The Spatial Web: How Web 3.0 Will Connect Humans, Machines, and AI to Transform the World

by Gabriel Rene

What exactly was Galileo’s crime? He had publicly placed his faith in objective and observable data and not in the subjective infallibility of the church. Galileo was one of the first to clearly state that the laws of nature are mathematical. He wrote “Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe ... It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures.” Galileo’s groundbreaking scientific work and “trust in math” forged the path that led us to our greatest scientific inventions, eventually inspiring the work of Descartes and Thomas Newton whose achievements in philosophy and physics became the iron bedrock upon which the Industrial Revolution was ultimately built upon. Importantly, the key shift in the western world from the Scientific Revolution to the Industrial one was a shift from the faith in the centralized powers of the church to that of the decentralized trust in the verifiable power of science—in observable facts over unquestionable faith. This change started with a willingness to shift perspective, coupled with an intense curiosity of the mind and an unquenchable desire to uncover a better way to describe reality more accurately and truthfully. Today, we have a similar opportunity to adjust our perspective in such a way as to create downstream changes that could alter our understanding of the world, ourselves, and each other for generations to come. We will need to shift as we did before—f...