Dangerous Knowledge
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Loading ... - Published date: December 19, 2011
- Category: Science
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In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians – Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing – whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide. The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century mathematics. He believed he was God’s messenger and was eventually driven insane trying to prove his theories of infinity. Ludwig Boltzmann’s struggle to prove the existence of atoms and probability eventually drove him to suicide. Kurt Gödel, the introverted confidant of Einstein, proved that there would always be problems which were outside human logic. His life ended in a sanatorium where he starved himself to death. Finally, Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of computer science and homosexual, died trying to prove that some things are fundamentally unprovable. The film also talks to the latest in the line of thinkers who have continued to pursue the question of whether there are things that mathematics and the human mind cannot know. They include Greg Chaitin, mathematician at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, and Roger Penrose. Dangerous Knowledge tackles some of the profound questions about the true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are still trying to answer today.










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If infinity really is an endless number then you shouldn`t be able to add infinity plus infinity …because the so called second infinity would be part of the first infinity… they should have given up while they were ahead !
I watch documentaries of this kind and what i cannot understand is why we, the modern Adams and Eves keep on biting the forbidden apple?
What bothers me about the lives of these men and many others is not that they worked desperately toward conclusions that couldn’t be reached due to the very paradoxical nature of the problems. It is that each time the oligarchy of each field of study refused steadfastly to give them the attention they deserved and to consider their ideas and findings. This is the kind of behavior one expects of religious faith not scientific pursuit and so shows the lack of rationality at its most basic level in the human mind. (This same “rational” behavior we take for granted in markets, politics, and relationships…) Had these men been met with anything other than dismissal their ideas perhaps could have been spread sooner and taken the pressure off them to continue the pursuit of the answers even when they themselves knew there couldn’t be one. It seems by meeting such staunch rejection without a bit of consideration because it flew in the face of “ideals” they were driven harder to prove they were correct and towards self destruction.
@ The first post: If all mathematicians and scientists thought like that then no new discoveries would be made. Moreover I don’t believe it is part of the character of a person who has these kinds of thoughts and passions to just give up. Asking questions like “why can’t I add infinity to infinity” obviously had profound implications whether it could be done or not. Just because something is infinite (or “goes to” infinity) doesn’t mean we can’t know and prove things about it. Anybody who has taken some calculus learns this quick.
Sounds like a Twilight Zone episode I seen once… need to see this, I hope I don’t go insane…