Truth and Dinosaur Bones

We went to the Field Museum in Chicago the other day. I saw they had a chocolate exhibit, and I couldn't resist. And I must say, the exhibit did a great job of making me want chocolate. Right before the gift shop was a video of people saying how very obsessed they were with chocolate, how they were addicted to it, how they couldn't go a day without it. So I bought a bar. Which, to give it its due, was one of the yummiest and most interesting bars of chocolate I've ever had. So there.

What really impressed me, though, was the permanent exhibit on evolution. There were lots of cool things there, but I really liked the display on how to dig up a dinosaur skull. You see some teeth poking up in the dirt, and you say, "Dinosaur!" But it's not your dinosaur until you dig it out. The problem with fossils is that they're practically fused to the dirt and rock around them, and are very fragile. So digging the thing up is this delicate balancing act of getting rid of non-fossil, while not damaging your find. It's no easy feat, acquiring your very own pet dinosaur skeleton.

After the Field Museum, we went for dinner with my philosopher friend.

Now a few days later, the whole experience must have swirled around in my brain, because I've just had the realization that finding truths is very much like excavating old bones. You see a bit of truth poking out in the dirt, and you go, "Aha! That's the truth!" But really you don't see it yet, because it's surround with dirt and rocks. You can't be satisfied with truth stuck in rock. So you have to extract it. You have to do this really carefully though. Because if you're careless, you'll wind up smashing your truth to pieces. Then you're left with a bunch of truth and rubbish all mixed together, and you're worse off than when you started.

At this point, it's more art than science. There's an art to find the right words to say what you mean. There's an art to being precise, to cutting right to the heart of the matter, without descending into trivialities and unimportant cases.

This is one of the hardest things in doing math (as for anything else, I'd imagine.) I've known this one fact for a long time. I've seen its skeleton buried in the rock for months. But trying to dig it out, to find its exact contours, has made me realize how little I've really known this whole time. And always, always, I think I've almost got it . . .