consider, for a moment, the wave function. you may not be familiar with the specifics, but you encounter it every day. it was proven by Fourier, what was Fourier after? he just thought this was kind of cool, it was like this is interesting. he was not at all thinking about practical applications. a world of electric communications which uses this routinely in order to. look at your Phone, how does this thing know to convert weird stuff, which is in the air? into sounds. answer: wave function. but Fourier wasn't thinking of those, and the application came later, almost every field of mass.

to Fourier, it was simply.....cool. he was guided by a sense of aesthetics; he found it interesting. the application came later.

in fact, many times in history someone's gone off into the mathematical wilderness. motivated purely by curiosity and kind of guided by a sense of aesthetics. and then they have created a whole bunch of new mathematics which has nice and interesting but doesn't really do anything useful. but then, say a hundred years later, someone will be working on some problem at the cutting. edge of physics or computer science and they will discover that this old theory in pure maths is exactly what they need to solve their real world problems.....which is awesome

there is a profound distinction here: when you find solutions for math it is called "pure math" when math finds solutions for you it is called "applied math" and this transition from the "useless" beauty of discovery to the vital necessity of understanding, is the very soul of Outer Wilds.

in this game, there are no experience points, no weapon upgrades, and no arbitrary skill trees. there is only knowledge.

when you find yourself in a situation where that theoretical knowledge becomes your only lifeline. you realise that the obscure rule you learned ten hours ago just because it was "cool" is actually the key to solving a grand mystery. you transition into applied math. you use the rules you discovered to save yourself, to traverse the impossible, and to witness the truth of the cosmos.

it even touches upon the profound strangeness of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, the idea that mathematics is a system made up by humans, yet it somehow explains the physical universe so perfectly. Outer Wilds presents a universe that feels hand-crafted and "made up," yet it operates on such a consistent, rigorous internal logic that unraveling it feels like a spiritual experience.

again, if you still harbour a sense of pure curiosity about anything at all, i highly recommend you play Outer Wilds!!

::) ·:)