The book turned out slightly different than expected: From the title, I had assumed to find a list of things that "we can never know", and -- being a follower of Hilbert -- I was more than sceptical.
Instead, the author delivers what in another genre would have been a collection of anecdotes: more or less disjointed facts, all in some way connected to limitations of understanding. There are classic paradoxes, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, NP-hardness, and the halting problem. There are some metaphysical questions as well as the more counterintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics. In the end, all of this is stuff that an educated person should know about, there's very little that,'s truly unknowable: the paradoxes conjure up situations that are actually impossible; quantum mechanics is, for the most part, well understood (it just doesn't agree with common sense): and undecidability and infeasibility in computer science pertains to general …
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Physicist turned sysadmin, father, orienteer, Go player. kirjoittaessani.de Formal verification with SPARK.
Halber Ostfriese, aufgewachsen im Rheinland, wohnt jetzt ganz im Süden vom Norden
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Review of 'The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
The book turned out slightly different than expected: From the title, I had assumed to find a list of things that "we can never know", and -- being a follower of Hilbert -- I was more than sceptical.
Instead, the author delivers what in another genre would have been a collection of anecdotes: more or less disjointed facts, all in some way connected to limitations of understanding. There are classic paradoxes, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, NP-hardness, and the halting problem. There are some metaphysical questions as well as the more counterintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics. In the end, all of this is stuff that an educated person should know about, there's very little that,'s truly unknowable: the paradoxes conjure up situations that are actually impossible; quantum mechanics is, for the most part, well understood (it just doesn't agree with common sense): and undecidability and infeasibility in computer science pertains to general problems only -- deciding the halting problem for a given program can actually be quite doable. And even Gödel might be circumvented with extra axioms.
kirjoittaessani rated Der Spiegelplanet: 3 stars
kirjoittaessani rated La Fille du vent: 4 stars
kirjoittaessani rated La frontière de la vie: 4 stars
kirjoittaessani rated Yoko Tsuno, tome 4 : 4 stars
Yoko Tsuno, tome 4 by Roger Leloup (Yoko Tsuno (4))
kirjoittaessani rated La Forge de Vulcain: 4 stars
kirjoittaessani rated Das kleine Gespenst, kolorierte Ausgabe: 5 stars
kirjoittaessani rated L'orgue du diable: 4 stars
kirjoittaessani rated Robbi, Tobbi und das Fliewatüüt.: 4 stars
kirjoittaessani rated Das Silmarrion: 4 stars
Das Silmarrion by J.R.R. Tolkien
A number-one New York Times bestseller when it was originally published, The Silmarillion is the core of J.R.R. Tolkien's imaginative …
kirjoittaessani rated Erste Person Singular: 4 stars
Erste Person Singular by Haruki Murakami, Ursula Gräfe
Frauen, die verschwinden, eine fiktive Bossa-Nova-Platte von Charlie Parker, ein sprechender Affe und ein Mann, der sich fragt, wie er …