How One Line in the Oldest Math Text Hinted at Hidden Universes

a single sentence in one of the oldest math books held the key to understanding our universe ucl's elements has been published in more editions than any other book except the Bible it was the go-to math text for over 2,000 years but for all that time mathematicians were skeptical of a single line which seemed like a mistake ultimately some of the greatest math Minds realized that uclid wasn't wrong after all but there was more to the story slight tweaks to this line opened up strange new universes out of nothing surprisingly 80 years later we found out those strange new universes are core to understanding our own [Music] Universe around 300 BC the Greek mathematician uclid takes on a massive project to summarize all mathematics known at the the time to essentially create the one book that contains everything that everyone knows about mathematics but that's no easy task see before euklid there was a bit of a problem with math people would prove things but they would just be going around in circles why does a triangle have 180° cuz if you take two parallel L yeah but why did parallel lines exist oh that's that's because you can make a square why does a square exist you have this infinite recursion of what the fundamental reason why something is true is it's kind of like in the dictionary every word is defined in terms of other words so how do you get to ground truth uid used a solution that was pioneered by the Greeks let's just accept a few of the most simple basic things as being true these are our postulates then based upon these postulates we can prove theorems one at a time building up our math using logic so that as long as those first statements are true then everything else that follows from them must definitely be true he had perfected the gold standard for rigorous mathematical proof that all modern math relies on uid used this method when he published his 13 book series called the elements in which he proved 465 theorems covering almost all of mathematics known at the time including geometry and number Theory and all these theorems depended on were some definitions a few common Notions and five Poss poates we go right to book one and book one starts with definitions you got to ...