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From: hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey)
Subject: Re: Roger Penrose's fixed ideas
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Date: Sat, 29 Oct 1994 21:35:01 GMT
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wojdylo@uniwa.uwa.edu.au (John Wojdylo) writes:

>francis@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Francis Muir) writes:

># Penrose wrote a brilliantly simple paper on unique generalized matrix
># inverses, and this was the product of a young, clear mind. Then he 
># began to take himself and his weirdness a little too seriously and
># did that stuff on aperiodic tiling; great stuff and entertaining too,
># but he was beginning to play God. Now he is on the Pop Sci Cultur
># circuit and it is rather lightweight and less than forrmidable. 

>Seems like they all are, these days.

It's the fashion of the times. I'm glad Penrose wrote these books.
All he has done is to carry the diagonal/impossibility proofs of logic and
math to its limit. It seems everyone has his limit. Everyone wants to
stop the diagonal/impossibility/nonexistence proofs/theorems at some
limit while accepting them in other cases.

If you look at some of these proofs/theorems from the perspective of
falsifiability a la Popper, some of these proofs/theorems are not even
falsifiable let alone verifiable. According to this view these
theorems are not even scientific statements. 
--
						-- Mark---
....we must realize that the infinite in the sense of an infinite totality, 
where we still find it used in deductive methods, is an illusion. Hilbert,1925
