4 ms·

> Is it really impossible to have some system of axioms where most statements you care about (ie. can make a physical experiment out of) can be decided? Of cou

by jordigh 11y ago

> Is it really impossible to have some system of axioms where most statements you care about (ie. can make a physical experiment out of) can be decided? Of course it's possible. Most statements we care about are decidable. Otherwise, mathematics would be pretty hopeless. :-) It's just that any system has undecidable statements, as long as it's strong enough to do arithmetic. That's Gödel's theorem.

noobermin 11y ago
I know due to Godel in principle that a logical system can't be complete, but science is a little more specified beyond just logical consistency, it has to be experimentally verifiable, which is a constraint that the mathematics used by science doesn't have. What I'm hinting at is there is a subset of logical statements that the mathematics of science contains defined by the set of experimentally testable statements, and this subset is decidable given independent axioms and free parameters. EDIT: to expand upon this further, things like the continuum hypothesis are interesting from a mathematical perspective, let's say I'm Godel and I assert that CH is false and there is some set A "in between" the reals and N in cardinality. However, if my friend Enrico Fermi wants to do experiments and he wants me to do a calculation, I won't use elements from A because it wouldn't be useful for his experiments in with particle physics. Worse, I can't even use all the real numbers, because he'll need numbers he can compare to his measurements, so I'm restricted to a countable subset of even the reals, and of course, I'm restricted to using statements from the decidable subset of mathematics. There's a big difference between what mathematics is capable of saying and what we observe in the real world. Even if the real world had a set of undecidable facts, the fact that the only way science can understand it is by experiments restricts falsifiable scientific statements to a subset of mathematical statements which is incomplete (because of the need of axioms and free parameters like the mass of particles or their charge, fundamental constants, etc), but decidable within it's axioms, because otherwise, it's not testable and it's not science.
- jordigh 11y ago
  As Einstein said, "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."[1] Forgive me for not addressing directly what you said, as you seem to be using "countable" to mean something other than "in bijection with the natural numbers". I don't really understand exactly what you mean. But it appears to me that you're trying to perfectly reconcile mathematics with experimental reality. This is impossible. Also, a lot of mathematical physics is very distant from experimental reality. -- [1] http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Einstein_geometry.html http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Einstein_g...
  - noobermin 11y ago
    I might be confusing this thread with another. The posters there claimed that when considering the infinite number of possible systems that you end up with undecidable statements. Probably countability has nothing to do with this. Also, the popular article linked elsewhere seems to imply that this has very real implications on experiment, which is upsetting.

by jordigh 11y ago

noobermin 11y ago

I know due to Godel in principle that a logical system can't be complete, but science is a little more specified beyond just logical consistency, it has to be experimentally verifiable, which is a constraint that the mathematics used by science doesn't have. What I'm hinting at is there is a subset of logical statements that the mathematics of science contains defined by the set of experimentally testable statements, and this subset is decidable given independent axioms and free parameters. EDIT: to expand upon this further, things like the continuum hypothesis are interesting from a mathematical perspective, let's say I'm Godel and I assert that CH is false and there is some set A "in between" the reals and N in cardinality. However, if my friend Enrico Fermi wants to do experiments and he wants me to do a calculation, I won't use elements from A because it wouldn't be useful for his experiments in with particle physics. Worse, I can't even use all the real numbers, because he'll need numbers he can compare to his measurements, so I'm restricted to a countable subset of even the reals, and of course, I'm restricted to using statements from the decidable subset of mathematics. There's a big difference between what mathematics is capable of saying and what we observe in the real world. Even if the real world had a set of undecidable facts, the fact that the only way science can understand it is by experiments restricts falsifiable scientific statements to a subset of mathematical statements which is incomplete (because of the need of axioms and free parameters like the mass of particles or their charge, fundamental constants, etc), but decidable within it's axioms, because otherwise, it's not testable and it's not science.

jordigh 11y ago
As Einstein said, "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."[1] Forgive me for not addressing directly what you said, as you seem to be using "countable" to mean something other than "in bijection with the natural numbers". I don't really understand exactly what you mean. But it appears to me that you're trying to perfectly reconcile mathematics with experimental reality. This is impossible. Also, a lot of mathematical physics is very distant from experimental reality. -- [1] http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Einstein_geometry.html http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Einstein_g...
- noobermin 11y ago
  I might be confusing this thread with another. The posters there claimed that when considering the infinite number of possible systems that you end up with undecidable statements. Probably countability has nothing to do with this. Also, the popular article linked elsewhere seems to imply that this has very real implications on experiment, which is upsetting.