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[David C. Ullrich]

On Sat, 2 Jun 2001 19:34:13 -0400, "Tim Peters" <tim.one at home.com>
wrote:

>[David C. Ullrich]
>> ...
>> Hanging out on sci.math the things that people said about Chaitin's
>> work made him sound like a total crackpot.
>
>sci.math?  Wow -- I thought Congress had voted to ban it.  Wishful thinking,
>I guess <wink>.
>
>> I was relieved when I saw a little bit of his stuff once - the
>> ridiculous aspects of what people had said about what he'd done were
>> not due to him, they were due to people misquoting and oversimplifying
>> his stuff.
>
>Chaitan is a bit of a self-promoter, and his rhetoric is often colorful, but
>by all indications his work is rock solid.  

The actual "work" is certainly solid - that is, the actual 
mathematical statements with proofs. Solid, also interesting,
significant, probably useful. But the "bits" of self-promotion
and rhetoric can be very, um, let's just say they can be a lot
like self-promoting rhetoric.

> A very nice high-level intro is
>this transcript of a lecture he gave at CMU:
>
>    http://www.cs.umaine.edu/~chaitin/cmu.html

Very interesting stuff, without a doubt. He wants to say that
his point of view makes incompleteness seems inevitable he
may well be right. But when he gets into statements like

"there is no reason that individual bits [of Omega] are 0 or 1!"

it's just too... well I better omit the adjective and just say
that "there is no reason that individual bits are 0 or 1" is not
a mathematical statement amenable to proof.

Preciate the reference - I definitely learned one thing, at least:

"Now what is the reaction of the world to this work?! Well, I think
it's fair to say that
the only people who like what I'm doing are physicists!"

Not having studied his stuff or people's reactions to it I thought
it was just me (seriously). (Um: It's _not_ true that mathematicians
don't like his work, I know of plenty of mathematicians who find it
fascinating. What people don't like is his [adjective] claims
about what his work _means_...)

The (or in any case _a_) point being things like

"I think there may be political reasons, but I think there are also
legitimate conceptual reasons, because these are ideas that
are so foreign, the idea of randomness or of things that are true by
accident is so foreign to a mathematician or a logician,
that it's a nightmare! This is their worst nightmare come true! I
think they would prefer not to think about it."

He insists that the world of mathematics is all upset over his
well-defined but unknowable Omega. If that irritates people what
irritates them is not the well-defined but unknowable character
of those bits, it's the idea that the idea of something being
well-defined but unknowable started with him. It's no big deal,
people have been dealing with "unknowables" for a long time.


David C. Ullrich
*********************
"Sometimes you can have access violations all the 
time and the program still works." (Michael Caracena, 
comp.lang.pascal.delphi.misc 5/1/01)