Timeline for Is there something similar to Gödel's incompleteness theorems in physics?
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8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 18, 2017 at 23:30 | comment | added | Pirx | @Oppa Hilbert Style That's within the limitations of Gödel's theorems, of course, and in principle, in contrast to our situation with regards to knowledge about the physical world. | |
| Jan 18, 2017 at 22:28 | comment | added | Red Banana | "we can know all there is to know about the mathematical systems we construct" - Can you provide a proof for it? | |
| Jan 17, 2017 at 3:59 | comment | added | The_Sympathizer | @Cort Ammon: It's also why I think that dogmatic materialism is just as wrong as dogmatic religion, as well. Declaring that everything real both known and unknown ultimately must reduce to matter is a sweeping, sweeping statement. It also makes me think of some of the advantages of alternative knowledge theories like "Feminist Situated Knowledges" (Haraway, etc.) where we have no knowledge of any "objective" reality but only knowledges localized to a particular situation or context. But this is all philosophy now, not physics so we're really kind of going off topic here! | |
| Jan 17, 2017 at 0:37 | comment | added | whatsisname | @Shufflepants: I'm pretty sure that it's turtles all the way up, and that even if you find some 'more powerful' sets of axioms, there will still be true statements within that system that cannot be proved by those axioms. | |
| Jan 16, 2017 at 16:37 | comment | added | Lawrence B. Crowell | What you write is in line with some ideas Bohr outlined about QM and is also within Kant's idea of the noumena and phenomena setting. However, for classical computing systems Turing's results give limits on algorithmic computation. In some sense we might say Godel's theorem applies in a basic classical sense as a result. | |
| Jan 16, 2017 at 15:10 | comment | added | Shufflepants | I feel like it's also key to point out that Godel's incompleteness theorem only says that for a particular set of consistent axioms that are sufficiently powerful, there are necessarily things in that system that cannot be proven. But this doesn't mean that there isn't some more powerful set of axioms where some of those things CAN be proven. | |
| Jan 16, 2017 at 1:58 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | I think the last paragraph may actually be an answer to the OP's question. I find that the idea that science cannot help us know anything about reality is on part with the level of limitation Godel's theorems put in place. I also find it to be similarly revolutionary -- it's amazing how many people are really uncomfortable with it! | |
| Jan 15, 2017 at 23:28 | history | answered | Pirx | CC BY-SA 3.0 |