Fractals of Human Knowledge

"Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth."— Issac Newton

It's strange to think how close we are — in real, physical time — to people like Isaac Newton. We like to imagine these figures as ancient, locked away in some distant historical realm, but we're only a few handshakes away.

Newton was alive when Immanuel Kant was born.
Kant was alive when Charles Darwin was born.
Darwin was alive when Einstein was born.
And there are people alive today who were alive when Einstein was still breathing.

That's not a long time. That's not thousands of years. That's four people — four overlaps — and suddenly we're in the present.

Time moves fast. So fast we barely notice it. A decade ago, something like the Apple Vision Pro would've looked like alien tech. Yet here we are. The world's changing in ways we can't fully grasp, but at the same time, we've barely tapped into anything. Especially when it comes to physics, consciousness, intelligence — the real fundamentals.

People talk as if we're late to the party, but the party just started. The modern scientific framework is barely a couple of centuries old. The idea that anyone — anywhere — can access the sum of human knowledge is not just recent; it's a post-internet idea. You couldn't just sit in your room and study general relativity, or neural networks, or ancient philosophy unless you were born in the right place, with the right access. Knowledge used to be locked behind gatekeepers — institutional prestige, wealth, location. And now? Anyone can learn anything, anywhere.

It's a strange, in-between moment. Time is flying, but knowledge is still young. We're living in the first generation where access to truth is almost frictionless — and we've barely scratched the surface of what that actually means.

It's almost like knowledge is this infinite fractal — every time we zoom in, we see another layer. And now for the first time in human history, anyone with a phone can zoom in. The surface hasn't just barely been tapped — we haven't even found most of it yet.