Equality doesn't exist.
I know—that's a strange way to begin a piece about one of humanity's most treasured ideals. But stay with me. I've spent years studying the universe from a wheelchair, watching galaxies spin and particles dance, and if there's one thing the cosmos has taught me, it's this: nothing is truly equal to anything else. Not identical twins. Not blades of grass. Not two drops of water. Not even the legs of the same person.
And yet.
We keep reaching for it. We keep inventing it. That reaching, that invention—that's where the magic lives.
The Beautiful Lie We Choose to Tell
Annalisa Ambrosio wrote something recently that stopped me mid-scroll: "L'uguaglianza è un'invenzione"—equality is an invention. She's right. You can dream of equality the way you dream of dragons, flying carpets, or infinity. It exists only in the mind of whoever summons it as an ideal. A thing truly equal to another thing? You can imagine it, but you won't find it.
Think about it. Mass-produced phones from the same factory look identical, but give one to a toddler and another to a careful adult—they won't age the same way. They don't occupy the same space. If they make a sound, it's not precisely the same sound. Zoom in with a powerful enough lens, weigh them on a sensitive enough scale, and the differences emerge like fingerprints.
In organic life, the evidence screams at us: dental records, DNA, fingerprints, wing spans, the infinite variety of fish scales. Every molecule is different from every other molecule.
So why do we bother?
Because unlike dragons and flying carpets, equality is an invention we can actually build something with. The question isn't whether equality exists in nature. The question is: what can we do, once we've imagined it, to make it feel real?
Aristotle Had Two Recipes
Here's where it gets interesting. Aristotle—long before equality had any social, religious, or political meaning in Western culture—sketched out two fundamental ways to produce it. I'm simplifying the philosophy here for clarity, but the core insight is brilliant.
The first recipe: if you want equality, give equal things to equals.
The second recipe: if you want equality, give unequal things to unequals.
Wait, what?
It sounds like a riddle, but it's actually practical wisdom dressed in ancient robes. The world is imperfect and uneven. Things resemble each other without matching. If everyone started with one apple, you'd just need to hand out one more apple each. Done. But what if someone already has seven apples while another has none? Arithmetic equality—giving everyone the same thing—suddenly produces unfairness. The person with seven now has eight. The person with none now has one. Equal treatment, unequal outcome.
So sometimes equality requires giving different things to different people. Sometimes it requires giving the same things. The art is knowing which situation you're in.
The 400-Metre Lesson
Ambrosio finds the perfect example on the athletics track: the 400-metre hurdles. Picture it. Eight lanes of red earth curving into a perfect oval. Athletes poised at their starting blocks, their breathing shallow, their muscles coiled. The judge shouts "Ai vostri posti!"—on your marks. Then "Pronti!"—ready. Each body freezes for a heartbeat.
Then the gunshot. The leap into motion.
Now here's what most spectators don't notice: the athletes don't start on the same line. They're staggered. The runner in lane eight stands metres ahead of the runner in lane one. It looks unfair. It isn't.
The track curves. The outer lanes form larger ovals. If everyone started on the same line, the athlete in lane one would run exactly 400 metres, but the one in lane eight would run 453.032 metres—over 50 metres extra. Each lane differs from the next by precisely 7.038 metres. Someone calculated that. Someone thought about the slightly narrower first lane with its raised edge that you don't want to step on while sprinting. The stagger compensates. Unequal starting positions produce equal distances.
It's just to treat unequals unequally.
But why is there a lottery for lane assignments? Because the lanes aren't equivalent experiences. Lane one has tighter curves. Lane eight has gentler turns but no visual reference—you're out front, running blind. The middle lanes offer the best of both worlds. Since that advantage can't be eliminated, it gets distributed by chance. Everyone has the same probability of drawing the lucky position.
Again: it's just to treat unequals unequally.
