Timeline for On critical reviews of Hawking's lecture "Gödel and the end of the universe"
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
28 events
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| Jun 15, 2020 at 7:27 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Feb 28, 2020 at 8:35 | history | edited | YCor | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Feb 28, 2020 at 1:33 | comment | added | user21349 | related: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14939/… | |
| Feb 27, 2020 at 23:35 | answer | added | Jeffrey Harrison | timeline score: 9 | |
| May 14, 2018 at 13:24 | review | Close votes | |||
| May 17, 2018 at 15:06 | |||||
| Mar 18, 2018 at 20:59 | answer | added | Timothy Chow | timeline score: 19 | |
| Mar 15, 2018 at 18:39 | answer | added | p6majo | timeline score: 3 | |
| Mar 15, 2018 at 9:18 | comment | added | Billy | I have no intention of dismissing the question outright, but let's make no mistake: there's no mathematical argument to analyse here, because Hawking (deliberately!) didn't make one. He was a brilliant and eminent physicist among other things, but I don't think he was, or ever tried to be, a logician. He presumably couldn't have stated Goedel's theorems, and would have been fully aware of this at the time of writing. This suggests to me, even in spite of his phrasing, that he never intended to invoke Goedel's theorems as mathematical statements, just as epistemological heuristics. | |
| Mar 15, 2018 at 5:08 | comment | added | Morteza Azad | @GerryMyerson (+1) Nice related quote! I added it to the original post. Thanks for mentioning, Gerry! | |
| Mar 15, 2018 at 5:08 | history | edited | Morteza Azad | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Mar 14, 2018 at 22:47 | comment | added | Gerry Myerson | Perhaps Thomas Breuer, Quantenmechanik: ein Fall fur Gödel?, Spektrum Akademischer Verlag 1997, MR1453883 (99m:00006), should be added to the list. "Gödel's incompleteness theorem, or more precisely, problems of self-reference, place limits on the experimental investigability of the universe, which makes impossible the answering of important questions, even if we had a TOE." | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 15:43 | history | edited | Peter Heinig | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Corrected spelling of Gödel's name.
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| Mar 14, 2018 at 14:38 | comment | added | RBarryYoung | The thing about Gödel's theorems is that they rely on infinity, which generally is not a problem in mathematics. Physics, however, is another matter, most physical theories do not assume or require physical infinities. And adding an assumption of physical infinity is really, really high on the Occam's Razor scale (though few physicists seem to realize this). | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 14:30 | comment | added | Philippe Gaucher | I am not physicist. I'd would like to point out anyway that maybe gravity does not exist at the Plank scale just because gravity is an emergent property of spacetime, not a fundamental force. That would imply that quantum mechanics and general relativity cannot be unified because there would be nothing to unify. Some physicists reading my comments will be certainly able to explain better than I can this new (emergent !) point of view in theoretical physics. | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 12:09 | history | edited | Morteza Azad | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Mar 14, 2018 at 11:58 | comment | added | Morteza Azad | @JoonasIlmavirta Unfortunately yes! Early this morning I woke up just to receive the sad news. The post is actually a logical tribute to his memory. May he rest in peace. :-( | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 11:53 | comment | added | Morteza Azad | @DaveLRenfro Yes, exactly. For example, he mentions: "What is the relation between Godel’s theorem and whether we can formulate the theory of the universe in terms of a finite number of principles? One connection is obvious. According to the positivist philosophy of science, a physical theory is a mathematical model. So if there are mathematical results that can not be proved, there are physical problems that can not be predicted." | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 11:36 | comment | added | Joonas Ilmavirta | Professor Stephen Hawking passed away today. | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 11:27 | comment | added | Dave L Renfro | (MOMENTS LATER) Having now read the entire essay, I now see that in other parts of the passage Hawking does make a more direct link to Godel's theorems. | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 11:21 | comment | added | Dave L Renfro | The above argument for refuting the possibility of achieving the Theory of Everything in physics is loosely based on Godel's incompleteness theorems in mathematics. --- To me, Hawking's quote does not say this or even suggest this. It seems to me that he was using Godel's theorems and mathematics as an ANALOGY for a certain situation that he believes may be the case in physics (namely, that M-Theory is sufficiently malleable to keep physicists working indefinitely, or something like this). | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 11:00 | comment | added | Gro-Tsen | I won't claim to understand the physics, but I find it a bit odd to try to apply Gödel's incompleteness theorem to show that all of physics can't derive from a finite (and presumably small) number of principles, when Gödel's theorem illustrates, precisely, that a finite small number of principles can still give rise to a very complicated system! (Obviously what we can't do is find every consequence of these principles, but I don't think anyone believes that anyway.) | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 10:43 | answer | added | Carlo Beenakker | timeline score: 49 | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 9:35 | history | edited | Morteza Azad | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Mar 14, 2018 at 9:29 | comment | added | Morteza Azad | @CarloBeenakker I see! Thanks for the clarification, Carlo! Let me edit the post in order to make this point clear. | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 9:22 | comment | added | Carlo Beenakker | this argument was not specific for Hawking, it has been brought up and discussed by several scholars, see the links in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… | |
| Mar 14, 2018 at 9:07 | history | edited | Morteza Azad | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Mar 14, 2018 at 9:00 | history | edited | Morteza Azad | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Mar 14, 2018 at 8:47 | history | asked | Morteza Azad | CC BY-SA 3.0 |