Posted on 04/13/2017 8:32:13 AM PDT by BenLurkin
The original "Star Trek" series isn't just a milestone of science fiction, it's also a treasure trove of mathematical ideas — as Space.com discovered when we attended "Star Trek: The Math of Khan" at the Museum of Mathematics on Thursday (April 6).
...
Captain Kirk talks computers to death no fewer than four separate occasions in the original series. The captain often achieves this feat using sentences similar to the "Liar's Paradox": "This sentence is false." It's a paradox because if the sentence is false, then the sentence is stating the truth, even though it is supposed to be false; if the sentence is true, then it must be true that the sentence is false.
A similar statement powers mathematician Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, which in effect proves there's a similarly paradoxical statement like "This statement is not provable" in any given mathematical system, Grime said. If the statement is true, it means there are true mathematical statements that can never be proved, like "holes" in mathematics. If the statement is false, it’s a contradiction, and that means there are contradictions within a mathematical system — so any system without any contradictions will also have statements that are impossible to prove. So something very much like Kirk's computer-busting paradox is something that appears in real mathematics.
...Alan Turing set out to find out whether it's possible to determine whether any given computer program will be able to solve a problem and halt or get stuck working on the problem forever. Ultimately, he proved that you cannot write another program to predict whether a program will finish or not — a result that suggests that you can't definitively determine whether a statement will ever be possible to prove, Grime said.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
“likeliest” isn’t necessarily a percentage parameter.
It is quite acceptable to be an assessment of absolute numbers.
What did viewer observe without knowing the total population of a group?
IIRC, except for Charlie X, most Enterprise (A) crew fatalities occurred planetside, so the better calculation might be red shirt fatalities among landing parties, rather than ship’s complement.
Meh. My favorites were when some hot alien babe asked Kirk, “What is love”, and in the next scene he’s sitting on the edge of a bed putting his boots on.
‘course, I was 14 at the time...
That’s why Guy had a better chance of surviving if he stayed on board the Galaxy Quest, though it still worked out ok for him.
FWIW, I thought Kirk’s logic in defeating Landru was pretty weak; M5 was the better take-down.
Nomad was somewhere in between.
“Don’t open that!! It’s an alien planet!!
Is there air?? You don’t know!” - Guy
“Meh. My favorites were when some hot alien babe asked Kirk, “What is love”, and in the next scene he’s sitting on the edge of a bed putting his boots on.”
Drea, “By Any Other Name”.
Drusilla was hotter.
Indeed. The term red-shirt in the context of likely to die meant an extra beaming down as a security guard at the beginning of an episode. It did not apply to eveeybody wearing a red shirt.
The green one was the best. :)
Vina
“Did you ever actually WATCH the show?!” - Guy
Must Sterilize!
Yup!
Yup!
"Your logic was impeccable, Captain. We are in grave danger."
There is no paradox. The statement is invalid and has no meaning, like 1/0. You can put the words together but they don’t signify any reality.
1/0 has no truth value. It is meaningless.
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