Our Relationship to Our Thinking

I invite you to pay attention to anything—the sight of this text, the sensation of breathing, the feeling of your body resting against your chair—for a mere sixty seconds without getting distracted by discursive thought. It sounds simple enough: Just pay attention. The truth, however, is that you will find the task impossible. If the lives of your children depended on it, you could not focus on anything—even the feeling of a knife at your throat—for more than a few seconds, before your awaren...

 Herschel Compares Scientific Discovery to Columbus' Explo...

Herschel prophetically implied that electricity and electro-magnetism still hid many secrets, and that their investigation would become the leading science of the new age. This would indeed be Faraday’s coming field of triumph. He summarised (paragraph no. 376) this pursuit in the image of a great and noble sea voyage of exploration. ‘There is something in this which reminds us of the obstinate adherence of Columbus to his notion of the necessary existence of the New World; and the whole hist...