TWO KINDS OF HISTORY The Scientist as Rebel (New York Review Books (Paperback)) by Freeman Dyson
Per creare bisogna distruggere molto. Laddove si distrugge, c’è spazio per accogliere l’ energia del genio.
Laddove tutto è sacro, simbolico, emblematico, la creazione viene continuamente abortita.
Laddove regna il “giorno della memoria”, regna la stagnazione.
Laddove l’etica museale imperversa, le fonti si seccano.
Laddove la strada è segnata (path dependence), l’ottusità della macchina vince.
Sulla gomma del preservativo non cresce nulla.
E’ vero per l’arte, è vero per l’economia, ma è vero soprattutto nella scienza.
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Guardiamo più da vicino le due più grandi rivoluzioni scientifiche del XX secolo…
… The two great conceptual revolutions of twentieth-century science, the overturning of classical physics by Werner Heisenberg and the overturning of the foundations of mathematics by Kurt Gödel, occurred within six years of each other within the narrow boundaries of German-speaking Europe…
Anni venti.
Germania.
Tutto è a pezzi dopo la sconfitta. Tutto è screditato, anche la scienza…
… In the new era of defeat and misery that begins in November 1918, the exact sciences are discredited together with the military-industrial complex that had sustained them… The dominant mood of the new era was doom and gloom… Decline of the West, the title of the apocalyptic world history of Oswald Spengler. The first volume of Spengler’s prophetic work was published in Munich in July 1918… Even those who disagreed with Spengler were strongly influenced by his rhetoric…
Il best seller era “Il declino dell’Occidente”. Spengler sulla scienza…
… He said, among other things, that the decay of Western civilization must bring with it a collapse of the rigid structures of classical mathematics and physics… There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the other, each limited in duration and self-contained.”… This is the origin of the sudden and annihilating doubt that has arisen about things that even yesterday were the unchallenged foundation of physical theory, about the meaning of the energy principle, the concepts of mass, space, absolute time, and causal natural laws generally.”…
Questa via distruttiva si rivelò molto creativa.
Ed ecco due discepoli di Spengler. Due figure che vedevano nella rivoluzione l’unica via di fuga…
… Two people who came early and strongly under the influence of Spengler’s philosophy were the mathematician Hermann Weyl and the physicist Erwin Schrödinger. Both were writers with a deep feeling for the German language, and perhaps for that reason were easily seduced by Spengler’s literary brilliance. Both became convinced that mathematics and physics had reached a state of crisis that left no road open except radical revolution…
Una scienza a pezzi orripila l’esteta ma scatena la fantasia rivoluzionaria del barbaro di genio.
Weyl e la matematica: intuizionismo contro logica formale…
… Weyl had been, even before 1918, a proponent of the doctrine of intuitionism, which denied the validity of a large part of classical mathematics and attempted to place what was left upon a foundation of intuition rather than formal logic…
I conservatori orripilati: David Hilbert e Albert Einstein…
… David Hilbert and Albert Einstein found themselves in the unaccustomed role of defenders of the status quo, Hilbert defending the primacy of formal logic in the foundations of mathematics, Einstein defending the primacy of causality in physics…
Ma presto, per loro, arrivò la disfatta…
… Heisenberg discovered the true limits of causality in atomic processes, and Gödel discovered the limits of formal deduction and proof in mathematics…
Dove si crea si distrugge. E, spesso, dove si distrugge si crea.
Perfino la guerra ha un eccezionale portato creativo, considerato l’eccezionale portato distruttivo.
E dove c’è creatività, c’è scienza. Scienza rivoluzionaria.
