4 October

The sculptor Kenneth Snelson created what he called 'floating compression' sculptures, like this one. In engineering they're now called tensegrity structures, the compressive rods float in a continuous tension matrix (they don't touch in any way). It got even more interesting, because the biologist Donald Ingber then realised that organisms operate using tensegrity. This is why I sometimes say we are born to float on the surface of the Earth - I mean it absolutely literally. Look at that sculpture - our bodies are like this, suspended effortlessly in space. Floating. But you won't feel that unless you allow your body to operate in this way. Most of us don't, we think we're weighed-down by 'gravity'.