Or perhaps held down beneath their feet? At this point, an honest retrospective is in order.
When searching for the boundaries of knowledge, one inevitably asks: is there anything truly novel left to say?
The rise of modern AI has made it effortless to scan the sum of human knowledge, and in doing so, it frequently delivers a bruising blow to the ego.
Quite a many times during the writing of this book, a "profound breakthrough" I managed to derive late at night turned out to have been discovered, cataloged, and named by someone else decades ago.
It is easy to wonder if this framework contains any isolated islands of original thought. The history of physics shows that novelty rarely belongs to a single isolated spark. Instead, it lives in the connective tissue—the way old pieces are arranged to reveal a completely new picture.
Whether this book offers a genuinely new window into the abstract nature of reality, or simply a deeply personal rediscovery of the eternal laws, is for the reader to decide.