No I think that’s it for me. TBH I thought I’d given all that up a few years ago. We had looked at buying a villa in Florida but that didn’t happen and I’ve ended up doing 2 hours in the last couple of years with the “villa money”. The first one wasn’t too bad but my age caught up with me on the second!
Hold up a second here... Scientists may work in theories (theory of evolution, the big bang theory, etc) for things that have not been proven (I'm more a mathematician than a scientist) but mathematicians work in proof for things that cannot be unproven/ disproven. If something has been proven by a mathematician with the correct level of rigour then it should not be capable of being disproven. I'd argue strongly that anything which can be disproven has never actually been proven in the first place. A theory yes, a proof nope. I often tell my students that mathematical proofs are pretty much the only things you will learn in your lifetime that are categorically correct, everything else requires a level of faith/belief even things which seem obvious like the existence of Spain or whatever.
Okay, but in that case maths is basically an infallible abstraction; as soon as you apply it to the physical universe, there’s probably a factor you haven’t quantified, in which case nothing quite fits. So everything that mathematics proves, is proved only in it’s own abstract (therefore theoretical) universe. Beyond that, nothing is proven that cannot be, if not disproved, at least disputed. Maybe.
Oh yeah there's tons of mathematics like that. Half the stuff Euclid "proved" turned out to only be correct in 2D planes (like a triangle having 180 degrees until you try and plot it on the globe and it's all curved) and even the things which are proven to be true are so convoluted in the proof (Bertrand Russell famously wrote thousands of pages proving that 1+1 does always equal 2) that people end up questioning why you cannot just accept obvious things in the first place that people shouldn't have to question. There's quite a split between those who think all mathematics should be based on the thinking of people like Russell and only things that are proven should be relied upon and those who (the majority) accept that it's a nice idea but slows development down so much that it's ok to just lay out your assumptions and then carry on into the discoveries based on belief.
I read Bertrand Russels theory, on 2d, and circular earth, but if you hit a horse in the correct spot, the curve of the earth will make it fall.
I used to think punching horses who kept telling me the earth wasn't flat was brave but now i know it's sphere. https://gifimage.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/buh-dum-tss-gif-10.gif
