of his nose.
Writers, publishers, and proof readers — even with the aid of the latest computerized spell-checkers — also know only too well that it is possible for the keenest eye and the sharpest mind to look through a proof a dozen times and still miss something that a keen-eyed reader will report within an hour of opening the book!
A great deal could be said at this point about the psychological phenomenon of “mental set,” and Edward de Bono, whose theories and interesting experimental work have contributed enormously not only to our understanding of human thinking processes but to practical improvements in them, always emphazises the importance of lateral thinking.
One type of mind focuses in on a problem and hammers away at it relentlessly until a solution is found. The second type of mind, which belongs to the lateral thinker, whose technique may either be instinctive or learnt, goes outside the problem and attempts to solve it by methods that may seem impossibly tangential, wild, and imaginative, but which nevertheless lead to satisfactory, if unexpected, solutions on most occasions.
Idea teams in the media and creative arts worlds, as well as advertisers, inventors, and designers, frequently meet in “brainstorming” think-tank sessions in which new ideas are hurled uncritically in all directions, recorded, and then analyzed and critically evaluated at later sessions. This type of work frequently leads to quantum-leap progress. Could it be that when we are experiencing difficulties in locating lost objects, we need to get outside the immediate focus of our own particular mind set and to look in the least likely place that the object we’re hoping to recover might have gone?
A visit to the tomb of Saint Anthony, or a prayer invoking his help, might be just the mental nudge that the searcher needs in order to escape from his or her current ineffectual mind set and begin looking somewhere else.
It is, of course, equally possible that a man who devoted so much of his time and energy to thinking, doing, and saying good things during his short earthly life had not finished the excellent work he began. Is Anthony still helping others despite the interruption called death?
One well-known theory that goes the rounds among psychical researchers is that the fabric of a building in which extreme emotion was once experienced has absorbed those emotions, and, in a sense, recorded them, in much the same way that magnetic tape can record pictures and sounds. A man with Anthony’s spiritual power and charisma would have been a very impressive recording agent. It is reasonable to assume that, despite the joy he is experiencing in the abundant and eternal life of Heaven, Anthony’s characteristic concern for those whom he loved and helped on earth still takes up part of his time, in so far as “time” can have any meaning in Eternity.
In this context, we need to consider the real possibility that Anthony of Padua is still very much alive, active, and interested in our physical world as well as in his own spiritual one, and that he does genuinely intervene when his help is sought. So many posthumous miracles have been credited to him that they cannot lightly be ignored.
Anthony once lived a very good and positive life. His relics survive. The miracles associated with them are well documented. That is Anthony’s part; the conclusions we draw from that evidence are our own responsibility, but his mortal remains are among the world’s most mysterious objects.
CHAPTER EIGHTOrffyreus’s Perpetual Motion Engine
Every science student studying for his or her school or college examinations knows perfectly well that even the most efficient machine loses some of the energy that is put into it. Friction, air resistance, and a host of other “energy leakages” prevent the full force of what went in from performing one hundred percent of its optimum work before it comes out. Energy, like matter, cannot, theoretically, be created or destroyed, and only through Einstein’s famous E = mc2 formula can matter and energy be exchanged one for the other. Once this basic scientific principle is firmly grasped, it seems that a perpetual motion machine is a contradiction in terms.
It has been said, however, by some of those who are expert in such matters, that the design of a bumblebee’s body and wings is aerodynamically unstable and, theoretically at least, the bumblebee ought not to be able to fly. Fortunately for the bumblebee, it does not know this, so it goes on flying contentedly despite all scientific theories to the contrary.
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