diumenge, 8 d’agost del 2010

Uncertainty

"At a time when physicists were learning from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that there were limits to what physicists could know, Kurt Gödel's proof meant that mathematicians would always have to live with their own uncertainty: that they might suddenly discover that the whole of mathematics was a mirage. Of course, for most mathematicians the fact that this hasn't happened yet is the best justification for why it won't happen. We have a working model that seems to justifiy the consistency. But since the model is ultimately infinite, we can't be sure that somewhere along the line the model will not contradict our axioms.

Marcus du Sautoy, The music of the primes.