woit氏のブログ.2025.6.27

The situation in fundamental physics

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・lnthga

> For an example of epistemic collapse
in math (or non-collapse, which would
be equally interesting),
one might look at the ABC Conjecture
broo-ha-ha.

Of course, this comment is just my way of trying to manipulate you into writing more on that…


・P.Woit
>lnthga
I guess I’ll take the bait…

The IUT story is one of the math community resisting epistemic collapse,
so far successfully.
By the usual community standards
Mochizuki doesn’t have a proof (he can’t
convince most other experts in the field
that it’s a valid proof). He and Fesenko
have created an “epistemic fracture”,
but it’s a small one: for a small group of
people around them it’s a proof,
but not for the great bulk of the math
community.
Math may in the end be the
subject that most successfully resists
epistemic collapse, since it is so
strongly devoted to careful understanding of exactly what in the mathematics world
is true, what is not true, and what we don’t yet know
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=14999#comments