An opinionated canon, 1.5 million years long.
External metabolism. Cooking unlocked the calories that grew the brain.
Sentences inside sentences — the first compiler.
A way to install a mind into a stranger across centuries.
The first abstraction: this many, regardless of what.
Settle, store, surplus — then write contracts about it.
Replace sliding with rolling. The first force-multiplier.
Memory leaves the body. Civilization gains durable state.
Justice externalised. The judge becomes a function, not a face.
A single moral source — universal rules instead of tribal ones.
A protocol for trust between strangers, denominated in metal.
Reality as paired opposites in flow, not isolated things.
Strangers, bound by procedure, can run a city together.
If you keep cutting, something must refuse to be cut.
Truth has structural rules independent of who speaks it.
Five postulates → an empire of theorems. The shape of certainty.
We are not the centre. The first cosmic humiliation.
Ask nature, not the ancients. Method beats authority.
Motion needs no cause. Rest is a special case of moving.
Doubt everything until something refuses to be doubted.
Math for futures that haven't happened yet.
The grammar of change. Reality acquires a tense system.
The same law runs an apple and the moon. One sky, no roof.
Light has structure. The instruments of inquiry multiply.
The state needs a reason. Power requires consent.
Civilization gets a second muscle. Energy on tap.
Decentralised coordination without anyone in charge.
Train the body's memory before the enemy arrives.
Design without a designer. Complexity from local pressure.
The invisible has agency. Medicine becomes a war on species.
Four equations and the lights come on. Light is a field.
Matter has a grammar. Empty cells predict what to look for.
Time's arrow is statistical. Disorder is the default.
Thought has cells. The mind is a network, not a fluid.
Continents drift. Even the ground is a slow weather.
Gravity is the shape of spacetime. Time bends with you.
At the bottom, the world is probability, not stuff.
The cosmos has a birthday. Distance comes with a date.
Inheritance is text. Life writes in four letters.
Symmetry groups, not particles, are the deeper grammar.
Some infinities are bigger than others.
Any system rich enough to count cannot prove itself sound.
All computation is the same shape — a tape and a rule.
Code is data. The same machine can be every machine.
A switch with no moving parts. Civilization fits on a chip.
Distinctions can be counted. Noise has a maximum.
Steering is the deepest verb. Goals come from loops.
Whispering in public — the mathematical impossibility of eavesdropping.
Belief is biology. The mind has a pharmacy.
No call, no centre — just letters that find their own way.
The mind ships with bugs — predictable, exploitable, lovable.
Copy DNA on demand. Biology gets ctrl-C.
Every document points to every other. The library finally networks.
You are an ecosystem. Most of "you" isn't yours.
Bacterial immunity becomes a word-processor for genes.
Why anything has mass: a field that drags. Finally measured.
Stack differentiable layers, push errors back, watch intuition emerge.
Prove you know it without telling anyone what it is.
What persists across theory-change is relation, not object.
If a structure is consistent, perhaps it already exists.
Consensus without an authority. A ledger no one owns.
Meaning becomes geometry. Words have coordinates.
Let every token look at every other. Sequence dissolves into relation.
Train a model on a model of human preference. Taste at scale.
Greatness is not loudness or proof. It is fertility — how many other thoughts a thought permits to exist. Fire permitted the brain. The brain permitted language. Language permitted the experiment. The experiment permitted everything else. Each entry in this list was chosen because it opened a door that did not close behind it. Most ideas you can have stop at themselves. A few keep generating. Those are the greatest.