Dangerous Knowledge Page #4

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and he returned to the asylum.

He was just recovering

from this breakdown,

when his son Rudolf died, suddenly.

Four days short of

his thirteenth birthday.

Cantor wrote to a friend,

saying how his son had

had a great musical talent,

just as he had had

when he was a boy.

But he had set music aside,

in order to go into mathematics.

And now with the death

of his son,

he felt that, his own dream

of musical fulfillment

had died with him.

Cantor went on to say,

that he could no longer even

remember why he himself...

had left music,

in order to go into maths.

That secret voice, which had once

called him on to mathematics,

and given meaning

to his life and work,

the voice he identified with God...

That voice too, had left him.

Here we have to leave Georg Cantor,

because if we treat

Cantor's story in isolation,

it makes it into a tragic

but obscure footnote,

to the broader sweep of history.

Where as in fact, the fear that

Cantor had dislodged something,

was part of a much broader feeling,

that things once felt to

be solid, were slipping.

A feeling seen more clearly in the

story of his great contemporary:

a man called, Ludwig Boltzmann.

Just as Cantor had revolutionary

ideas in mathematics and was opposed,

so Boltzmann, his contemporary,

had revolutionary ideas in physics,

and was equally opposed.

This is Ludwig Boltzmann's grave.

And that...carved on it,

is the equation which killed him.

And it did so, because like Cantor...

Boltzmann's ideas were out

of step with his times.

Cantor had undermined the ideal of a

timeless and perfect logic in maths.

Boltzmann's formula and

his destiny...

was to undermine the ideal

of a timeless order in physics.

Together, their ideas were part of

a general undermining of certainty,

in the wider world

outside of maths and physics.

Boltzmann's and Cantor's times

craved certainty,

in politics, in art, as well as

in science and philosophy.

They were times that looked on

the surface, solid and certain...

but felt themselves to be

teetering and sliding.

The old order was dying.

And it was as if they could already

feel disaster's gravitational pull.

In Vienna,

which was called by Karl Kraus:

"Laboratory for Apocalypse",

there was this feeling that...

this political construct

of the Habsburg Empire

couldn't last for much longer.

They were very strange times.

On the one hand,

those in power spent 20 years

building the monuments

of imperial Vienna,

to declare that this order, firm on

it's foundations, would last forever!

The rich man would

always be in his castle;

the poor man always at his gate.

But on the other hand, the empire

was actually on it's last legs.

And the intellectual

tenor of the times,

was summed up by

the poet, Hofmannsthal...

who said that, what previous

generations believed to be firm,

was in fact, what he called:

"das Gleitende".

The slipping, or sliding away

of the world.

I thing that describes

the feeling in Vienna.

In other places too,

but particularly in Vienna in

this capital of an empire that...

hadn't crumbled yet but,

it looked like...set to break down.

This characterizes it very well.

And it was against this background,

that the scientific questions of

Boltzmann's times were understood.

This is the Great Courtyard

of the Univerity of Vienna...

and these are the busts

of all of the greats who

have ever thaugt here.

Boltzmann's is here too.

But many of his contemporaries,

men, more influential in their

day even than he was,

lined up to oppose

him and his ideas.

But their opposition was as much

ideological, as it was scientific.

The physics of Boltzmann's time,

were still the physics of certainty.

Of an ordered universe,

determined from above,

by predictable and timeless

God-given laws.

Boltzmann suggested,

that the order of the world was

not imposed from above by God,

but emerged from below.

From the random bumping of atoms.

A radical idea,

at odds with his times,

but the foundation of ours.

Professor Mussardo, lives and works

in Trieste, on the Adriatic Coast.

Not far from where

Boltzmann's live ended.

He is an expert on Boltzmann, and

works on the same kind of physics.

I think that there were two

reasons why he could not...

get fully accepted and recognized

by the German physicists.

One of them was,

that he based all his theories on

atoms, that people can't see.

And this was the reason of the very,

very strong criticism by Ernst Mach.

One of the most influential...

Philosophers of Science

at that time.

So the criticism of Mach

was simply:

i can't see an atom...

I don't need them,

they don't exist.

So why should we bring

them in the game?

Worse than insisting on the reality

of something people could not see,

to base physics on atoms,

meant to base it on things who's

behaviour was to complex to predict.

Which meant an entirely

new kind of physics.

One based on probabilities,

not certainties.

But then there was a second aspect;

it was revolutionary as well.

And this consists in...

putting forth and emphasizing

the role of probability,

in the physics world.

And people were used to the laws of

physics and science as being exact.

Once established,

they stay there forever.

There is no room for uncertainty.

So, introducing into the game,

two ingredients like invisible

atoms and probabilities,

means there is no certainty.

You can predict what is probably

going on, but not certainly.

Well, this really contrasted

very, very much with the...

the scientific spirit of the time,

and therefore this produced trouble.

Boltzmann's genius, was that

he could accept probability.

This meant he could begin to

understand complex phenomenon,

like fire and water and life.

Things which traditional physics;

the physics of mechanics,

never could.

But because his solution

relied on probability,

and probability

undermines certainty,

no one wanted to hear him.

And so just like Cantor,

he faced implacable opposition

which he too, found extremely

difficult to deal with.

It seems like Boltzmann was just

the wrong man in the wrong place.

Absolutely...absolutely.

Absolutely, it's true.

It's true.

He could just had his idea

twenty years later...

And in England he would have been

the most succesful physicist

of that time, it's true.

Somehow he met all his enemies.

So he met Ernst Mach, often.

Their careers even crossed,

in a very...in a very...

He meets all his enemies

but none of his friends.

Not his friends, it's true.

It is not hard to see

how Boltzmann's ideas

where so radically at

odds with his times.

Especially when applied not just

to physics but to the social world.

Classical science, classical physics...

gives you this image of a

God-ordered creation.

Where everything is set in stone,

according to perfect

and eternal rules.

Everything is predictable.

Everything has it's place and

everything is in it's place.

But when you come here, to the

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