"To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science"
About this Quote
The intent is partly defensive. Einstein’s own breakthroughs didn’t come from polishing Newtonian machinery; they came from asking what the machinery couldn’t easily accommodate: What if time isn’t universal? What if gravity is geometry? Those weren’t “solutions” in the ordinary sense. They were acts of conceptual vandalism against the default assumptions of an era. So when he links “real advance” to “creative imagination,” he’s staking a claim that many gatekeepers resist: the scientist isn’t only a technician but also a storyteller of possible worlds, disciplined by evidence.
The subtext is a rebuke to routine. “Old problems” implies institutions can get stuck, rewarding incrementalism and treating unanswered questions as personal failures rather than signs the question is poorly posed. “New angle” is also a political phrase in academic life: a reminder that consensus can harden into dogma, and that breakthroughs often look, at first, like heresy or play.
Context matters: early 20th-century physics was drowning in anomalies. Einstein’s line captures that moment when the data wasn’t missing; the conceptual frame was. He’s arguing that the scarce resource in science isn’t information. It’s audacity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: The Evolution of Physics (Albert Einstein, 1938)
Evidence: To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science. (Page 92 (in later Simon & Schuster editions; chapter is commonly identified as Chapter 2, "The Decline of the Mechanical View")). This line appears in Albert Einstein & Leopold Infeld’s co-authored book The Evolution of Physics (original publication year: 1938). Many secondary references point to p. 92 (especially Simon & Schuster reprints such as the 1966 edition) and present it as part of a longer passage beginning, “The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution…”. I was able to verify the wording of the sentence itself reliably via multiple independent secondary sources that explicitly cite the book and page, but I did not retrieve a scan of the 1938 first edition page itself in this search session. Therefore I’m labeling confidence as medium (correct work/year, but first-edition page verification not directly inspected here). Other candidates (1) Problems-First Learning (Ted McCain, 2020) compilation97.4% ... Albert Einstein himself says, “To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Einstein, Albert. (2026, February 26). To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-raise-new-questions-new-possibilities-to-34871/
Chicago Style
Einstein, Albert. "To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science." FixQuotes. February 26, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-raise-new-questions-new-possibilities-to-34871/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science." FixQuotes, 26 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-raise-new-questions-new-possibilities-to-34871/. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026.
