J. Z. Young, in Doubt and Certainty in Science, explains how electricity is not something that is conveyed by or contained in anything, but is something that occurs when two or more bodies are in special positions. Our language derived from phonetic technology cannot cope with this new view of knowledge. We still talk of electric current “flowing,” or we speak of the “discharge” of electric energy like the lineal firing of guns. But quite as much as with the esthetic magic of painterly power, “electricity is the condition we observe when there are certain spatial relations between things.” The
...more
