar luck,
like the electric suctionscope, or the light bob you heard about a while ago,
the opposite of a plumb bob, and actually in one of my lectures,
a child came to me afterwards saying, 'Don't worry Mr. Trivizas,
'when I grow up, I will invent the light bob, so that
'you don't get tired by carrying your suitcase as you constantly travel'.
In my next lecture, we may as well have a light bob to show you.
Now, let's go back to paperclips.
The statue of the paperclip you see,
refers to yet another symbolic use of the paperclip.
Norwegians consider their country as the place of invention
of the first paperclip in 1901, I think.
So, during the Second World War,
Norwegians, to show that they are all united against the conqueror,
instead of using buttons, they fixed their clothes with clips,
or then wore paperclips.
Whoever wore a paperclip in Norway at that time
ran the risk of getting arrested by Gestapo.
To prove the persecution of imagination from education,
- as we cannot afford the time to elaborate on the historic reasons
why imagination is persecuted -
I will tell you a story narrated to me - he no longer lives -
by the theatrical writer, Iakovos Kampanelis
- one day at the Kedros Publishing House where we were talking -
he told me this story about his daughter who is a grown woman now.
He told me that at school, it was asked of the children
to write how they spent their weekend,
or some holiday, I don't remember, and to make a drawing.
Kampanelis told me,
he had been with his daughter on a road trip,
and as the car was running,
the little girl observed, through the window,
the sun between the cols, so she saw it
appear, disappear and she saw it again and again
as the car passed by,
and when the teacher asked for a drawing,
she drew a line of mountains and, between them, five suns.
She returned from school crying, as Kampanelis told me,
because the teacher had crossed out the four suns
and had only left one.
What is the irony?
The irony is that even from a scientific perspective
Kampanelis' daughter, not the teacher, was right.
There is not just one sun.
Our solar system is not the only one.
There are many suns, perhaps infinite;
definitely more than five though, I assure you.
That's what I had to say. Now, I will take my invisible green kangaroo
and go back to the Island of Fireworks.
Thank you. (Applause)
Thank you very much
(Applause)