Russell first started, completely with a mentality of correcting students' homework, reading Chen Muwu's paper.

It's a bit familiar......

It's interesting here......

Well, it should be that he combined his previous questions and thoughts.

Yes, yes, the ability to draw inferences is very strong.

Then, the smile on Russell's face gradually faded, and his expression became more and more serious, and his attitude became more and more serious.

Because he saw a passage like this in the paper:

"It is well known that mathematics is moving in a more precise direction, and has led to the formalization of most branches of mathematics, so much so that it is possible to prove any theorem with only a few mechanical rules.

Thus, one might guess that the rules of these axioms and reasoning are sufficient to determine any mathematical problem that these formal systems are capable of expressing.

"This is not the case below."

Chen Muwu spontaneously did after-class exercises, which is commendable.

But if you do the question, why should you change the content of the textbook?

The point is, there is something really wrong with the content in the textbook.

This is equivalent to Chen Muwu using only one paper to overturn all the efforts that mathematicians have been trying to make since the beginning of the century.

Russell remembered himself when he was young, he was only in his early thirties at the time, and the Russell paradox proposed by him also shocked and panicked mathematicians around the world for a long time.

It seems that it was only a few years ago that a solution to this problem was finally proposed.

It's just that compared with the Russell paradox at the beginning, Chen Muwu's flower work this time is a little heavier.

If Russell's paradox is spoken, it is equivalent to tearing down a load-bearing wall of the mathematical edifice.

Then the incompleteness theorem proposed by Chen Muwu is like using enough explosives to directly blow up the foundation of the building that mathematicians all over the world are working so hard to build.

Russell happens to be one of them.

Is this person so ruthless as soon as he makes a move?

But Russell remembered something else.

It seems that Chen Muwu is not only a destroyer of mathematics, he has already put forward many shocking ideas in physics and astronomy, and even philosophy has not been spared.

The point is that after repeated verification, everyone found that these scientific views are still correct, not a dream, let alone nonsense.

The same is true of the incompleteness theorem this time.

Because Chen Muwu had been asking him about this issue before, Russell had only read the paper from beginning to end and was able to judge that everything written in this paper was correct.

But this is a new view that is very different from the current mainstream view, and to be on the safe side, Russell not only checked the calculations himself, but even called Ramsey from King's College.

He asked Ramsey to see if there were any errors in the mathematics and logic used in the paper that he had not yet discovered.

"Professor Russell, is this paper really written by Dr. Chen from Trinity College?"

The look on Ramsey's face was both shocked and skeptical, and so was his heart.

As a member of the Cambridge Apostolic Society, Ramsey witnessed the whole process of Chen Muwu's sudden interest in mathematics and logic from a member of the society who had been inconspicuous until this year.

At club meetings, he often talked about the plan of the German mathematician Hilbert.

Ramsey thought at the time that Chen Muwu must have been very interested in the project's desire to standardize mathematics.

It seems that physicists are doing the same thing, isn't Einstein, who proposed the theory of relativity, also trying to unify all the laws of physics with the two fundamental interacting forces of gravity and electromagnetism?

This made Ramsey think that Chen Muwu was going to do the same work as Einstein, but before that, he wanted to find inspiration in mathematics.

As a result, he saw a copy of the paper that Russell had given him.

Where is this looking for inspiration, it's clear that it's here to smash the field!

But the key is that his smashing is justified and cannot be refuted.

"Professor Russell, maybe it's because of my limited level, but I really didn't find anything wrong in this paper."

"I think so, too."

"So...... Does Dr. Chen's paper directly reject the grand plan proposed by Professor Hilbert? ”

"Although I am very reluctant to admit it, I have to say that it is true."

After confirming that the content of the paper was correct, Russell first picked up the pen and wrote a reply letter to the editorial office of the Bulletin of the Natural Science Society.

He said above that the content of the paper that the editorial department asked for review was all correct, and there was no need to revise anything, and it could be published in full.

After his official business, Russell wrote a letter in German to Professor Hilbert in Germany.

