Wednesday 2 June 2010

Dangerous Knowledge


Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, a thin thread of thinking that gradually reveals the power of uncertainty. Four mathematicians that profoundly changed the course of the history by laboriously working on the paths of the uncertain.
So Gödel after Turing's death set the profound question "how the mind could reach truth outside logic and what it could mean if it couldn't?"
Greg Chaitin adds in his concluding touch to this brilliant documentary:"You do not want to solve the problem, it is more fun to live with the problem and create... it is much more creative".

It is not therefore about solving the problem, it is about living and creating within the problem.
So indeed, "logic has revealed the limitations of logic and the search for certainty revealed uncertainty"

It is about time though to question, as the documentary invite us to do, how different is our world from Cantor's. Why we haven't learned to live with uncertainty, and to transport our thinking to social science, political theory and economics, it is time to question how all these established realities have affect the way we understand and reject uncertainty. Why have we stopped being creative?

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