My brain’s filled with all sorts of tidbits I think I know: time is not fixed, the Earth is not flat, and the Sun doesn't go around it on a giant chariot.
But people throughout history have believed a lot of crap - for over 2,100 years, people thought Euclidean geometry was a thing, that it was the only thing, to the point that mathematical history books are filled with an enormous amount of bullshit arguments on why parallel lines can never meet, arguments which, in a post-Einstein world in which we’ve measured the deflection of the light from the stars in the sky by the bending of space itself under the weight of the Sun, are obsolete and ridiculous. That isn’t to say tomorrow that scientists won’t find a use for a model of the world which embeds the bendy-wendy Einsteinian cosmos in a fixed Euclidean model of space and time, but it is to say that the idea that only Euclidean geometry is logically possible is dead wrong.
So, knowing that people can be wrong, and dead wrong, about things that they’re dead sure are so true they’ve mistaken them for logical tautologies, it’s worth taking out a little time, when you’re called upon to call up one of those little tidbits you think you know, to check your work.
Which is a way for apologizing for the next article on this blog, which will be a bunch of brain nerdery.
-the Centaur
Pictured: my recent efforts to revisit three things I think I know: how to construct stories, how to construct numbers, and how to construct cognitive architectures.