What is a Theory?

I can assure you, for all intents and purposes, Hawking is a mathematician. To suggest that he doesn't understand set theory is simply laughable. He is a theoretical/mathematical physcist - definitely more physicist than mathematician if we are comparing to the likes of the real mathematical physicist heavy-weights like Atiyah, Segal, Witten, etc, and of course Penrose, which is why he will deny being a mathematician as he frequents their company BUT as far as you are concerned, he is a mathematician. The 'cosmology' we study is not built upon stars and galaxies, but on algebraic topology, differential geometry, and related fields. I'm sure you will appreciate the "connection" with set theory

As Rrhain has pointed out, this was based on analagous thinking to Godel, but was actually based on Hawking's ideas around information loss. He finally changed his mind (long after the rest of us did!) on this in 2005 so his comments from 2002 regarding a potential Thoery of Everything are now obsolete...Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

so perhaps you'll explain to me how I, a physicist by your definition, was teaching set theory on the Tripos? Beyond a certain level, Rrhain, the distinctions blur. Perhaps you have yet to reach those levels to realise that. we're not talking about undergraduate courses, Rrhain. But even so, I have taught those tensor classes to mathematicians. And I agree there is a world of difference between a physics tensor course and a mathematics tensor course. Which is why Hawking and I are(were) in the maths department and not the physics department... and in the main, the Relativity Group takes its members directly from the Maths Tripos. Yes, and guess where most of them are... Perhaps if you move forward in the field, you'll realise your error By degree, my peers were a mix of mathematics, physics, and astrophysics. Two years afterwards, you would have a very hard time telling them apart. Several year later, you would not be able to tell them apart. So Atiyah and Witten are physicists? are you going to tell them to give back their Fields medals? You should spend some time at John Baez's This Week's Finds In Mathematical Physics - you may learn something about the underpinnings of set theory, as John is a Category Theory nut. Or is category theory *too* fundamental for mathematics, and should be considered physics again? And when we start looking at different topoi, I guess we're just performing experimental physics ROTFLMAO Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

Yep, that was Rrhain's point - it is a very precise value to give as an answer to the question, "what is Pi?", but it is not at all accurate.