It begins with a brief greeting, then begins to introduce him to the core ideas of Chen Muwu's paper, and regrettably informs Hilbert that the Hilbert Project, which he began with 23 questions in 1900 and was formally prepared in 1922, was about to be declared a failure after the publication of Chen Muwu's paper.

After writing these two letters, Russell felt both relieved and lost.

Easily, he completed the task handed over by the editorial department, and Chen Muwu did not overturn his own views.

The sad thing is that this is, after all, a major failure in the mathematical community.

Although it has not reached the level of the third mathematical crisis caused by the paradox before, it is only much more destructive than Russell's paradox.

I don't know what kind of thoughts Professor Hilbert will have when he receives the letter and sees the official version of the paper, and whether he will be able to withstand such a blow in his spirit in his old age.

Russell suddenly wanted to talk to Chen Muwu again, because he had already realized that mathematics could not be perfect, so he came to ask him about those questions?

He first went to Chen Muwu's room, which was also at Trinity College, but was told that Dr. Chen had left the college early in the morning and went to Cavendish Laboratory.

But when Russell went to Cavendish Laboratory, he inquired around and found that no one could tell clearly where Chen Muwu, who was not in the laboratory, had gone.

Even Rutherford, the director of the laboratory, was a little vague, and he called his assistant Chadwick in front of Russell.

The latter only said very vaguely, and Dr. Chen left in a hurry after receiving a telegram, and no one could tell where he had gone.

Rutherford and Chadwick talked about him because they didn't want to tell Russell that Chen Muwu had gone to the place where the particle accelerator was developed.

The two of them wished that Russell would stop pestering and leave quickly, so that no one asked what Russell's purpose was when he came to find Chen Muwu this time.

Most of the people in Cavendis's lab are like this, because everyone knows that Chen Muwu was very close to Russell during this time, and he started mathematics without doing his job.

There was only one person in the entire lab who had a keen sense and sensed that something was out of the ordinary.

It is true that Chen Muwu and Russell are very close, but every time they say that the former goes to the latter's office to ask questions.

Only this time, Russell looked for Chen Muwu and actually found Cavendish in the laboratory for the first time.

There must be something else behind this.

"Hello Professor Russell, I'm the Guardian Manchester Guardian's Resident Science and Technology Reporter, Crowther. May I ask if you came to Cavendish Laboratory to find Chen Muwu this time, is there something wrong? ”

Russell Xin said that he really deserves to be a journalist, and his sense of smell is very sensitive.

Even if he doesn't say it today, it won't be a few days before the paper is published in the Natural Science Bulletin, and the whole of Britain and even the whole world will know about it.

"I did come to Dr. Chen. He made an interesting discovery in a paper that I thought I would come and talk to. ”

"What is the paper? Math? What is his discovery, can you briefly talk about it? ”

Russell readily agreed to this request, followed Crowther into the conference room of the Cavendish laboratory, and briefly talked about Chen Muwu's "small" discovery.

After a long time, Crowther, who had bid farewell to Russell, looked at the notes in his notebook and felt that Dr. Chen's "small" discovery was inevitably a little too big.

It's big, but it's a little hard to report.

It may be because mathematics is too high and low, and mathematicians think very highly of themselves, and since a long time, mathematics has always been less popular than physics.

In addition, the two industrial revolutions that promoted social progress were based on the knowledge of physical theories, so the physicists in the newspapers were more famous than mathematicians.

In the nineteenth century, the media celebrity of physics had Faraday.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was another top 1 in the world, Albert Einstein.

The theory of relativity was undoubtedly one of the most top-notch physics disciplines in the media at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Quantum mechanics can't beat it, and neither can low-temperature physics, which mobilized the enthusiasm of the people in Britain some time ago.

Although Chen Muwu has always been in British newspapers because of physics, astronomy, and last year's hottest low-temperature physics, and was even crowned "smarter than Einstein" by reporters with ulterior motives.

But if you were to ask random passers-by on the streets of Britain who the smartest person in the world was, at least half of them would give Einstein's answer.

Of course, the answer given by the remaining half was not Chen Muwu, but Newton.

"Dr. Chan of the University of Cambridge Proves Hilbert Wrong".