The Invention That Took 34 Milliseconds
The starting blocks tell their own story. Running is ancient. Starting blocks are modern—they only appeared at the 1948 London Olympics. A stubborn American gymnastics teacher named George T. Bresnahan had patented them around 1929 after noticing his athletes gained about 34 milliseconds on the 100 metres when they crouched and pushed off from those angled metal wedges.
Before 1948, athletes used whatever personal equipment they liked for their launch. Some advantages were invisible, unquantifiable. Standardised blocks levelled that particular playing field.
Now the athletes are equal. And it's just to treat equals equally.
The starter's pistol, the judge's commands—these exist because not all starts are created equal. A false start means your nerves betrayed you, your body moved a few tenths of a second before the bang. The judges are experts in spotting inequality. They listen through headphones. The athletes are equal on the knife-edge of that shout, the three commands arriving identically in each pair of ears.
Equal treatment for equal conditions.
The Work That Never Ends
Line up all these ingenious inventions—the staggered starts, the lottery, the standardised blocks, the judges, the timing systems—and you have the rulebook for the 400-metre hurdles. But really, you have something more profound: a collection of strategies for bringing equality into a world where every molecule is different.
Thousands of years of human thought. Material science. Sophisticated regulations. All to remove as many inequalities as possible from a single moment of athletic competition.
The invention of equality requires enormous work. It never finishes.
Two centuries from now, new rules will emerge. New dimensions of reality will be considered. Will the starting pistol's sound be equidistant from every athlete's ears? How will we address the psychological advantage of starting behind others and then overtaking them? Should we standardise the shoes?
These questions sound almost absurd. But absurdity is just imagination wearing uncomfortable shoes. Every rule we have today once seemed unnecessary—until someone noticed an inequality that needed fixing.
The Place Where We Practise the Dream
Aristotle's two recipes can be applied with skill and creativity to any domain of human action. But there's one special place where the dream of equality gets practised daily, relentlessly, imperfectly, beautifully.
School.
Instead of red earth, there's a space sheltered from rain with surfaces to write on. The largest part of the arena is invisible—it exists in the minds of people who are learning (often reluctantly). The shoes are tools: reading, writing, arithmetic, drawing. The track curves differently for each student depending on their family background, their ease with the language being spoken, their mental and physical health. Instead of a starting pistol, a digital bell rings.
Public school was born from the dream of equality, emerging from the French Revolution to accompany citizens toward universal suffrage. Napoleonic schools were tracks where you earned a basic citizenship licence—learning to drive your way to the voting booth without crashing into your own ignorance. Study is the beautiful price of freedom.
But here's the twist that took me years to fully understand, perhaps because I experienced it from an unusual vantage point.
The Inverted Race
Sport aims to give everyone equal conditions so we can see who's fastest. School inverts that logic entirely.
In school, the finish line is at the same distance for everyone, but one student runs while another walks. Some want to sprint off the track entirely. Some want to sit in the stands. Some want to remove their shoes and quit.
Parents talk about school in terms of speed: "My daughter is too fast—she's bored." Or: "They go too fast for him—he can't keep up."
How do you create equality in this chaos?
One approach: make the field enormous. So vast that everyone fits. That's public education. The second approach is subtler. The teacher becomes the judge of the race, carrying the hardest task imaginable: inventing, every single day, ways to hold the exceptions together, give citizenship to equality, adapt the curriculum to the class, and tame the class to the curriculum.
Some teacher-judges announce from the start that they'll move at the pace of the slowest. The fast ones must be patient; time will feel geological. Other teachers burn through the material, following the winged runners of merit, failing the slow ones, sometimes making them feel guilty for their own pace.
But the most brilliant teachers take a third path—one requiring the greatest effort of imagination. They stop looking at individual students. Instead, they watch the class as a single organism with its own rhythm, a collective body that will cross the finish line together. It doesn't count if only a finger makes it to the other side, or a kidney, or an elbow. The whole collective body must pass through and emerge into summer. Within that body, different speeds become functions to activate, like the gears of a car.
