The Birth of Tragedy

"Just as Poincare began his famous 1908 introspection with the problem, ” What, in fact, is mathematical invention,” Einstein began his by asking “What, precisely, is ‘thinking’?” Like Poincare he was deeply interested in how ideas metamorphose. Our first impressions of a world which “memory-pictures” emerge. Certain memory pictures form series. A memory picture that occurs a great many times in several different series can serve as an “ordering element” for those series. Einstein referred to this ordering element as a “concept”. Thinking is “operations” with concepts… the creation and use of definite functional relations between concepts and co-ordination of sense experiences to these concepts.” Concepts are organizing principles that enable us to turn sense perceptions into exact knowledge. Subconscious thinking is a “free play with concepts.” When Einstein told Seelig about “building blocks.. being prepared over a period of years,” he meant a continual process of “free play,” and then kept in the unconscious.
That creative thinking is essentially nonverbal seemed clear to Einstein: How else could “we ‘wonder’ quite spontaneously about some experience?” (Two of Einstein’s childhood “wonders”, as we saw, were the compass needle and the geometry booklet.) Wondering “quite spontaneously” is at the root of his highly visual thought experiments. For Einstein, creative thinking occurred in visual imagery, and words “were sought after laboriously only in a secondary stage.”
In summary, as a musician and a physicist Einstein was an antipositivist. In music, beyond notes and instruments was the sublime realm where melodies floated. In physics, beyond observations and theory lay the music of the spheres, where laws of nature waited to be plucked out of the cosmos. His great breakthrough was to use organizing principles and the visual imagery of thought experiments to go beyond sense perceptions and its associated form of intuition."