Dangerous Knowledge

I watched Dangerous Knowledge last night, an absolutely brilliant documentary on an increasingly good BBC Four. it's bound to be be repeated at least 20 times so keep your eyes peeled. It's planning porn and certainly stirs up a bit of quant v qual, positivist v naturalist debate.

Presenter David Malone took us on an insightful journey into the lives of four genius mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. All of them managed to create a storm up back in the day by questioning whether or not there are somethings in the world mathematics cannot know and that there will always be problems outside of human logic. Some of their personal battles with unexplainable entities such as homosexuality, religion and social oppression arguably forced them to question their own beliefs and the concept of certainty.

Tragically these guys went insane and eventually killed themselves in their quest to prove a number of theories such as infinity. Essentially they were trying to use mathematics to prove the limitations of mathematics, logic to prove logic is illogical and when they continuously looked for certainty all they found was uncertainty. All sounds enough to screw any one's head up.