194 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
write down the rules and then play the ‘game of mathematics’ to derive every possible truth. Hilbert despised the idea that there could be unknowable things and was a forthright speaker. His battle cry was: Wir miissen wissen — wir werden wissen! “We must know — we will know!” He believed there were no fundamental unknowns in the world.
Donald Rumsfeld famously summed up the problem of unknowns in an attempt to clarify a question from a journalist at a Whitehouse
press conference:
“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
Interestingly Donald Rumsfeld, like Bertrand Russell, is another person to span a huge swath of time in the public eye. He was both the youngest and the oldest serving U.S. Secretary of Defense, serving under both Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. We will shortly discover Rumsfeld’s convoluted view of the world turns out to be closer to the truth than Hilbert’s tidy mathematical aspiration.
As well as believing there were no unknowable unknowns Hilbert thought mathematics was completely abstract. You did not need to know what you were talking about. Whether the symbols meant dogs, cats or numbers all you needed to do was apply the rules and all would be well. His belief is captured in his quote below.
“Tt must be possible to replace in all geometric statements the words point, line, plane by table, chair, beer mug” David Hilbert
Geometry with Beer and Furniture
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