The shortest distance between two points... ( Archived) (55)

That's what I thought...

Until I was laying in bed thinking the other night.


The shortest distance between the north and south pole... Is a half circle.

And if you extend a line into space...

Gravity will bend it!

Nope.

There's no such thing as a straight line.

What if you fold space?

Then you can jump from point a to point b. Einstein's theory of relativity predicted the existence of wormholes, but none have been found to date.

I was so excited when I woke up thinking of this around midnight, I couldn't sleep the rest of the night.

I thought I had considered something nobody else knew.

I felt almost as disappointed as vindicated, when I googled it, and found a page full of articles like this one...






Straight lines and perfect circles don't exist in reality, all perfect shapes are mathematical abstractions.

There are No Perfect Shapes in Material Reality
Straight lines and perfect circles don’t exist in reality; they are mathematical abstractions.

Therefore, there is no perfect line or circle in the entire universe (and unless you count imperfect shapes that constantly change at the quantum and molecular level as “perfect”).

In reality, all objects are three-dimensional objects in spacetime made of quanta, there are no exceptions.

We can represent a straight line or perfect circle with mathematics (the basis of geometry), or we can approximate it on paper or using a computer (the visual part of geometry), but we can never actually create a straight line or circle.

Luckily, approximating gets us close enough for geometry to be useful. The further we calculate a number, and the more pixels we use, the closer lines get to straight, and circles get to perfect but alas, a truly perfect shape is never created.

Like “infinity,” which is well represented in pi when calculating the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, straight lines, and circles (and thus all perfect shapes) are metaphysical and theoretical. They are concepts that speak to real things, but they are not themselves real physical objects.

The concept of perfect shapes is a sort of transcendent rational thing of both metaphysics and physics.

Simply put, there are no perfect shapes in material reality.

MUSING: So “is geometry a lie” or “are we misunderstanding the universe by looking for perfect reflections of all our rational ideas in the material universe?” Or C, neither/both.

“Everything you’ve learned in school as ‘obvious’ becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.” – Quotations by R Buckminster Fuller.

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