Cartography is strongly opinionated. The dirty secret, which I don’t think most people realize, is that there is no correct, reproducible source upon which to base the creation of a map. Every frame of reference is known to be wrong in material ways, so maps are a bit of a polite fiction that work well if you don’t look at them too closely. Maps are more suggestions than truth even in the best of cases.

Maps are still useful but as the old saying goes, maps are not the territory. Physics puts a practical bound on how closely a map can represent the territory that in modern contexts turns out to be important.