Abstract
Nearly four centuries after our first memorable dialogue, I think it is high time to meet again and debate the new problems which have arisen over such a long time. If I remember rightly, at the end of the fourth day last time, we promised that one day we would resume our discussion.
A number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.
There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses; it can move in all directions, and put on all the guises of truth. The truth, by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.
The man without qualities, Robert Musil
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Notes
- 1.
L. T. Clay, businessman from Boston, in 1998 founded the Clay Mathematical Institute (CMI). In 2000, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the famous Paris conference in which D. Hilbert formulated 23 important problems in mathematics (almost all resolved today), the CMI announced seven awards (a million dollars each) for seven different issues, one of which is the proof of existence, uniqueness and regularity of the solution of Navier-Stokes equations in three dimensions. See Notices of the AMS, May 2000, p. 877.
- 2.
Eliminate hindrances.
- 3.
See the book of Campbell and Garnett (1882).
- 4.
The sleep of reason produces monsters.
- 5.
The quote that Sagredo has in mind is: Many phenomena of common experience, in themselves trivial (often to the point that they escape attention altogether!)—for example, the cracks in an old wall, the shape of a cloud, the path of a falling leaf, or the froth on a pint of beer—are very difficult to formalise, but is it not possible that a mathematical theory launched for such homely phenomena might, in the end, be more profitable for science?Thom (1993).
- 6.
It seems that he was actually ashamed of his humble origins.
- 7.
For a short discussion on the theory of turbulence see Cencini et al. (2009).
- 8.
See Chap. 6 for a short discussion of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox.
- 9.
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Chibbaro, S., Rondoni, L., Vulpiani, A. (2014). A Galilean Dialogue on the Levels of Reality. In: Reductionism, Emergence and Levels of Reality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06361-4_1
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