<nettime> a reductionist manifesto

[Tjebbe van Tijen <tijen@inter.nl.net>]

This openening statement dropped in my Emailbox this week ...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Nils Roeller*

Goedel - a nomadic case study

Napoleon realized the strategic importance of officers skilled in
mathematics and so he was eager to found the Ecole Polytechnique. Hitler
was different. He concentrated on a stupid, cold and bloody Lebensraum
instead of recognising that, in the small town of Goettingen, German
mathematicians had already been successful in opening spaces that were
waiting to be inhabited, like the flexible Riemann-space and the
friendly Hilbert-space. Not seeing the opportinities that mathematics
offered was one reason for losing the war.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Directly after reading I climbed my bookshelves to find anything confirming
this bold statement. Now a funny thing happened: a rather yellowish piece
of folded paper dropped from the inside of one of these fat Goedel
paperbacks and it reads as follow:

"a reductionist manifesto

our aim is to reduce all reality to one,
basic meme,
explaining it all

our enemy is complexity
that makes one doubt

we do not want to doubt
we want to make sure:
that shortsight becomes insight
backslight changes in foresight
hindmost in utmost

one bright idea is enough
to chase the planets from their orbits
so lets not waste time anymore
and impose out theories"


I thought it would be nice and wise to share this serendipic moment with
other nettimers




Tjebbe van Tijen
Imaginary Museum Projects, Amsterdam
tijen@inter.nl.net


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