Abstract
During the summer of 1900, David Hilbert, widely recognized for his ability to see mathematics as a whole, delivered the keynote address at the Mathematics Congress in Paris. Speaking in a hall a few blocks away from the laboratory in which Madame and Pierre Curie were tending their vats of radioactive material, Hilbert set the agenda for the study of mathematics in the twentieth century. There were, he said, twenty-three unsolved problems in mathematics and all of them were amenable to solution in the near future. As Hilbert put it, “There is always a solution. There is no ignoramus.”1
Some physicists would prefer to come back to the idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist independently of whether we observe them. That, however, is impossible.
Werner Heisenberg
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Reference
Felix Browder, Mathematical Developments Arising from Hilbert Problems, Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics, vol. 28 ( Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society, 1974 ).
Albert Einstein, “How I Created the Relativity Theory,” lecture in Kyoto, Japan, 14 December 1922, in Abraham Pais, Subtle is the Lord( New York: Oxford University Press, 1987 ), p. 131.
Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis, trans. W.J.G. (New York: Dover, 1952 ), p. 90.
Ibid, pp. 168, 176.
Werner Heisenberg, quoted in James B. Conant, Modern Science and Modern Man( New York: Columbia University Press, 1953 ), p. 40.
Ernest Rutherford, quoted in Ruth Moore, Niels Bohr: The Man, His Science and the World They Changed( New York: Knopf, 1966 ), p. 40.
Werner Heisenberg, quoted in Conant, Modern Science and Modern Man, p. 40.
Max Jammer, The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics( New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966 ), p. 271.
Werner Heisenberg, quoted in Conant, Modern Science and Modern Man, p. 271.
Robert Oppenheimer, quoted in Ibid.
Clifford A. Hooker, “The Nature of Quantum Mechanical Reality,” in Paradigms and Paradoxes, ed. Robert Colodny ( Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972 ), p. 132.
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Kafatos, M., Nadeau, R. (2000). Two Small Clouds: The Emergence of a New Physics. In: The Conscious Universe. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1308-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1308-6_2
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