VIDEO-Dangerous Knowledge

Dangerous Knowledge is a BBC documentary about four mathematicians--Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing--who explored the infinite in mathematics. The result of their labors was insanity and suicide. Can infinity and uncertainty lead to madness?

I remember a story one of my college professors told me about when he was a salesman for Honeywell. He would give sales pitches for mechanical calculating machines, and he would allow the customers to try the machine. But he also had to be close to the plug in to the wall in case the customer did something not recommended for the device. You could never divide by zero. If you attempted the feat, the machine would begin whirring and never stop. He would yank the cord from the wall to stop the damn thing. Try this with modern calculators, and you will receive a simple error message.

The story of those mechanical calculators illustrates a similar phenomenon that happened inside the brains of these four brilliant men. Lesser mathematicians either ignored or shunned the avenues these men explored with a certain intuitive sense that it would yield them nothing. They were correct because the men who explored these avenues all went insane and killed themselves. Their brains worked feverishly in attempting to find proofs and certainty for the most certain of disciplines--mathematics. All four of them failed. And as one of them--Turing--showed to the world, the rest of us cannot escape it either.

The documentary begins with the story of Georg Cantor and gives the beginnings of the problems of infinity. The ideas will set your brain on fire, and you immediately understand why all four men would want to find a solution to the puzzle. But there is no solution. Some paradoxes simply are. If you have ever fucked with a Mobius strip, you can spend a lifetime trying to understand why it is what it is. But that is relatively a simple matter compared to what these men were attempting.

The fact is that the world is uncertain. As finite beings, the infinite escapes us. There are simply things we can never know. These men upset the world but not for the better. The world shunned them for it. And they destroyed themselves in trying to reconcile it all. They should have done like Galileo and let it go. But they couldn't.

I highly recommend this documentary. You can watch it here.

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