The winning essays in the FQXI Essay contest will be announced in early June, but there’s little chance that my essay will win anything. Right now it’s buried in the ratings, a little more than half-way down in a field of many, many essays.
However, I am pleased to announce that an anonymous group of Russian scientists has honored it with a prize of their own, thanks to my long-time fellow traveler in all things Larsonian, Horace from Poland. I am most grateful for this gesture.
Horace explained that “They were taken by someone attacking an axiomatic concept such as the point,” and were intrigued by the view of space and time as fundamental constituents of the universe instead of the orthodox view of space and time as a container of matter.
Of course, the idea that space and time exist in three dimensions, in discrete units, and are simply the reciprocal aspects of motion, which motion is the single component comprising all things in a physical universe, conforming to Euclidean geometry, the ordinary relations of commutative mathematics, with absolute magnitudes, and that there is no background, no container of matter, was not my idea, but the great insight of the man, Dewey Larson.
Even the idea that the point can and should be defined in a new way, which is the point of my essay, arose from the development of the consequences of Larson’s fundamental postulates. He deserves the credit that I hope will come to him in due time.