The Teacher as Traffic Light
The collective body of a class has its own velocity. It changes after holidays. It wobbles when someone leaves. It accelerates when certain emotions burst in.
The teacher-judge acts like a traffic light—or perhaps like the starter with the pistol, marking the empty spaces and the full ones. Calling on someone in the back row. Activating another student's memory. Engaging the mathematics trio. Pairing this one with that one because together they form a symbiosis. Sometimes using competition the way you use a clutch to shift gears—never imagining anyone will reach the end alone.
Good teachers have excellent memories and remarkably fine-tuned ears. They keep their preferences to themselves. They remember names, mostly. Even when they don't realise it, they're teaching civic education. And the class doesn't fight—or if it fights, it makes peace. Individual grades don't matter the way you'd think, because if the teacher-judge has done the work well, everyone expects to measure roughly where they do.
For this worker in the world of what-doesn't-yet-exist, the greatest tool isn't knowledge.
It's sensitivity. And voice—used constantly, tirelessly.
The Daily Inventors
Good teachers are the most sophisticated inventors of equality. They invent it every day. Several times a day. Even early in the morning, before they're fully awake.
These teachers can testify: two identical students, two identical handwritings, two identical minds have never existed. If two essays were identical, that would prove someone copied. Equality is an invention. And yet—at the end of that obstacle course called school—if everything worked, many young people emerge with the idea that Equality exists somewhere. Word has it, it's a good thing.
I think about my own education. The schools I attended in Italy after my family left Albania when I was five. The classrooms where my wheelchair made the track curve differently than it did for everyone else. The teachers who saw me as part of the collective body. The ones who didn't.
My philosophy—Never Give Up—was forged in those rooms. Not because anyone handed me equality on a silver platter, but because certain people kept inventing it for me, kept adjusting the stagger so I could run the same distance, kept finding ways to include my different wheels in the collective motion.
What the Universe Teaches
I study astronomy. I look at stars that died millions of years ago, their light just now reaching us. I examine galaxies spinning at different speeds, planets with different masses, moons with different orbits. The cosmos is spectacularly, gloriously unequal.
And somehow, that makes me love the human project of equality even more.
We don't pretend the universe is fair. We don't expect it to be. We observe it with wonder and try to understand its rules. But when it comes to human society—to the small corner of existence where we have some say—we imagine something different. We imagine that every person matters equally. We imagine that opportunities can be balanced. We imagine that the race can be fair.
Then we get to work building it.
The work never ends because the world keeps changing. New inequalities emerge. Old solutions become obsolete. Each generation must invent equality again, for their time, with their tools.
A Question for You
So here's what I'm left wondering, and I hope you'll sit with this question too: Where in your life are you inventing equality?
Maybe you're a teacher adjusting your pace for the collective body of your classroom. Maybe you're a manager figuring out how to give unequal things to unequal situations. Maybe you're a parent trying to treat each child fairly, which means treating them differently. Maybe you're a friend noticing that someone needs a staggered start to run the same race.
Equality won't fall from the sky. It doesn't grow in fields. It doesn't flow from mathematical formulas.
It comes from imagination. From sensitivity. From the stubborn human refusal to accept unfairness as natural law.
Annalisa Ambrosio ends her piece with a beautiful image: students emerging from school, never having seen Equality in person, yet carrying the idea that it exists somewhere. That rumour alone—the persistent whisper that equality is real and worth pursuing—changes everything.
I was born in Albania in 1986. I emigrated to Italy in 1991, a five-year-old in a wheelchair crossing borders for medical treatment. I've lived with dystonia my whole life. I've had surgeries, complications, setbacks that would make a detailed list of their own. Through it all, certain people kept inventing equality for me. They adjusted the starting blocks. They staggered the race. They made space in the collective body.
Now I run FreeAstroScience. I write about the cosmos. I try to invent equality for others—through science education, through accessibility, through the simple insistence that everyone deserves to wonder at the stars.
Equality is an invention. Let's keep making it.
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