[ecosystem]

Non-Euclidean geometry (geometric axioms in which one postulate is rejected such that the 3 angles of a triangle are not exactly 180 degrees) was considered a meaningless word game and fundamental mistruth.

Later, non-Euclidean geometry was actually essential to modern physics.

It's intellectually sketchy to judge future value by the present.

[PunchyHamster]

Might as well fund someone researching whether quantum theory run on little gnomes, if there is no serious path to verification after 50 years, why not quantum gnomes?

[ecosystem]

On this topic (parallel postulate), it took ~2000 years from Euclid and then 3 people all came to the same conclusion independently within ~10-20 years.

Progress is weird.

[Elextric]

Ideally, one should explore all possibilities. It is remarkable how far "merely" predicting the next word has taken us.

[Tadpole9181]

> We should stop funding research into prime numbers. They're stupid and useless. Who cares about them, if they will never be used for anything? Number theory should be stopped, you may as well research gnomes.

I imagine this is what you would have sounded like 100 years ago.

[constantcrying]

>Non-Euclidean geometry (geometric axioms in which one postulate is rejected such that the 3 angles of a triangle are not exactly 180 degrees) was considered a meaningless word game and fundamental mistruth.

This is just a lie though. Non-Euclidean geometry is a mathematical model of how distances behave on non-linear spaces. Nobody ever believed it to be a "fundamental mistruth", even suggesting it would look ridiculous. It would be akin to denying linear algebra, even the meaning is unclear.

That the physical reality of space is not linear was a shocking revelation, since all human experience and basically every experiment done up until that point indicated otherwise.

[ecosystem]

This is a generally known part of the history of mathematics.

> Nobody ever believed it to be a "fundamental mistruth"

https://math.libretexts.org/Courses/College_of_the_Canyons/M...

"Lobachevsky [mathematician contemporary of Gauss, who claimed parallel postulate was unnecessary] was relentlessly criticized, mocked, and rejected by the academic world. His new “imaginary” geometry represented the “shamelessness of false new inventions”"

Further, many claimed premature success in finding logical contridictions in geometry lacking parallel (Euclid's 5th) postulate; which meant they believed a 4-postulate geometry to be fundamentally false.

[snapplebobapple]

you are mixing up gambling spend vs whole industry spend. If string theory was a small handful of people making up a small m*nority of physics departments like non-euclidea geometry research was that would be fine. Its huge swaths of most physics departments and a huge suck on research funding. For that kind of spend you better show results because you are in production phase at that point not lotto ticket moonshit phase. If we are buying lotto tickets with the money bey lots of different lotto tickets not a whole bunch of one lotto ticket

[Tadpole9181]

I think you are vastly overestimating the number of string physicists and how much their non-experimental research costs.

There's maybe a couple or few hundred-ish in the whole world that focus on it. And they don't need much money because it's pretty much all math.

[karmakurtisaani]

> m*nority

Is this a typo? I see a lot of words being censored these days and I assumed it's because of some algorithms and visibility. That shouldn't be the case here tho..

[cess11]

I imagine that elliptic geometry had some use before modern physics.

[saghm]

Yeah, even just trying chart a course on a ship across a reasonable distance will cause you to need to reevaluate some "obvious" things (like "what path is the shortest between these two ports" being a curve rather than a line).

[ecosystem]

The specific controversy was whether without the parallel/5th postulate, there existed a logical contradiction, i.e. proving the parallel postulate

[emil-lp]

In the 1700s, perhaps. But we have come a long way since that.

[ecosystem]

Yet, OP is repeating the same logical fallacy: the absence of a result is not a result of absence.