Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
cause it is based on a fantastic mathematical error” and then he sat down. The
conference was on agriculture in the developing countries. Most of the agronomists
and economists there knew nothing of mathematics. The only one there who knew
mathematics was his assistant and this man, who was there to report on some-
one else's paper, stood silently on the platform behind him during our exchange of
views. Before I got home I received a letter from the secretary of the Congress in
which he said “Here is a copy of a letter from Professor Potemkin - Dear Mr X,
having arrived home and read Professor Georgescu's paper, I now realise that he
was right and I was wrong, and as wrong opinions should not be put down in black
and white I would like to withdraw my comments from the proceedings”. And I
had to approve this because otherwise the secretary could not accept it. What do
you think I did? I let him take it out. What I would have done is this, see. I would
have met you, I would have talked about the problem. I would have known I would
be presenting your work to two hundred people so I wouldn't simply have stood up
and said “Nicholas, I think you are wrong”.
Antonio Valero: Do you think that humanity's great theories and discoveries are
the results of individual geniuses or of the collective mind?
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: People don't produce innovation and invention.
The Community does. The Community is like a balloon, and when it's about to
burst along comes somebody like Newton. If Newton hadn't existed somebody else
would have come along because the idea came to Newton's mind as if he were some
kind of interpreter. Someone asked the question - what would have happened if
Newton, instead of having the mind of Newton, had had the mind of Kepler? And
if Kepler had had the mind of Newton? I wrote a paper on this subject. Were they
unique minds? The best argument against this idea is that there aren't you can't
talk so much of “people” as of “discoveries”. Many discoveries have been made at the
same time and I asked why it should be that this is so. Because some are like the
answers to mathematical questions. The professor sets a mathematical problem,
say - find the solution to this differential equation. Naturally, if the problem is set
and it is a problem that preoccupies society, then many people will try to solve it
and there would be at that time, or maybe within periods of fifty or a hundred
years, the same discoveries made. Well, I would say that, in that case, how should
we see the Law of Gravity? You can look at it as a kind of power that emerges
in a uniform manner in the whole of space, the further away from a body you are,
the less force there is. Nowadays we see that this led Newton to what we consider
his great discovery - gravity. I have given other interpretations in the past, and for
other things such as optics, etc. I put it forward as an example of the kind of theory
I have about cosmology. If two things are quantitatively measurable and directly
connected, the relations between them are linear. There are only a few cases in
which linearity works in this way, giving a kind of qualitative residue. If you're an
Search WWH ::
Custom Search