Ah, facts. Don’t we just love ‘em?

Here’s a fun fact: there aren’t any.

Well, not in Realworld anyway.

The other day, a young man, nice but arrogant, told me something. He said it was a fact. He said it more than once and said it emphatically.

Facts do exist, but only in somewhere like Mathspace, the  phasespace of mathematics.

There, you can have facts. Lots of ‘em.

When you start a mathematics, you begin with some very basic facts. Axioms. These are the very fundamentals, the initial declaration of what this particular mathematics will be like.

The numbers will be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and so on. That is now a fact. If you want to challenge that, you have to go off in a corner and build your own mathematics.

The numbers will be 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, there will be no number between 4 and 6.

This will be a completely different mathematics. It may even turn out to be impossible, or at least very limited. But, you are welcome to try it out. It probably won‘t match the real world very well.

Back to our normal mathematics.

It has facts. And as we build on them, you can uncover other facts.

The difference between Mathspace and Realspace is that in Maths, you start with facts and then build outwards. In Realworld and Realspace, you do the opposite: you start with an unpleasant surprise and then try to find out what’s going on.

As you explore and uncover things, you find out new stuff. These are facts.

Until someone finds out something that contradicts that fact.

Then you have a new fact, plus the fact that the old fact is not, in fact, a fact.

In the real world, today’s fact is tomorrow’s delusion and next year’s ancient myth.