Logic and empiricism

[palapiku]

What they do might be entertaining to themselves but it's not important or insightful to anyone else.

Doesn't this describe just about any mathematician?

And just about any Go player, yes

[Mike Novack]

What they do might be entertaining to themselves but it's not important or insightful to anyone else.

Doesn't this describe just about any mathematician?

Oddly enough, although at the time they did it the mathematicians were just "entertaining themsleves" turns out fairly common that about 100 years later some area of math that appeared to be abstract turns out very useful for something of other.

To find cases where areas of math were developed in order to be useful (because needed) perhaps have to go back to the time of Newton.

[hyperpape]

Mike, my understanding (and I'm venturing a bit beyond areas where I'm that knowledgable) is that you can't just say "well, choose whatever axioms you like and study the consequences" because the notion of consequence is explained in terms of models of the axioms, and models just end up being sets (in most cases), so you need to have an intended model of set theory, but there's more than one hanging around.

[shapenaji]

Monodology: In response to your comment about the "fuzziness" being due to the measurement inaccuracy rather than a probabilistic nature of the underlying particles.

The Copenhagen Interpretation would strongly dispute this,

And Bell's Inequality would out-and-out refute it.

Not saying that it doesn't feel right (After all, you're in good company, Einstein felt the same way), But this is at odds with what we know about quantum.

EDIT: Woops, meant Monod, not Liisa

[Monadology]

And Bell's Inequality would out-and-out refute it.

As I understood it, the experiments confirming Bell's theorem have not yet entirely ruled out hidden variables on a non-local scale. I was also under the impression that hidden variables were not the only potential problem (something to do with a deterministic model of the universe, but it's been a while).

[shapenaji]

EDIT: Scratch this post, need to go back and read.. be back in a few