The Thousand Mile Hole
By Steve GillmanI am working on my newest book, The Thousand Mile Hole - A Guide to Deep Thinking. I hope to have the first draft ready by the end of summer. Whether or not that happens, I will have the book published by the first weeks of 2011. But in the meantime I have already set up a website for the book. I even have excerpts from a few chapters posted there, although the final versions in the book may be revised of course.
On the site I refer to the book as “A Guide to Deep Thought” (That link will take you there), rather than using the actual subtitle of the book. The reason for this is simply that there are more people searching for the term “deep thought” than “deep thinking,” so I hope to get more of that search traffic. Stated either way, the meaning is clear enough.
What is the book going to be about? Well, it started with an idea that I first introduced here. The thousand mile hole, some of you may recall, was an exercise in imagination. A hole is discovered in the woods that is a hundred yards across and thousand miles deep, and someone falls into it. The difference between an ordinary hole - and falling into it - versus this one, is that it would take eight hours to fall a thousand miles. That brings up some interesting questions and insights, which I get into in the book (the first chapter starts with the story of my falling in).
The point of that story is to demonstrate what Einstein called a “thought experiment.” It is one way in which we can look more deeply into things and discover new insights and ideas. Each chapter covers another way to think more deeply. It is a fun book to write, because for the sake of demonstrating the techniques suggested, I have to come up with a lot of new ideas and new ways of looking at everything from spirituality to politics.
If you think you might be interested in reading the book, I will announce its publication in the Brainpower Newsletter. Click that link and subscribe before you forget.
Tags: deep thought, thinking, thousand mile hole