From Crispin Rope
In referring to Stephen Hawking’s view that physics, like mathematics, may contain true but unprovable statements, Michael Brooks writes that this is something “we might have seen coming for decades” (5 April, p 34). Perhaps this is a point on which philosophers were ahead of physicists.
In Unended Quest (1976), Karl Popper wrote: “The evolution of physics is likely to be an endless process of correction and better approximation. And even if one day we should reach a stage where our theories were no longer open to correction, since they were simply true, they would still not be complete – and we would know it. For Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorem would come into play: in view of the mathematical background of physics, at best an infinite sequence of such true theories would be needed in order to answer the problems which in any given (formalized) theory would be undecidable. Such considerations do not prove that the objective physical world is incomplete, or undermined: they only show the essential incompleteness of our efforts.”
Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK
