Now we have finished with our incursion into maths, and I know that will be welcome…

Why have we been talking about such non-spiritual things as acceleration, velocity (speed) and distance? The answer is that these aspects of motion are at the heart of how we learn about the world, and how we interact with it. In learning, we forget how we learned and become absorbed in the results.

When the infant reaches out to grasp the hot cup she shouldn’t touch, and her fingers fail to grasp it, but push it away, she is using acceleration in the force she is trying to exert with her fingers. The small training cup may move but a larger and hotter teapot wouldn’t. The difference is not in the child’s fingers but in the mass (heaviness) of the teapot. A burn may be the result. It’s important to be able to gauge the mass of things – cycling into a tree or a wall is more painful than a hedge.

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