Forgive me if there’s an obvious answer I can’t figure out. I will probably facepalm myself.
We are surrounded with straight lines and flat surfaces: your computer screen, IKEA furniture, bathroom tiles and so on. But how they were made? The factory machines must have been made by other factory machines, and so on. Where is the origin of all that?
I can’t think of any straight lines appearing in nature, save for the horizon line, Sun rays and a frozen lake, perhaps.
A perfect circle is much more achievable; it’s relatively easy to make a compass or a spinning wheel for clay pottery (although manufacturing of a perfect sphere is beyond me).
I’m aware Ancient Greeks were using a straightedge. But when did it all started? How human society - in the Stone Age, perhaps - managed to make something perfectly flat by using stone tools and bones?
By “perfectly” flat I mean reasonably flat, not on a microscopic level.
And this begs another question: what is the most perfect flat surface/straight line we are able to make nowadays (using laser technology and whatnot)? I mean material object, not the laser beam itself?