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"Formalization of Science"
Nov. 29th, 2003 04:01 pmWhen your placeholders are #6 and #7 on Google and the placeholder on your old page is #10, you know there's a lot of work to be done in this area.
There seem to be plenty of people saying that formalization projects aren't interesting or worthwhile, so I'll give them a chance to convince me. The reason I left physics (and much of the reason I "left" mathematics) is because we didn't have a formal way of talking about things. Since there was no logical calculus to appeal to, I could never ultimately convince my teacher that she was wrong (this was in high school). About one year later, my classmate Eivind managed to out-rhetoric me and convince her.
This same sort of thing could be happening in top-level scientific debates today. If we did have formal logic in science, we probably wouldn't have so many controversies.
There seem to be plenty of people saying that formalization projects aren't interesting or worthwhile, so I'll give them a chance to convince me. The reason I left physics (and much of the reason I "left" mathematics) is because we didn't have a formal way of talking about things. Since there was no logical calculus to appeal to, I could never ultimately convince my teacher that she was wrong (this was in high school). About one year later, my classmate Eivind managed to out-rhetoric me and convince her.
This same sort of thing could be happening in top-level scientific debates today. If we did have formal logic in science, we probably wouldn't have so many controversies.