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www.quantamagazine.org
| | billwadge.com
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| | The famous mathematician Kurt Gödel proved two "incompleteness" theorems. This is their story. By the 1930s logicians, especially Tarski, had figured out the semantics of predicate logic. Tarski described what exactly was an 'interpretation' and what it meant for a formula to be true in an interpretation. Briefly, an interpretation is a nonempty set (the...
| | carcinisation.com
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| | Gödel's theorems say something important about the limits of mathematical proof. Proofs in mathematics are (among other things) arguments. A typical mathematical argument may not be "inside" the universe it's saying something about. The Pythagorean theorem is a statement about the geometry of triangles, but it's hard to make a proof of it using nothing...
| | dvt.name
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| | Gödel's incompleteness theorems have been hailed as "the greatest mathematical discoveries of the 20th century" - indeed, the theorems apply not only to mathematics, but all formal systems and have deep implications for science, logic, computer science, philosophy, and so on. In this post, I'll give a simple but rigorous sketch of Gödel's First Incompleteness ...
| | 4gravitons.com
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| Merging quantum mechanics and gravity is a famously hard physics problem. Explaining why merging quantum mechanics and gravity is hard is, in turn, a very hard science communication problem. The more popular descriptions tend to lead to misunderstandings, and I've posted many times over the years to chip away at those misunderstandings. Merging quantum mechanics...