On Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:29:26 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> I am not aware - despite possessing a book detailing the entire history
> of Fermat's Last Theorum - of any proof that was widely held to be
> correct for a long time before being found wrong. All the incorrect
> proofs were discovered to be incorrect fairly quickly.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. ;-)

>>> And I suppose next you'll be telling me that some day, some future
>>> technology might enable us to find a sequence of chess moves whereby a
>>> bishop can get from a black square to a white square, despite it being
>>> trivially easy to mathematically prove the impossibility of this...
>> 
>> You're still missing my point....
> 
> You're still missing *my* point. :-P

Then we're even. ;-)

>> My point is that there's plenty of examples where raw data is lost but
>> it can be reconstructed.
> 
> Blurring doesn't actuallly "lose" nearly as much data as you'd think.
> That's why it can be mostly reversed.

Again, 10 years ago, doing this was thought to be impossible.

>> Well, who knows?  There are ancient civilizations that had no concept
>> of zero.  The introduction of imaginary numbers didn't come along until
>> the late 1500s.  Up until that point, sqrt(-1) was undefined.
>> 
>> Who knows what we don't know about mathematics even today?
> 
> If I were you, I'd be far more worried about the sky falling - it's
> about as logically plausible...

I don't see how your statement follows mine....

Throughout history, mankind has claimed to have reached the end of 
knowledge on all manner of topics, saying "there's nothing more to learn 
here".  In every instance (AFAIK), that's been proven wrong.

But now here, in the 21st century, we've finally exhausted the base of 
knowledge?  I don't think that's the case.

Jim

Post a reply to this message