Spaces and Questions

Abstract

Our Euclidean intuition, probably, inherited from ancient primates, might have grown out of the first seeds of space in the motor control systems of early animals who were brought up to sea and then to land by the Cambrian explosion half a billion years ago. Primates’ brain had been lingering for 30-40 million years. Suddenly, in a flash of one million years, it exploded into growth under relentless pressure of the sexual-social competition and sprouted a massive neocortex (70 % neurons in humans) with an inexplicable capability for language, sequential reasoning and generation of mathematical ideas. Then Man came and laid down the space on papyrus in a string of axioms, lemmas and theorems around 300 B.C. in Alexandria.