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Good morning. On Tuesday, three American scientists received the Nobel Prize in physics for observing gravitational waves; thus confirming an idea by Albert Einstein. It’s a reminder of Sir Isaac Newton’s statement that, if we see further, it is by “standing on the shoulders of giants”. Yesterday, also acknowledging previous great minds, the Science Museum in London opened a new exhibition – Illuminating India. One part of it is entitled 5000 years of Science & Technology, and explores the contribution of discoveries in India over five millennia. Examples include the earliest standardised weights & measures in the Indus Valley cities and the recognition of zero as a number – a concept that revolutionised mathematics. It’s natural to regard modern society as so much more advanced thanks to the technology in our hands; so it’s worth being reminded that each great incremental discovery from then to now required the same intellectual capacity as that of this week’s Nobel prize winners. I think reflection on India’s past offers us a particularly valuable insight. We think of the scientific method as something post-Enlightenment. But, the foundational principles of science were identified much earlier in ideas contained in ancient Sanskrit texts. One method for establishing proof is called: pratyaksha meaning direct observation; and another is anumana – what you can infer from that observation. Even today, we accept that the process of gaining knowledge about the world depends on our abilities to observe, analyse and come to a conclusion. And, we understand these abilities are key features we include within a description of that mysterious thing we call consciousness. The Hindu sages concluded that the study of consciousness, therefore, should be the starting-point and prime subject for methodical exploration. This led to the development of the practices of yoga and meditation as means of isolating and identifying the conscious self as the observer, distinct from what we observe – distinct even from the thoughts that float around in our minds. Hindu texts down the ages have claimed that the results of all this experimentation provide evidence that the conscious self is different to the physical body. And, they suggest the processes of meditation offer the methodology for personal verification of this theory. Hindus are recommended to understand both the conscious self and the world side by side. Studying one without the other, the Gita warns, risks our ‘knowledge being stolen by illusion’; that, despite all our scientific and technological brilliance, we may end up believing that we are as temporary and ephemeral as the material objects we observe around us.