Terence Tao

And we've standardized it and we've built all our computers and a number of representation systems around it.

And so we're stuck with it now, actually.

Some people occasionally push for other systems than decimal,

There's too much inertia.

So you can't look at any given scientific achievement purely in isolation and give it an objective grade without being aware of the context, both in the past and the future.

And so it may never be something that you can just reinforce and learn the same way that you can for much sort of more localized problems.

Often, actually, the ultimately correct theory initially is worse in many ways.

Copernicus's theory of the planets, it was less accurate than Thomley's theory.

Geocentrism had been developed for a millennium by that point, and they had many, many tweaks and very increasingly complicated ad hoc fixes to make it more and more accurate.

And Copernicus' theory was a lot simpler, but much less accurate.

It was only Kepler that made it more accurate than Thomley's theory.

I mean, science is always a work in progress.

So when you only get part of the solution, it looks worse than a theory which is incorrect, but somehow has been completed to the point where it kind of answers all the questions.

As you say, Newton's theory had big mysteries, the equivalence of mass and action at distance, which were only resolved with a very conceptually different approach centuries afterwards.

often progress has to be made not by adding more theories, but by deleting some assumptions that you have in your mind.

So one reason why geocentrism held on for so long is we had this idea that objects naturally want to stay at rest.

This is the Aristotelian notion of physics.

And so the idea that the Earth was moving, how come we weren't all falling over?

you know, once you have Newton's motion, you know, object motion remains in motion and so forth, then it makes sense.

But you had to, so conceptually, it's a very big conceptual leap to realize that the Earth is in motion.