Transcript

The course comes to a close this week on a more philosophical note. What is scientific knowledge? Can we ever know for sure whether we have found the real explanations for how the universe works? Can mathematics lead us to the truth? We end with the rather remarkable mathematical discovery that mathematics itself has unknowns. An Austrian logician, Kurt Gödel, proved that there are truths about numbers that we will never prove are true within mathematics. Called ‘Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem’, this theorem proves that the unknown is an integral part of mathematics – the ultimate subject of truth and knowledge.