Dangerous Knowledge Page #7

---

A man called, Mittag-Leffler.

And the letter is ecstatic.

He says:
i've done it!

I've proved the Continuum

Hypothesis. It's true.

And he promises that he'll send

the proof in the following weeks.

But the proof never comes.

Instead, three months later,

a second letter arrives.

And in this one, you can

feel Cantor's embarrassment.

He says:
i'm sorry i should never

have claimed that i proved it.

And he says:
my beautiful

proof lies all in ruins.

And you can see the wreckage

of his work, in the letter.

But then, three weeks after that,

this letter arrives:

and in it he says:

i've proved that the Continuum

Hypothesis is not true.

And this pattern continues.

He proves that it is true...

and then he's convinced

that it's not true.

Back and forth.

And in fact,

what Cantor is doing...

is driving himself slowly insane.

One of the things that will happen

especially in the early stages and,

the stages just before

a schizophrenic break,

but also in the early stages,

will be that the patient is...

in a way,

looking too hard at the world

and too concentrated away.

As a kind of rigidity of

the perceptual stance.

When he could not solve

the Continuum Hypothesis,

Cantor came to describe

the infinite, as an abyss.

A chasm perhaps,

between what he had seen...

and what he knew must be there,

but could never reach.

What can happen, is that

some object in the world that...

that the rest of us would just...

consider just a sort of

random thing there,

seem somehow symbolic in some way.

There's a way in which in

order to understand something

you have to look very hard at it.

But you also have to be able to

sort of move away from it

and kind of see it

in a kind of context.

And the person who stares too hard

can often lose that sense of context.

Cantor never fully recovered.

For the rest of his life...

he would be drawn back to work

on the problem he could not solve.

And each time,

it would hurt him, profoundly.

In 1899, Cantor had

returned once again

to work on the

Continuum Hypothesys.

And again it made him ill

and he returned to the asylum.

He was just recovering

from this breakdown,

when his son Rudolf died, suddenly.

Four days short of

his thirteenth birthday.

Cantor wrote to a friend,

saying how his son had

had a great musical talent,

just as he had had

when he was a boy.

But he had set music aside,

in order to go into mathematics.

And now with the death

of his son,

he felt that, his own dream

of musical fulfillment

had died with him.

Cantor went on to say,

that he could no longer even

remember why he himself...

had left music,

in order to go into maths.

That secret voice, which had once

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes