¶ Hyphenated Sciences
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Index Entry
Hyphenated Sciences:
“The wholesale exodus of mathematicians from reality with the usual, notable, and relatively few exceptions, such as Euler, occurred simply because the mathematicians’ inability to cope epistemologically with the increasing flood of emergent inter-relatedness of physical reality which imposed many hyphens between the adjacent sciences-- of physics and biology for instance-- as the increasing specializations found themselves inadvertently overlapping on the joint thresholds of the older sciences. Leaving the weddings of biochemists, physio-chemists, astro-physicists, et al., mathematicians plunged into the ultramorphic abstraction behind a screen of axiomatic inadequacy whose alleged ‘obviousity of unprovable first truths’ were, to me, neither true nor obvious. With each advance of the physical sciences the mathematical axioms were ever less apt, even as tentative hypotheses. There was nothing wrong with the mathematicians’ play once they had adopted the axiomatic rules of their game.”
