Dangerous Knowledge (David Malone, BBC Two, 2008) (2-2)

DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE BBC Two June 2008
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 begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century mathematics. He believed he was God's messenger and was eventually driven insane trying to prove his theories of infinity. Ludwig Boltzmann's struggle to prove the existence of atoms and probability eventually drove him to suicide. Kurt Gödel, the introverted confidant of Einstein, proved that there would always be problems which were outside human logic. His life ended in a sanatorium where he starved himself to death. Finally, Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of computer science and homosexual, died trying to prove that some things are fundamentally unprovable. 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. Dangerous Knowledge tackles some of the profound questions about the true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are still trying to answer today.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Dangerous Knowledge
• David Malone
• BBC
• Georg Cantor
• Ludwig Boltzmann
• Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing
• theories of infinity
• atoms
• probability
• code breaker
• enigma
• computer science
• Greg Chaitin
• Roger Penrose
• mathematical thinkers
• math
• logic
• suicide

[muchosbares]

Posiblemente exista un conjunto de leyes inalterables que gobiernan el universo y también una lógica para todo lo existente, aunque esas leyes y esa lógica universal nunca puedan ser del todo desveladas ya que no son humanas. Es absurdo y contradictorio pretender abarcar conceptos trascendentes, de los cuales no se posee (ni se poseerá) una acabada comprensión por ser estos, de una naturaleza que va más allá de lo humano. En consecuencia creo que la búsqueda de conocimiento no tendrá fin.