Quote of the day by Blaise Pascal: 'All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to...'

Blaise Pascal was a 17th-century French mathematician, physicist, philosopher, and theologian whose work transformed mathematics and science In 2014, psychologists at the University of Virginia placed participants alone in a plain room for 15 minutes. They had no phones, pens, or reading materials. The only object in the room was a small device that delivered a mild electric shock when a button was pressed. Before entering, every participant had said they would pay money to avoid being shocked. Yet, with no outside distractions, 67 per cent of the men and 25 per cent of the women chose to shock themselves instead of sitting quietly with their own thoughts. One participant pressed the button 190 times.The experiment provided scientific evidence for an observation made nearly four centuries earlier by French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. Writing in his notes, later published as Pensées, Pascal wrote: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."Pascal was not making a simple joke about restlessness. He was pointing to a basic weakness in human psychology. People have a strong urge to seek distraction, no matter how meaningless o...