Writing the title on a piece of paper, and after a little thought, Crowther drew another horizontal line on it.

He felt that not many British newspaper readers should know that there was a mathematician named Hilbert in Germany, even though he was now the leading figure in mathematics in the world.

"Dr. Chen Overthrows the Mathematical Edifice" and "Dr. Chen Reconstructs the Foundation of Mathematics......

These topics are too big, and it is easy for Chen Muwu to be used as a target for criticism.

And for ordinary people who can't even multiply, no one cares whether the mathematical foundation is subverted, as long as one plus one is still equal to two, and one pound can still be exchanged for two hundred and forty pence, then their daily life will not be affected.

Both Trinity College graduates and Cavendish labs were together, and Crowthor didn't want to push his friend to the forefront.

It struck him to think of how the British media had reported on the progress made by the Royal Institute in low-temperature physics last year.

"Under Russell's guidance, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge shattered the unrealistic mathematical dreams of the Germans".

Downplaying his achievements in mathematics, highlighting two British elements, Russell and Cambridge, and then pointing the finger at Hilbert's German identity.

Crowther felt that he had chosen a good headline, which would certainly help the Manchester Guardian sell well.

Just as he thought, the newspaper that published this news report was not only the first to publish it than the "Bulletin of the Natural Science Society" that carried Chen Muwu's papers, but it was also quickly reprinted by other newspapers.

For those who don't know math, Britain once again won over Germany.

But for those who understand mathematics, everyone is looking forward to the publication of the latest issue of the newspaper.

Crowther's report stunned Chen Muwu's paper to receive the same treatment as well-known writers.

Before the book came out, the preview information in the newspaper was already eagerly awaited.

News travels even faster than international letters can be delivered in Europe.

Before Hilbert received Russell's letter to him, a reprint of Crowther's report appeared in German newspapers.

Of course, the title was changed to a more normal one, and the Germans, although rigorous, were not so rigorous as to follow the British in belittling Germany.

In Berlin, Einstein saw the news in the Berliner Zeitung.

Whether it is Chen Muwu or Hilbert, these two are his old acquaintances.

The former, in his eyes, is a student who has gone astray.

And the latter, in his eyes, is an enemy who has been reconciled.

Einstein originally respected Hilbert, a German scientific ancestor, until the summer of 1915, a few months before he proposed the general theory of relativity.

From June 28 to July 5, Einstein was invited by Hilbert to visit the University of Göttingen for a week, during which he gave six presentations on his work on the general theory of relativity.

Then Hilbert's interest was drawn to the general theory of relativity by Einstein's report.

At that time, Einstein's research on the general theory of relativity was in the final stages, and there was only one goal left, which was to give a concrete form of the gravitational field equation mathematically.

Albert Einstein had mathematized abstract physical concepts, and Hilbert was just a mathematician, and almost one after the other, announced that they were the first to write field equations.

Albert Einstein gave a presentation at the Prussian Academy of Sciences on November 25 of that year, and presented his paper on the same day, which was published a week later on December 2.

But Hilbert's presentation was at the University of Göttingen on November 20, saying that Hilbert was five days ahead of Einstein in terms of the date of the report.

But his paper was published six months later, on March 31, 1916, nearly four months after Einstein.

Both men claimed to have been the first to discover the general theory of relativity and have been arguing about it ever since.

It wasn't until a long time later that Hilbert relented and admitted that Einstein was the discoverer of the general theory of relativity.

So Einstein also wrote to Hilbert, hoping to shake hands with him.

These two people are reconciled on the surface, but no one can say whether they have really let go of their hearts.

After Hilbert reconciled, he once said something very arrogant: "Every child on the streets of Göttingen understands four-dimensional geometry better than Einstein." But despite this, Einstein did it (general relativity), while mathematicians did not. ”

Seeing in the newspaper that Chen Muwu actually defeated the invincible Hilbert in mathematics, Einstein's beard unconsciously rose a little higher, and his face was full of smiles.

This Chinese lad is still inherently good, and it would be better if he could give up those unrealistically naïve ideas about quantum mechanics.

(End of chapter)