Technically, you’ve never seen a circle
Chaotic musings through philosophy, maths, and linguistics
Just let it sink in for a moment.
Okay, now you can freak out. Circles don’t exist? Wait whaaaat? Rachell, how do you explain this?
Circles need an infinite amount of points to be smooth, but as of now, we haven’t found anything that’s actually infinite, so circles don’t exist in real life.
Zoom in on those circles, and they just become jagged pixel staircases. Zoom in on a real life circular biscuit, and it just becomes a fuzzy mess.
Okay, I wish it was that simple.
When I started researching for this article, I tripped and fell into the rabbit hole of infinity-ness, debated math, and guess what, philosophy (because, what does existence even mean?).
But whatever, let’s just turn the snappy article into a way too long philosophical musing.
So circles don’t technically exist.
Then neither do squares, triangles or pentagons, as 2D shapes can’t exist in a 3D world. All these are just ideas.
But just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
You can’t really see stupidity, but it certainty exists in this world. 😛
And anyways, does it even matter that true circles don’t exist? An approximation of a circle is enough for it to be helpful. We don’t really need to care that our circular biscuit is all squiggly when zoomed in — it’ll still be as tasty (and we’ll still be able to find the area of it, accurate enough to be useful).
I mean, it’s not like real life constraints ever mattered in maths anyways.
Let’s get away from circles for a moment. They’re overrated anyways; hexagons are the bestagons.
Hey, do see that? There goes another of them. And another three.
Words.
Beautiful, charming, ravishing, pulchritudinous. What do they have in common?
They’re synonyms (even that last one that looks like the name of some lung disease).
Except…true synonyms don’t exist either.
Every word is a unique mash of history and usage, each with it’s own subtle connotations. There’s some beautiful rocks out there, but would you call a rock sublime? How about classy?
But like the circle situation, it doesn’t matter that true synonyms don’t exist.
They’re still useful, as long as we remember the approximation that they are.
(idk man, I just need to write this down — I really tried to give this article a satisfactory conclusion, but because this is just random musings anyway, I guess I can only really end it on another random musing -> It’s surprisingly hard to write articles without a ‘happy’ ending, without some sort of advice, moral of the story at the end)
