Spencer Heath Archive

Item 205

Verbatim note by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath, New York City, followed by a paragraph taped and transcribed.

July 11, 1960

     I think it’s highly probable that Euclidean geometry has put more clogs on the human mind than anything except theology. And for the same reason — which is that in neither case has the reasoning been based upon objective human experience.

     What I’ve said of Euclidean geometry is true of all the other geometries (only more so) which have the “virtue” of being more complicated and less realistic. Euclidean geometry has more self-consistency. An example of that is that a straight line is a straight line and not both straight and curved at the same time. In Non-Euclidean geometry, a triangle can be drawn on a sphere. Two curved lines can’t have any definite angle between them.