Current mood:

enthralled

Godel -how fun is that?
So, I'm reading a book by Douglas Hofstadter called "I am a Strange Loop" (because "I is a strange loop" is a grammatical trainwreck -the way the choice of title changes the meaning, but really doesn't, well, it describes the book extremely well. Great title.)

Anyway, he's writing about his adventures through the mind of Godel and his fabulous treatment of Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. I'm getting the PM, what is that..third or fourth hand? I tried it once straight and it was so boring! I much prefer it with some layers -like french cuisine :).

So, I gather that Godel developed a numerical code for the axioms of the PM that tidily assigned a unique number to every theorem by tying every symbol to a unique exponent and the position in the equation to a prime number, which would serve as the base of the exponent. To generate the number, you just do all the multiplication and viola! What fun! as long as you have some supercomputer to do all that boring prime multiple number generating. Godel must have seemed utterly insane to his relatives doing that!

That means if you have the number, you can work backwards and "decode" (Douglas' word) the theorem.

So, after some alot of multiplying, he'd have a set of numbers that all "CODE A TRUTH"!!

Oh, the Pythagorean Mystics must be rolling over in their graves! If only they'd had set theory!

It makes me wonder if finding things like the Fibonacci sequence and natural e embedded so deeply in the natural world is some kind of code for "the truth." But, where is nature's decoder ring? and where is the lexicon?

I suppose we could ask the Hebrew numerologists -did they have a universal primer in there? The name of God perhaps?

Who needs science fiction? The world is an astounding place :)