Immpossibility

Immpossibility . That is the book, i just finished reading. Its by John D. Barrow. Its about what is impossible. What is it that human mind cannot do? what is unknowable, undoable, etc ? lots of interesting things...

There are the usual mathematical problems..like the Towers of Hanoi (IT guys would know that). But what was interesting was the paradoxes..Zeno's paradoxes were particularly interesting..The best was Russle's paradox - consider a town where there is a sole barber - the barber shaves those who do not shave themselves....then, who shaves the barber ?

There is very detailed description of the developments in astromony, astrophysics, particle physics, and the limits that we encounter there.

Then, a lot about Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, which establish that you cannot prove everything about mathematics, using mathematics, or any system for that matter. It would be possible only for very simple systems, and mathematics is not one of them. This raises a serious issue – if mathematics has an inconsitency, then all our knowledge, which is based on mathematics would have inconsistencies. But, he gets around this by saying that mathematics is too big, and we use a very small part of it; so our knowledge need not be affected.

All in all, a good read. But, I must caution though, it would take a long time, not because of the number of pages, but because it’s a lot of gyan – pretty difficult to understand. I did not understand most of it, and even the little that I did understand, I am not sure if I got it right!