QUIXOTIC PUBLISHING
John G. Cottone, PhD
Science & Math Videos
John Oliver provides a balanced critique of science and the critics of science that was exceptionally well done. Oliver argues that we need to temper our confidence in what scientific exploration can teach us about existence, while at the same time emboldening the recommendations of the best of our scientific endeavors.
In this clip from the documentary “What the Bleep Do We Know: Down the Rabbit Hole” entitled "Dr. Quantum in Flatland" an animation shows
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Search for other clips from “What the Bleep Do We Know: Down the Rabbit Hole” on:
* "Entangled Particles & Superposition"
* "Double-Slit Experiment"
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"Dangerous Knowledge" tackles some of the profound questions about the true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are still trying to answer today. In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.
The film also talks to the latest in the line of thinkers who have continued to pursue the question of whether there are things that mathematics and the human mind cannot know. They include Greg Chaitin, mathematician at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, and Roger Penrose.
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In this lecture, Gregory Chaitin tells the dramatic story of the recent disputes over the foundations of mathematics, starting with the problems in Cantor's theory of infinite sets and then discussing the work of Bertrand Russell, David Hilbert, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing, and finally his own work using complexity. This complexity-based analysis of the foundations of mathematics suggests that perhaps mathematics is more similar to physics and to biology than is commonly believed, and should sometimes be carried out quasi-empirically, that is, more in the spirit of an experimental science.
In this lecture, Gregory Chaitin discusses Leibniz's ideas on complexity (Discours de metaphysique, 1686), leading to modern work on program-size complexity, the halting probability and incompleteness. Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason asserts that if anything is true it is true for a reason. But the bits of the numerical value of the halting probability are mathematical truths that are true for no reason. More precisely, as he explains, they are irreducible mathematical truths, that is, true for no reason simpler than themselves.