Later I came across the work of the mathematician Kurt Goedel. Asked to examine mathematics and refine the principles on which it is based he determined that they could not be refined, that they are unprovable assumptions. And though mathematics follows logically from the underlying principles (and everything works nicely when you accept those principles as true), they cannot themselves be refined… unless you stand out of the system itself. You cannot use the tools of a system to refine the system whose tools you are using. And of course, at nearly the same time Werner Heisenberg determined that if an observer assumed electrons were waves they would act more and more like particles and that if they were assumed to be particles they would act more and more like waves.
The implications of Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle are routinely ignored in most of the sciences. Specifically: the assuptions (the mental perspectives) of the observer change what is being observed; scientific systems such as mathematics are based on unprovable, often unrefinable, assumptions.; and to understand the limits of a system and refine its underlying assumptions it is necessary to stand outside it, to literally be in a different system. But, since science is insisted to be – by scientists, Western culture, public school curricula, and so forth – the only accurate system through which to view the workings of the Universe, no other legitimate system exists in the Western world in which a person can stand to understand the limits and refine the underlying assumptions of science.
