Re: TOE Via Cantor's Transfinite Arithmetic

From: OsherD (mdoctorow_at_comcast.net)
Date: 03/19/05 

Date: 19 Mar 2005 11:43:27 -0800

Since some of the elitists on other threads have been interjecting
irrelevant comments apparently to move threads beyond their own
downward in the lists, or even create new threads of tangential
scientific interest, I am almost tempted to do the same here, but I
restrain myself due to a conscience. For those who think that
conscience is irrelevant to physics, it is roughly speaking what
happens when nondrinking and non-dope-taking parents raise children
born without abnormal hostility (unlike Hitler for example) who are
taught to not call everybody in the "out-group" "stupid," "insects,"
"boring," etc., which alcohol- or dope-babies are also known as
Elitists if someone has difficulty in recognizing them. They are
typically Ingenious Imitators in one field at most period.

I want to here mention something relevant to this thread, namely where
I learned about Georg Cantor who is relevant to this thread.

Unlike the physicists who rushed through their courses as rapidly as
possible in order to reach the next one (which explains a certain lack
of interest in or attention to fundamentals and axioms and
self-criticism and most of all simplicity), I learned my field of
mathematics from the "old school" which included Garrett Birkhoff and
Saunders MacLane whose A Survey of Modern Algebra Revised Edition,
MacMillan: N.Y. 1953 was written respectively by Birkhoff of Harvard
and MacLane of Chicago. Birkhoff and MacLane were at different times
Presidents of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). They are
regarded as the "Deans" of American mathematics, although MacLane's
category theory is in my opinion far inferior to Birkhoff's
hydrodynamic and other contributions. They both coauthored a later
graduate algebra textbook with their order of authorships reversed,
which again was a fundamental text.

Of the 15 chapters in Birkhoff and MacLane (1953 - yes, I kept the
textbook), one, chapter 12, is Transfinite Arithmetic of Georg Cantor.
It covers pages 356-369 of their book.

Apparently nobody had yet told Birkhoff and MacLane that a future
generation of Clinton's "4 favorite political allies," the computer
corporation lobby, would eventually denounce infinity as Persona Non
Grada, or in other words excommunicated since they couldn't produce it
on a computer. George Cantor's story itself is very inspiring to
Nonconformists, who appear to be a small minority not only in physics
and engineering but in sci.physics as well - which is exactly correct,
since rare things would lose their value if they were common. Cantor
was hounded by the Chair of his mathematics department at U. Saint
Petersberg (later U. Leningrad, which returned to Saint Petersberg
after Stalin died, although there are rumors that Putin is putting back
the name Leningrad) and by Kronecker, who was himself at one time the
Chair there to my recollection, since he deviated from the "finitist
algebra" and "picayune detail" philosophy which was then as now the
rage of academia. He was not allowed to publish his theory by the
usual "unbiased peer reviewers" of his time then as now, although when
his Chair died he managed to slip his theory in and called it
Contributions To the Theory of Transfinite Numbers in honor of others
who had contributed and helped him (apparently he wasn't a hateful
alcohol- or dope-baby, though we'll never know for sure). Cantor was
Christian, Kronecker was Jewish, but nowadays the tables are turned
among conformists although now it is mostly the Jews who are victimized
unless they declare themselves "Pro-Palestinian" (no, Palestine wasn't
the Philistines; Palestine was Jordan, and the name Palestine didn't
exist for most of history).

Perhaps Cantor should have done like Pierre De Fermat of 1600s France
and totally ignored publishing. Fermat, who co-discovered Probability
theory with Pascal and invented modern number theory which developed
partly into cryptography and discovered Cartesian/analytic geometry
before Descartes and calculus equations before either Sir Isaac Newton
or Leibniz (though both heard of Fermat, who had preceeded them by
about 20 years or so but was still alive when they were young) and who
bested Descartes in optics (Fermat maintained that light slows down in
water, Descartes maintained that it speeds up), managed to reach the
modern world through a fluke or coincidence when his letters to various
people were published by his friend Mersenne. Fermat eventually
himself published one minor paper on something unrelated to any of the
above, but otherwise like Sir Isaac in his prime was totally
uninterested in publishing. Fermat was also an amateur mathematician
unlike the "professional?" Descartes and others who would now be called
Bureaucrats. Fermat's profession was law and being a Magistrate, which
he barely held onto in later years because Descartes worked feverishly
to destroy his position after being bested in two public arguments by
Fermat and forced to apologize in public.

If Cantor had waited like Fermat and abandoned all interest in
publishing, then he might well have been published by some friends of
his eventually, although there is also the possibility that Clinton's
computer allies might have reached the public first, in which case
Groupthink rather than Transfinite Arithmetic might be a chapter in
Birkhoff and MacLane or their descendants or acquaintences.

Osher Doctorow

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