By Doron Zeilberger
Posted: March 29, 2012.
Prejudice is part of human nature, that's why we all are (to various degrees) racists, sexists, chauvinists, and elitists. But an equally despicable prejudice is "time-chauvinism", dismissing the scientific beliefs of past generations as mere superstition. True, we now know better than Newton and Kepler, who strongly believed in Alchemy and Astrology, but in a few hundred years, future generations will make fun of us, dwellers of the early 21st century, for our many superstitious beliefs, the most ridiculous one being the strong belief in the actual (and even potential) infinity in both the real world and the mathematical world. Yet modern theoretical cosmology is based on modern mathematics, where the "infinite" is the central dogma, hence both modern mathematics AND modern physics and cosmology are seriously flawed.
The annoying blue light on the blackboard came from a projector that should have been turned off.
Part 1, minute 29:12: apologies to Albert for misquoting his formula for adding velocities. I erroneausly wrote on the blackboard that u "+" v=(u+v)/(1-uv/c), the true formula, of course, is:
u "+" v= (u+v)/(1+uv/c2)
(I never prepare my talks, they are spontaneous, so I just scribbled from (false) memory)
Part 2, minute 17:45: "unprovable" should have been "disprovable", meaning that the negation of the statement is not provable either. Of course Gödel meta-proved that his "statement" is unprovable (and also its negation). Kurt believed that his "statement" was "true". I respectfully disagree, his statment is neither true nor false, but meaningless, since it involves quntifiers ranging over "infinite" sets.