Replies to post #91923 on DD Support Board and Research Team

[shajandr]

First, I generally agree with everything you wrote butt for the claim that science doesn't neccessily deal with experiments.

Yes, in fact it does. We cannot have science without experiment. It is not possible. We can have theoreticians, butt their work is all based on prior experiment and all their hypotheses are garbage unless put to extensive experimentation designed to falsify them. When enough such experiments fail, we elevate the hypothesis to a theory.

Without experimentation, there is no science. Period. By definition there cannot be.

You mention Fermat's Last Theorem, which as you point ~OUTT is math.

As I wrote earlier, and which is not of controversy within the academy, mathematics is NOT science. Never has been. It's akin to a language.

It's very USEFUL in science as a tool. Math oddly matches a lot of natural phenomena that we observe. Butt math is a human construct. It is an artifact - an invented language.

I don't think you'd find many if any university scientists or mathematicians who would claim that math is a science. Butt there are many applied mathematicians who are employed in science - doing math for scientists or combining both themselves.

Now, as another point of agreement - would you concur that Integral's Malibu bungalow is the fount of all knowledge and repository of all information of the Universe integrated (hence his name) over all time?

[jurisper]

Consider a problem like Fermat's Last Theorem. I have no clue what it's about, and probably wouldn't begin to understand it if it were explained to me. But obviously it was a seductive story; the proof Fermat said he'd worked out, but that had somehow been lost. Were subsequent attempts affected by changes in the field of mathematics over the next 350 years? That would be, from the point of view of someone like me, an interesting idea to pursue. And perhaps easier to deal with than arriving at the proof itself, though not by much. So count me out. But as far as I know, solving that kind of mathematical problem is no more "useful" than determining the year in which Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Cecilia Gallerani was painted.

I did part of my PhD with a group that had been extravagantly funded (relatively speaking) in part to prove Fermat's Last Theorem using mathematics built on a funky new logic.

Didn't work - big sadness!

For me, the unanswered question was: Why care about FLT anyway? (Apart from the glory aspect.)

You can see why mathematicians cared about it, though - very simple statement, looks like it "should" be easy to prove. It finally fell to very complex mathematics, certainly way beyond whatever Fermat had available to him.