¶ Science: Gap Between Science and the Humanities
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Index Entry
Science: Gap Between Science and the Humanities:
"a little from the clock. You could go around the clock and borrow a little from tomorrow or you could go backwards on the clock and borrow a little from yesterday. It is kind of like going to the bank and you accommodate it on a time payment affair. This is called imaginary number, complex number, where the square root of minus one is going into yesterday one quadrant. They found they could accommodate the fourth power mathematically but they couldn’t make a model of it.
“In the nineties, then, it began to happen that the scientists said: We are sorry. We have had models up to now, and you asked me to explain what we are doing in science, and there was a model but suddenly models seemed to be invalid. Mathematics could carry on so you gave up models. That is what happened in the nineties. Not everybody knew this right away. This was not such a big fashionable thing. There were no decrees along these lines but it gradually became known that the scientists were carrying on with purely with mathematical notation and were getting along very well and they could handle invisible phenomena. They simply said: all this stuff that’s invisible here is also nonconceptual. There are no models.”
¶ Citations
- Oregon Lecture #4, pp.131-132, 6 Jul’62
