A Few Bits on Mathematics, Science, Human Beings, Nations, Knowledge, Evolution, Theory of Games, Quantum Mechanics, Work & a Bit More‏

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The art of crafting a mathematical theory

Mathematics itself evolves.

Math is completely organic.

Science advances one death at a time.   (Max Planck)

Human beings 

are not especially good 

at anything in particular,

but we are very curious

and extremely adaptable.

Human beings should not 

try to be like machines;

machines are much better

at that than we are.

Nations die when they become rigid,

when their bureaucracy overwhelms everything,

when they stagnate, when they become inflexible,

when they think too much of themselves.

Our knowledge is always incomplete,

always partial, and constantly changing.

Exhaustive random search 

takes time that grows exponentially 

because exhaustive search is ergodic.

The human genome has 3 x 10ˆ9 bases,

but in 4 billion years the biosphere

has only been able to try

an infinitesimal fraction

of the astronomical number

4^[3 x 10ˆ9] of all possible

DNA sequences of that size.

Evolution is not at all ergodic.

The theory of games can be viewed 

as a mathematical theory of ethics and morality...

A footnote in von Neumann and Morgenstern's massive

and brilliant Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944)

on the fact that quantum mechanical randomness

was necessary in order to be able to formulate

a theory for zero-sum games without a saddle-point.

It seemed strange to me that such a theory

would not be possible in a classical, deterministic world.

Proving Darwin - Making Biology Mathematical

Gregory Chaitin

Pantheon Books (New York, 2012)

La convicción sin la experiencia lleva a la rigidez.

We should do away 

with the absolutely specious notion 

that everybody has to earn a living. 

It is a fact today 

that one in ten thousand of us 

can make a technological breakthrough 

capable of supporting all the rest. 

The youth of today are absolutely right 

in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. 

We keep inventing jobs 

because of this false idea 

that everybody has to be employed 

at some kind of drudgery because, 

according to Malthusian Darwinian theory 

he must justify his right to exist. 

So we have inspectors of inspectors 

and people making instruments 

for inspectors to inspect inspectors. 

The true business of people 

should be to go back to school 

and think about whatever it was 

they were thinking about 

before somebody came along 

and told them they had to earn a living.

Buckminster Fuller