On Sun, May 13, 2018 at 03:53:43PM -0400, John Clark wrote: > > And you already said, quite wisely, that if you had correctly used the ZFC > axioms to produce a proof the Goldbach Conjecture was true but then a > computer found a number that violated Goldbach you would place the blame on > the ZFC axioms and not on the laws of physics the computer operates under. > So like me you are saying it is physics and not axioms that is the ultimate > judge > that > decides what it true and what is not > > John K Clark
That is probably putting a little too much faith in computers, and the possibility of bug-free programs. There is a certain amount of scepticism of the proof of the 4 colour theorem, which is only available as an enormous computer generated proof. If the computer came up with a counter example to the Goldbach conjecture, and lots of mathematicians independently verified the result by hand, what you say would be correct, and people would look to find the error in th ZFC proof, or reject the ZFC axiom. On the other hand, since we probably require a computer to verify that a large even number is not the sum of two primes, suspicion might well settle on the computer program first. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
