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The Black Mallet :: Vicarious Brain Explosion
by
I love the puzzles of the universe. How the simplest questions can
drive us either completely bonkers or stretch our minds out toward
greater enlightenment. The world's towering geniuses are those who have
devoted their lives to questions like, "What is time?", "How fast is
light?" and "How big is infinity?" For most of us, these "unsolvables"
are put to rest at an early age. As Charles Lamb once quipped: "Nothing
puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them."
Happily for us, there are deep thinkers out there who have made it
their lot to uncover these theorems and proofs. Unhappily for them, the job of simplifying the wild patterns of the universe sometimes has its price: we plebs call it, sanity. So today's doc is a tribute to a few of these brave men. In Dangerous Knowledge
we'll see how Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan
Turing spared millions of our brain cells from exploding by sacrificing
their own minds to answer some very big questions.
Tags: Black Mallet, bonkers, infinity, light, space, time, Ziya Tong
1 Comments
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May 9, 2008 12:58 PM
cvj
Hi Ziya,
Thanks for the post. Three comments spring to mind:
(1) Let's be careful about thinking of these people as somehow super-special and different from the rest of us. I'll elaborate on this in a full blog post, since it is too important an issue too bury in the comments. It'll appear later today.
(2) There are a lot of great women mixed in with the great men who are proving those theorems and so forth that you mentioned. I know you know this, but it's worth mentioning. Not the least because the women, no matter how great their contributions, often are downplayed in historical accounts as mere technicians, or plodding hard-workers (see my upcoming post), instead of the Mercurial (male) "genius-types" who are lauded for somehow having a direct connection to revealed knowledge. Think of Rosalind Franklin vs Watson and Crick. Think of Vera Rubin, or Henriette Leavitt, or Lise Meitner, or Emmy Noether, or...
(3) We now know how fast light is, and have very good mathematical classifications for the various types of infinity. So we're in good shape on those questions as regards physical sciences. As to what time is... yeah, probably a lot more physics to be uncovered there!
Cheers!
-cvj
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