Dangerous Knowledge
Dangerous Knowledge was originally aired on BBC 4 on 8th August 2007 as part of the "Science You Can't See" season. David Malone tells the tragic story of four great minds whose brilliant but obsessive pursuit of certainty in an uncertain world, ended in their madness or suicide. One after another, they all sought certainty but found uncertainty. They were all radically at odds with their times, but laid the foundations of ours. The brilliant mathematician, Georg Cantor, believed he was God's messenger. But when his theories of infinity uncovered paradoxes and uncertainty at the foundation of mathematics, he was bitterly opposed and eventually driven insane The physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, then brought uncertainty into the heart of Physics itself and faced equally implacable opposition. After 30 years of being unable to get his theories accepted, he committed suicide. Kurt Gödel, the greatest logician of all time and the introverted confidant of Einstein. Gödel wanted to solve the problems that had defeated Cantor and prove once and for all the completeness of mathematics. Instead he proved mathematics would always be incomplete and some problems would forever lie beyond logical proof. He starved himself to death. The story ends with Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of computer science and homosexual. The mathematics of infinity which had shaken the foundations of logic, became for Turing, a question about the human mind. He died still asking if the limits of logic were the limits of the human mind or if we transcended mere logic. The film also talks to the latest in the line of thinkers who have continued to pursue the question of whether there are things that mathematics and the human mind cannot know. They include Greg Chaitin, mathematician at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, and Sir Roger Penrose. Dangerous Knowledge tackles some of the profound questions about the true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are still trying to answer today.
Runtime:
89
Certificate:
All
Year:
2007
Released:
19 Feb 2008
£15.99
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