“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
— Law of Talion, Code of Hammurabi
the famous Taleon's Law It is a law of proportionality. You take my eye, I take yours. You take my tooth, I take yours (being a Babylonian dentist must have been difficult).
The law was not implemented to encourage violence; rather, it was intended to restrict it. He Taleon's Law He imagined a legal world where everything could be described by linear equations: each crime would create an outcome proportional to its input. And since the punishment for a crime was proportional to the crime, excessive reprisals and explosions of violence that left everything in their path destroyed were avoided.
Beyond the world of retribution, linearity plays an important role in our thinking about the world: in linear systems, everything is understood. There is no chaos or complicated math. All the scientists would have to do all day would be to solve these types of equations:
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
— Newton's third law of motion
Unfortunately, the reality we inhabit is far from this linear utopia. History is full of examples of how the world responds to small things in very disproportionate ways: the Defenestration of Prague that caused the Thirty…
