J. Beaman - The Magazine

This is one of my favorite things ever. From Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

What the old lady is describing is the infinite regress. From Wikipedia:

…if the truth of proposition P1 requires the support of proposition P2, and for any proposition in the series Pn, the truth of Pn requires the support of the truth of Pn+1. There would never be adequate support for P1, because the infinite sequence needed to provide such support could not be completed…

Apparently it’s one part of the Münchhausen Trilemma, ironically named because the Baron Münchhausen pulled himself out of a swamp by his own hair.

And.

Euclidean geometry (invented by Euclid of Alexandria…duh) is a system which assumes that a small set of things are true (i.e. any two points can be joined by a straight line) and then using those assumed truths (which although appealing have no actual proof) to prove a bunch of other shit. A whole set of maths based on assuming some things are true. That’s so not mathy.

Anyway, both of these things remind me of what Norman Mailer liked to call magical thinking. I live this way. Assume a few things are true (even if I know they’re not) and create a whole life system out of it. It’s turtles all the way down, dude.