The Moves

Move 1

A missing component

To adjust, when something is missing.

The picture has too few basic parts. Some problem keeps returning, until someone sees that one more basic component is needed, and with it the picture comes right.

• Plato’s “third kind.” Forms and their copies could not explain how copies come to exist anywhere at all. In the Timaeus Plato says we need a third kind: the receptacle, the space in which copies appear.
• Aristotle’s potential. Parmenides allowed only being and not-being, which made change impossible, since something would have to come from nothing. Aristotle added a third basic notion, potential: the acorn is potentially an oak. Change became intelligible.
• Aristotle’s ether. Four elements could not explain why the heavens circle forever without decay, so he added a fifth.
• Pauli’s neutrino. In 1930 energy seemed to vanish in radioactive decay. Wolfgang Pauli proposed an unseen new particle that carried it away. It was detected twenty-six years later.

Built by Umair Malik while studying Iqbal · Your Commentator