You will already have had a hint of my views on the limitations of the ability of maths and physics to capture lived experience. Here I want to focus on something absolutely central to the mathematization of the world we live in: the notion of a point, in particular a point in space. Points, which lie at the heart of the mathematization of space (and subsequently of space–time), achieved this elevated status via the discipline of geometry.

Those of you who remember your early encounters with Euclid may recall (amid memories of fear, humiliation, boredom and the other accompaniments of the pedagogic experience) that he begins with a series of definitions and axioms. Some of them seem so obvious that you may have wondered “Why is this guy telling me this?” Did I really need to be informed that “Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other” or that “A whole is greater than any of its parts”? You stop wondering when, as if by magic, he conjures from these a series of theorems that are far from obvious. What's more, they were accepted as the last word on space for 2000 years.