Disclaimer: You’re in a world where physics still doesn’t exist.
You’re sitting on a bench sipping coffee with a friend of yours. You’re facing a slightly busy road littered with kiosks of roughly the same dimensions, spaced evenly away from each other. People are briskly walking by — when an odd white-bearded man with a toga, screaming “Eureka!”, runs frantically between the crowd.
You turn to your friend and exclaim, “He’s walking quite fast”. Your friend casually replies, “yeah, he’s quick”. Almost instantly, another person catches your eye, this time a woman with her shoulders tilted to support her other hand which was carrying grocery bags. This time your friend turns to you and says, “She’s going very fast.”
You agree initially, but then you retort at your friend mockingly, “So you think quick is faster than very fast?”. They say, “Of course. What, you think very fast is faster than quick?”. In no time, a heated debate begins and both of you are up and ready to begin to brawl — then you pause. A thought had miraculously surfaced into your minds eye.
“Wait wait wait, our disagreement is a cause of our differing understanding of words. Could there be a way to set aside our slight disagreement and agree on something?”, you acknowledge. Both of you itch your chins and begin to think.
You start to think out loud and so a socratic conversation ensues:
You: “We know they’re moving fast. But How do we know that? Well, we subconsciously compared them to the other pedestrians whereby they seemed to be moving faster. Lets break it down fundamentally, how do we know that they’re moving in the first place?”.
Your friend: “Hmmm… We can see them travel from one position on the road to another”.
You: “Good, good. Lets be more precise. We witnessed the man and woman both move from the beginning of that kiosk to two kiosks further ahead — ”.
Your friend: “So essentially we can agree they moved from and to the same positions — 3 kiosks.”
You: “Absolutely! We obviously both saw one of them traverse the space of 3 kiosks faster than the other….”
Your friend: “Naturally, the old man reached the third kiosk in less time — ”
You: “Thats it! Time! We agree on the distance as 3 kiosks and now we know time is another important concept.”
Suddenly your heart jolts, as a result of drinking your caffeinated beverage, causing you to raise two fingers to the middle of your chest.
You feel your heart beat, thud thud thud, regular but fast palpitations. An epiphany strikes —
You: “I got it! I got it! We can keep track of time by my heart beats!”
Perplexed, your friend inquisitively raises both fingers to inspect their heart beat. In almost an instant, their face lights up. They reach out and place their fingers akwardly on your heart, then nod.
Your friend: “Your heart rate’s way too fast. We’ll use mine because its regular and it’ll stay the same since I haven’t drank any coffee.”
You: “Fair enough. Thats a second thing we’ve both agreed on. Space traveled, in terms of 3 kiosks and time in terms of heart beats.”
Your friend: “You’re correct. Now I can tell you how many beats a person takes to move from the first to the third kiosk.”
You: “This effectively means that the person who reaches the third kiosk in less beats is travelling the fastest, no?”
Your friend: “Well… yes.”
You catch your friend staring at the people going by and murmuring under his breath “one,two, three” —
You: “Hang on a second. Whilst we’ve stumbled upon a way where we can both agree on who’s faster without the use of words, which would inevitably cause a misunderstanding, there’s something we haven’t considered. Yes we can agree on who’s faster, if they walk past those three kiosks, but what if they don’t walk past those three kiosks? Or better still, what if they walked up to the second kiosk and paused to shop. What then?”
Your friend: “Damn. You have a point…”
You: “We can assume everyone ignores and walks past at least one kiosk; regardless of which one it is. How about we count how many of your heart beats it takes each person to traverse one kiosk?”
Your friend: “Great idea! This eliminates the problem of which kiosk they stop at. Wait, I think we’ve found out something even more profound…“
You: “We’ve managed to minimize our criteria of describing speed by one kiosk per number of heart beats. Whats more profound than that? The fact that we both agreed on something? I can give you that!”
Your friend: “Ha ha ha. Bear with me please. By knowing how many heart beats per one kiosk, I can tell you in how many heart beats they’ll reach the third, fourth, or even a hundredth kiosk!”
You: “I haven’t considered that. Could we tell the inverse? How many kiosks in lets say 10 heart beats?”
Your friend: “It would seem so..”
You: “But what if they reach 3 and a half kiosks in 10 heart beats? Then we’d have to agree where half, or less than a half — ”
Your friend: “Baby steps. Why spoil the fun? We’ve just discovered we can tell the future, enjoy it!”
You take a deep breath, lean back, take another sip of your now very cold coffee. A smile slowly creeps up to your face, as you watched the crowd come and go.
The main idea behind this short story, is to highlight the importance of convention. Qualitative descriptions only take you so far. Quantitative ones however are a starting ground of agreement. Nevertheless, we can never be fully independent of qualitative descriptions as they are also of paramount importance for interpreting the quantitative information. Another point to extract from this story is the art of a socratic discourse and how a series of questions and answers can lead to interesting deductions. It starts being a source of disagreement, the yearn for agreement, and the solution for the disagreement being: come to common terms, talk it through, stimulate thoughts, pose conclusions, and finally select and settle on an agreed upon solution.