The essence of Genius: Part 1

Genius then becomes something through which you can sift anything at all and come up with something different yet familiar enough to be recognizably different. At this juncture, it sounds remarkably like creativity, or fancy, or imagination. These latter two words are often confused with one another. The critic who did the most to distinguish these two words initially was Coleridge. As we know, fancy for Coleridge was the inferior mental faculty that was content with the passive data accumulated in memory. Fancy does not combine, or in combining, create. Imagination, on the other hand, is a more dynamic faculty, by which a human being can create something new, and assert the organic principle that the Romantics felt underlay all of creation. Imagination can be unconscious, or conscious and deliberate.

True genius, inasmuch as it begets something new, lies towards the end of the creative spectrum denoted by Imagination. But this applies for literary and creative fields. What about the sciences?