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I gave this classical reference
its own little category:references entry, for ease of cross-linking at related entries for Wigner and Galilei, and in order to record that famous quote more visibly than hidden behind a link to a pdf.
Have you (or anyone else) ever come across a transcript of the full speech (not the radio version) in English translation?
We must not believe those, who today with philosophical bearing and a tone of superiority prophesy the downfall of culture and accept the ignorabimus. For us there is no ignorabimus, and in my opinion even none whatever in natural science.
I’d be curious what or who he had in mind here. My immediate thought was that many intellectuals were still under the spell of Spengler and his predictions of eventual cultural demise.
David, do you have a link to a German transcript, if any? I haven’t seen that either.
Todd, as you point out, a reasonable guess as to someone he had in mind concerning prophecies about the downfall of culture would be Oswald Spengler and his The Decline of the West.
Interesting. I hadn’t realised that “Mathematics is the object of the first chapter of Spengler’s book”
Re 3, as far as I know (and according to Wikipedia), it refers to Emil du Bois-Reymond’s phrase ignoramus et ignorabimus. (Emil was an older brother of Paul du Bois-Reymond.)
@Urs
there seems to be this article by Hilbert with the same name, with gems such as
Drosophila ist eine kleine Fliege, aber groß ist unser Interesse für sie
!
Here is a differently-typeset free version
Urs, it seems that the lecture was published, is in his Collected works in German (pp. 378-387) and translated in W. Ewald, From Kant to Hilbert, 1996, pp. 1157-1165. The English title is ’Logic and the knowledge of nature’.
Aha, here is a Google Books preview (I can read all but three pages)
Ulrik, that’s very interesting; thanks! I also had no idea the du Bois-Reymonds were German.
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