Posts

Showing posts from September, 2011

The Death Of Certainty?

I've just discovered - nearly ten years after the event, but I never claimed to be fast - that Stephen Hawking has changed his mind and declared that a Theory of Everything is unachievable. This is not quite as radical a piece of side-switching as the Pope announcing his conversion to Islam would be, but it's pretty significant and his reasons are interesting (not new, but interesting anyway, especially given his status in the world of science). Some Background Towards the end of the nineteenth century there was a general feeling among scientists that explaining the universe was on the verge of being done and dusted: there were still some minor issues to be resolved, but essentially all the elements of a complete explanation were in place and all that was left for the future was further refinement. So much for science, but in the field of mathematics things were not quite as rosy - the branch known as set theory was undergoing a major crisis as a result of the discovery tha