Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Quote of the Week

Thanks to Gil Kalai for this week's quote. The great mathematician Atiyah, who was rumoured last week to have canceled his proposed talk entitled Quantum Gravity and the Riemann Hypothesis, gave instead a talk at IAS on Octonions and the four forces of Physics. Gil informs us that Atiyah concluded the talk with the line:
You can regard what I say as nonsense, or you can claim that you know it already, but you cannot make these two claims together.

2 comments:

  1. Great cite! I would like to see the talk, is it available? Atiyah is the only man in the world that comes near to understand how CP2 covers S4 (or is it the reverse? I do not claim to understand it) and this is probably the key to octonions in the standard model.

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  2. I am guessing it will appear on the IAS site soon. Hopefully.

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