| David Hilbert and Beelzebub's Second Law of Nature | 9 comments |
 12 Aug 2010 @ 15:55, by Max SandorAs a child I once got spanked for peeing at the side of David Hilbert's grave in Göttingen. Besides the obvious humiliation, what remained in my traumatized mind were Hilbert's supposedly last words, engraved on his tombstone:
Did his postulate 'stick' with me? Are there 'positive engrams'? Is it that what's driving my relentless mind to dive into the abyss of human thought? Be it as it may, Hilbert's assertion, and likewise his curve, never ceased to spook around in some remote regions of my brain, and, strangely, just when I thought I could safely forget about it, I'll be reminded immediately that a problem just doesn't walk away if you simply ignore it. Just like Riemann, Gauss, and Moebius [link] , the ghosts of Göttingen are still haunting me. Back in LA, Tony Matweecha RIP, the man who proved that Riemann's sphere is NOT a sphere (by the simple laws of homology since there is one point on the top of the sphere for which there is no tangent), Tony had this to say when I told him how and why I got spanked many years ago: "did you notice that your piss went down in a curve, parabolically to be more precise?" Well, right on, that's how a mathematician thinks after all. I already eulogized Tony on this Blog more than once, so here goes another one of his gems, one for which he didn't take credit himself but assigned it to his own math prof at UCLA, a former assistant to Albert Einstein at Princeton: If Einstein were right and space were curved and Riemann's transformation were applicable, with the help of a super-sharp razor from Occam's stock, being located on Earth, we MUST conclude that the true shape of Earth is in reality a PLANE. Of course, this didn't win him any friends even though he PROVED IT WRONG, far from it, and so he died alone, after some fruitless NASA years in Pasadena and a decade of visualizing new solutions for approximating 3D splices in a japanese mini-thinktank. Still to these days, the mentioning of the mathematical possibility of Earth being a plane, if Einstein's assumptions were correct, that is, drives anyone ballistic, sure enough, so, for the record, I'll officially refrain from mentioning it and yield to the brute force of Copernicus' counter-Meme. To the dismay of the managers of the hitech lab, we filled Tony's room with smoke so thick we could study Hilbert's and Beelzebub's curves in the drifting clouds above us, measuring cigarette consumption in octaves rather than packs. Would it not have been for the heroic figure of GZ joining us frequently, nobody other than us would have seen these strange twists of the shape of this Universe, unfolding for us while coughing our lungs out. To recap, Beelzebub's FIRST law of the Universe is, of course, the law of the triad, "Trimonia". Gurdjieff would not have been the genius he was, if he would have ignored that one. But the second law, Eftologodiksis, is what it's all about, the curvature of the space in which we live, and the resulting birth of the octave and the lambdoma, where Gurdjieff and Pythagoras are joining themselves in the infinity of Meme-space. It consoles me somehow that Beelzebub pulled out another law, the ‘Accumulation of Similarities’, in order to justify the jump from a curved line joining in itself in infinity to the phenomenon of the Octave. Sometimes I wish that Anton Walter Smetak [link] were still alive as he jungled with the lambdoma like noone else since Pythagoras&friends. But hope is on the way: I'm working hard on convincing Mark II (what a prodigenous name!!!) to do a retranslation of Gurdjieff's chapter 39 of his 'Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson'. And, who knows, a congenial mind like his, may very well uncover the mechanics of the ruminations of Gurdjieff&Beelzebub. Let's hope he doesn't twist his brain to pieces while attempting this gigantic task. Meanwhile, let's sit back and watch the drift... or, perhaps, if I weren't that lazy, I should really start an expedition to find that ONE spot on Earth that cannot be touched by a tangent of REAL Earth, the plane that is, you know what I mean. Which may very well make Hilbert forgiving me for peeing on his grave. After all, it would prove Riemann wrong. What else could a mathematician hope for other than disproving another one of his own kind? |