Word: godell
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...last, step where we cannot see. We are made like this - there is only so much an individual can truly understand. And there is always a point in decision-making at which reason fails (funny enough, this was actually proven, mathematically, by the 25-year-old logician Kurt Godel). Ultimately, without absolute evidence, decisions must still be made - the inescapable truth is that in the end, we all trust one expert or another...
...then, are we or are we not full of shit? Can we possibly find an answer to this thorny question? Let us follow the courageous example of, say, Godel or Heisenberg, and say, resoundingly, no. This is not a proposition fm can decide, at least not right now. Perhaps later there will be time. For the moment, we leave it to you instead. This weekend, as you chillax, do with us what you will. Decide if we shoot from the hip, or from slightly lower. And read accordingly...
...ACTIVITIES] Fun with geometric transformations, and Godel's incompleteness theorem...
...Baekeland, plastics pioneer --Tim Berners-Lee, Internet designer --Rachel Carson, environmentalist --Albert Einstein, physicist --Philo Farnsworth, inventor of electronic television --Enrico Fermi, atomic physicist --Alexander Fleming, bacteriologist --Sigmund Freud, psychoanalyst --Robert Goddard, rocket scientist --Kurt Godel, mathematician --Edwin Hubble, astronomer --John Maynard Keynes, economist --The Leakey Family, anthropologists --Jean Piaget, child psychologist --Jonas Salk, virologist --William Shockley, solid-state physicist --Alan Turing, computer scientist --James Watson & Francis Crick, molecular biologists --Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher --The Wright Brothers, visionary aviators...
...vexing question in the arcane realm of mathematical logic, few nonspecialists today would have any reason to remember him. But the method Turing used to show that certain propositions in a closed logical system cannot be proved within that system--a corollary to the proof that made Kurt Godel famous--had enormous consequences in the world at large. For what this eccentric young Cambridge don did was to dream up an imaginary machine--a fairly simple typewriter-like contraption capable somehow of scanning, or reading, instructions encoded on a tape of theoretically infinite length. As the scanner moved from...