Re: "Godel got it all wrong"

Peter_Smith says...

I can see how people can get confused about the supposed implications
of G=F6del's First Incompleteness Theorem. What fazes me is the
seemingly perennial temptation to say that there is something wrong
with the Theorem itself. (When I was editing one of the philosophy
journals for twelve years, there'd be another "refutation" submitted
every four or five months.) The really odd thing is that the Theorem is
in fact *easy*.

Almost all crackpot arguments are aimed at "easy" results. In physics,
Special Relativity attracts the largest number of cranks, and Special
Relativity is one of the few aspects of modern physics that can be
explored using nothing more sophisticated than high-school algebra.

In math, Cantor's theorem of the uncountability of the reals attracts
more cranks than Godel's theorem, and Cantor's result can be explained
in two or three lines.

Cranks never have a problem with more difficult results, such as
Brower's Fixed Point Theorem or the Great Picard Theorem or the
unsolvability of the general quintic equation in terms of radicals.

--
Daryl McCullough
Ithaca, NY

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