An abstract from the Goddard Space Colloquia some may want to seek out.

Presenter(s)
Chaitin, Gregory
Presentation Date
2002-02-01
Series
Scientific Colloquium: 2002
Call Number
2002-0201 (SCI)
Physical Format
Videocassette

Abstract
I'll discuss how Gödel's paradox "This statement is false/unprovable" yields his famous result on the limits of axiomatic reasoning. I'll contrast that with my work, which is based on the paradox of "The first uninteresting positive whole-number", which is itself a rather interesting number, since it is precisely the first uninteresting number. This leads to my first result on the limits of axiomatic reasoning, namely that most numbers are uninteresting or random, but we can never be sure, we can never prove it, in individual cases. And these ideas culminate in my discovery that some mathematical facts are true for no reason, they are true by accident, or at random. In other words, God not only plays dice in physics, but even in pure mathematics, in logic, in the world of pure reason. Sometimes mathematical truth is completely random and has no structure or pattern that we will ever be able to understand. It is NOT the case that simple clear questions have simple clear answers, not even in the world of pure ideas, and much less so in the messy real world of everyday life.