Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

which tends towards perfection, but could only reach it through an infinite number of iterations. Seashells – and for that matter, drawings of Fibonacci spirals – are somewhere between this. The curve is theoretically perfect, like its associated ration, but the practicality of creating the spiral can never be perfectly achieved. We have to turn to Plato to drill down further into this. Plato is best remembered for his world of perfect forms (the Realm of Being), which exists quite separately from our everyday, familiar world (the Realm of Becoming). The usual interpretation of this is to say that Plato thought our world to be a poor shadow of the world of forms – that Earthly things are shoddy representations of their eternal and perfect form. But it seems that there are perfect forms that can be explained and understood, but could never, by definition, be realised. This is a puzzling conclusion. I don’t have an answer to it except to say that I think it is a fundamental paradox of the universe. There are perfections, but the world in which we live is flawed.

Perhaps it helps here to invoke one of Aristotle’s other categories of truth – the brute fact. Let’s start by going back to the toy cars. The problem here, you’ll remember, was scale. To be a proper model car, it needs to match up – more or less – with the real car. In philosophy this is referred to as correspondence. Apart

from scale though, the toy cars are quite a good match. They’re made of similar materials and their make and model are at least recognisable. By analogy, physicists hope that the universe turns out to have similar correspondence to their models. If there’s a good enough match between what theory predicts and what is

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