Dear Reader,

Today I feel like concocting something new. Inventing is one of the cheapest activities to be involved into; you picture something into your mind and, voilà, instant invention! Probably that’s also the reason why we rarely engage in creating something new. We perceive it as cheap in the sense of not valuable, not in the correct meaning of not costly.

Anyway, I invented a word for a concept I’m going to describe: FLEXIOMS. Spoiler: it is a portmanteau, the euphonic blend of two other words. It seems a promising invention since a google search does not give many results, most of which appear to be misspellings, wrong character recognition in scanned books and the likes of “Flexi OMS”.

The Setup

What happens when you act like the adherence to a procedure were more important than the expected result of the process?

What happens when we say “no” or “it is impossible” before saying “let’s see how to achieve it”?

The common outcomes are, in most cases, missed opportunities for growth and innovation.

“Wait, do you mean that even events that we know to be absolutely impossible are possible?”

Yup. I mean that. Please, answer in complete and strict intellectual honesty the following question: “Can man fly?”

The strict answer is that no, man cannot fly. Planes fly. Helicopters fly. Gliders fly. Even kites can be said to fly. Yet, man does not fly, period.

(I leave some room for laughter and the rotting-vegetables-throwing competition that will break out!)

Nevertheless, people fly over countries and oceans every day, achieving the ultimate goal behind the question “Can man fly?”.

The Analysis

So, what happened here? Let’s try to follow the matter along the following steps:

  • QUESTION: “Can man fly?”
  • WHAT IT IS KNOWN: “Man has no wings, and it is too dense to fly by waving its arms.”
  • LOGICAL ANSWER DERIVED FROM WHAT IS KNOWN: “No”
  • ANALYSiS OF THE ULTIMATE GOAL: “Transport man above obstacles.”
  • REVISITATION OF WHAT IT IS KNOWN: “Man cannot grow wings, but can be lifted by something else”
  • FINAL RESULT: Civil flight

As you can see, the turning point was revisiting our initial firm belief and, loosening it a bit, trying to find new ways. That is a trick mathematicians do all day every day: they have a “strong” or “consolidated” version of a theorem, based on some axioms, and they start tweaking the axioms to see what they can get from them. The result is usually a “weak” version of the theorem (stricter axioms, less strong conclusions) or a variant of some sort.

One of the most stunning examples of “axioms tweaking” that I could think of is the relaxation of the Axiom of Parallels in euclidian geometry. Without going too technical, it asserts that “parallel lines behave as we expect, never meeting”. That seemed, at the time, an extremely strong axiom, as it was evident from the world around us. By getting rid of it, we obtained General Relativity, some masterful and fearful descriptions by Lovecraft (who often refers to non-euclidean shapes in his tales) and an, let me use the word, unparalleled advance in mathematics!

Conclusions

By now you should have solved the initial riddle. I’m advocating Flexibility in the choice and use of your Axioms. So, FLEXIOMS is just that: “axioms that should be flexible in their use”.

If you prefer you can just think of the concept as “always questions the status quo”, but I like the prescriptive aspect that the word flexiom implies: list down your postulates and actively try to tweak them, playing an endless “what if” game with the state of the problem at hand.

Until next time, tweak, tweak, tweak, for the inner mechanics of the World and the Gods of Creation love tweakers!