A Plague of Truth Tellers

© by Mark Dempsey


Historically, humanity has not treated truth-tellers kindly. Here are a few examples. The good news is we’re improving.

Pythagoras and Irrational Numbers

Here’s a graphic proof of Pythagorus’ famous theorem about triangles:



Pythagoras had a lot of other mathematical observations like the harmonic relationships between musical notes, even projecting that last relationship into the heavens as the “music of the spheres.” It was also his firm belief that all numbers were rational–expressable as a fraction.

His beliefs were as much religion as math, and that was reflected in his treatment of heretical Pythagorians. One of his followers–Hippias–observed that a triangle with sides measuring one for a and b would have a hypotenuse (c ) of the square root of two–a non-rational number. The Pythagoreans killed Hippias by throwing him over a cliff.

I’d suggest humanity has become a little less brutal than this when we disagree.

Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo

Kepler lived when the world believed Ptolemy's theory that the cosmos was geocentric–planets and the sun revolved around the earth in crystalline spheres, attuned to Pythagorean harmonies. He began to doubt this when a comet appeared to go through the crystalline spheres.

Copernicus published his hypothesis that the solar system centered on the sun after his death, and Galileo publicized it after he observed planetary motion (and moons) with his telescope. Kepler’s calculation that the planets moved in ellipses rather than circles or spheres laid to rest the ideas common in his time.

Galileo contradicted a Biblical passage with his gentle suggestion that (possibly) the solar system was heliocentric. For his trouble, he spent his later years under house arrest after he apologized for telling the truth. Heliocentric advocates were burned as heretics, however, so humanity has only made partial progress in treating truth-tellers, although it lionized Newton’s revision rationalizing the heliocentric model, based on Kepler’s calculations.

Max Planck

For those who think “those guys were ancient or medieval, we don’t ignore truth-tellers today!”... Not really. The early 20th century attempted to resolve problems in Newtonian physics, and no one more successfully than Max Planck. His hypothesis was the “quanta” of “quantum mechanics.” Essentially, energy comes in small packets, not continuously, as Newton thought. Planck famously tried to get his physics professor colleagues to adopt this new standard, without much success. His evaluation: “The truth never triumphs, its opponents simply die out. Science advances one funeral at a time.”

The truth is seldom as persuasive as "getting along and going along."