*Euclid dammit
In: 6
So, you know how when you’re drawing and you make a straight line? Then you decide to make another line that never touches the first one, no matter how long you make them? Those are called parallel lines.
Euclid made a rule about these lines. He said that for any point not on the first line, you can draw only one line that will never touch the first line.
But some other people later on said “Hey, what if that’s not true everywhere? What if we can imagine a place where lines don’t work that way?”
In one of these imagined places, which they called “hyperbolic” space, you could draw more than one line through a point that never touched the first line. Like having many paths that never meet.
In another imagined place, called “elliptic” space, there were no lines that didn’t eventually meet. It’s like being on a globe, where if you go far enough, you’ll end up at your starting point.
So, they didn’t say Euclid was wrong. Instead, they said, “Well, in some places, like on a flat paper, Euclid is right. But in other places, like on a globe or in hyperbolic space, things work differently.” Therefore, Euclid’s rule is just one of many ways lines can work.
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