Ep 182: Livestream Science News and AMA
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Is There a Fixed Method for Getting to the Truth?
To prove something true would mean finally once and for all without possibility of ever having the possibility of there being an error, which is physically impossible. So Gertle showed that for anything as sophisticated as a simple arithmetic, that you would always have incomplete stuff. And so you could always add axioms. You could always come up with a new system of mathematics. That is why, David says, there will never be a fixed method determining whether a mathematical proposition is true. In the privacy of our own minds, we make blunders and mistakes. Our brains are physical objects, doing the computing. They can make mistakes. The laws of physics say that when you write down symbols on a
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