Re: The naming wars continue...

[William Lee Irwin III]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2004 at 06:15:49PM -0700, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>> It would be nice if this were qualified with something that distinguished
>> the outlandish idealizations you're actually criticizing from real math,
>> which makes no presumption that its axioms or hypotheses have any
>> connection to reality, observations, or predictions thereof. The abuse
>> you're speaking of is poor modelling for the sake of tractability of
>> symbolic calculations, which has nothing to do with proof or logic.

On Fri, Oct 22, 2004 at 08:35:18PM -0500, Matt Mackall wrote:
> Actually just the opposite. It's more about Godel and Whitehead than
> Feynmann in my interpretation.

"The notion of a perfectly modellable world is dead" and branding a
field with the sins of those who misapplied it is not difficult to
understand. Worse yet, it's even arguable that even the idealizations
were done in full cognizance of their limited validity. Whatever else
you're reading into it is not there. I suppose in this and the instance
of some religiously-oriented .sig's there is little or no recourse.


-- wli
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