Bruce, Thank you for clarifying further. If you ever have the opportunity, I think you'd be deeply interested particularly in the second chapter, "Truth Mining," in the science-fiction novel /Diaspora/ by Greg Egan. Since your ideas seem similarly attracted, perhaps you've already read it. Indeed, it's highly sympathetic to our concern with knowledge dynamics.
An excerpt: "If ve ever wanted to be a miner in vis own right—making and testing vis own conjectures at the coal face, like Gauss and Euler, Riemann and Levi-Civita, deRham and Cartan, Radiya and Blanca—then Yatima knew there were no shortcuts, no alternatives to exploring the Mines firsthand. Ve couldn't hope to strike out in a fresh direction, a route no one had ever chosen before, without a new take on the old results. Only once ve'd constructed vis own map of the Mines—idiosyncratically crumpled and stained, adorned and annotated like no one else's—could ve begin to guess where the next rich vein of undiscovered truths lay buried." ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
