51³Ô¹ÏÍø

Michael Gove speech to the Royal Society; Gove speech SOT - Newton, the greatest President this society has had - so far - was the godfather of the Enlightenment, mankind's great period of intellectual flowering, the liberation from ignorance on which our current freedoms rest. In the nineteenth century, the greatest mathematicians were Germans - like Karl Friedrich Gauss and Bernard Riemann - reflecting the shift of intellectual innovation, and economic power, to central Europe. In the twentieth century, the flight of mathematicians like Kurt Godel from a fascist Europe sunk in a new barbarism to a new world of liberty and promise again presaged a fundamental shift in economic, political and intellectual power. In the last few generations, it has been the breakthroughs of mathematicians and theoretical physicists working in the US that has allowed mankind to progress from only the vaguest and most approximate understanding of our world to precise quantitative models. Richard Feynman has described the precision of quantum mechanics as like being able to measure the distance from New York to L.A to the nearest hair's breadth. And for those of us navigating journeys even more fraught and perilous than an odyssey across America - such as driving from West London to Westminster without hitting roadworks - the precision of GPS satellite technology can guide us - and all thanks to the extraordinary precision of relativity's equations. - And if we want mathematics to guide us into the future, it is easy to see in which direction history is currently moving: East. The nations of East Asia, large and small, are now in the position the Islamic world was a millennium ago or Europe enjoyed during the Renaissance. Individually, they now increasingly resemble the England of the eighteenth century, the Germany of the nineteenth or the USA in the twentieth. They are growing rapidly industrially and technologically; integrating more and more of their people into the global econ...