How do we define a point? Because I’ve never seen one, have you? It’s certainly not that drop of ink you put on a paper with a point-ed pen. If you look closer, it’s huge! A swarm of bacteria might be throwing a party on it. In fact, if you can see it, then it’s not a point.

A point is an abstraction. It doesn’t exist in reality; and yet, it’s a surprisingly simple concept to imagine. In fact, you need to infinitely zoom in to see a point; and to do that in time, it will literally take you forever. How can we speak of points and infinities without ever being able to point them out? It must be something so fundamental in how our mind works that we do it so effortlessly.

In the last century, scientists and mathematicians have discovered many ways to combine what we know with what we don’t. We no longer believe that the physical world can be explained and predicted with purely deterministic equations, as Newton and Laplace did. It turns out that we can’t get rid of randomness. Most physical phenomena cannot be measured, modeled and/or predicted exactly. They can only be studied probabilistically.

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