axiomatize

到20世纪初，有很多人试图将热力学公理化。我认为这不是一个很有用的东西。物理学是关于现实的，而现实是非常复杂的，它不像欧几里德几何那样可以被公理化。如果你真的想要绝对合乎逻辑，你必须在完全确定之前陈述很多很多事情。所以，在我看来，公理化物理学的想法是没有用的。之所以有公理化热力学的讨论，是由于在数学发展到了十九世纪末二十世纪初的时候，出现了将数学公理化的想法，大数学家希尔伯特的厥功至伟。希尔伯特在1900年就23个重要的数学问题发表了著名的演讲，对20世纪的数学产生了巨大的影响。这23个问题中，有一个是将物理学公理化。在我看来，这不是正确的方向。大约在1930年，一位名叫哥德尔的年轻数学家证明，将整个数学公理化的想法并不是完全正确的事情，这导致了数学、数理逻辑和哲学的伟大进步。然后，在没有实现物理公理化的情况下，人们对这个希尔伯特问题失去了兴趣，直到1950年代。20世纪50年代，基本粒子物理学进入了一个探索未来的时期，一些人，尤其是德国的很多人，在某种意义上复兴了这种公理化物理学的想法。当时国际上有许多人去跟风，发展出来一个叫作公理化场论的领域，但是到了1970年代，这个领域也走到了尽头。今天，在这样的方向上进行这种努力并不被认为是推动物理学向前发展的有用尝试。我们在讨论物理学时应当努力成为物理学家而不是逻辑学家。 原文： By the beginning of the 20th century, there were many people who try to axiomatize thermodynamics. 我认为it’s not a very useful thing. Physics is about reality, and reality is very complicated. It’s not like Euclidian geometry you can axiomatize. If you want really to be absolutely logical, you have to state many many things before you can be completely sure. So the idea axiomatizing physics, in my opinion, is a useless thing. The reason there were discussions of axiomatizing thermodynamics was because, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century in mathematics, through, especially, the leadership of the great mathematician Hilbert, there was an idea to axiomatize mathematics in his 23 problems. Hilbert in the year 1900 gave a famous speech about 23 important problems in mathematics, and that caused the tremendous influence on 20th century mathematics. One of these 23 was to axiomatize physics, in my opinion, that is not the right direction. Around 1930 there was a young mathematician named Gödel who showed that the whole idea of axiomatizing the whole mathematics is not quite right thing to do, that's a great development in mathematics, in mathematical logic and in philosophy. Then without having achieved the axiomatization of physics, they lost of interest about this Hilbert problem until the 1950s. In the 1950s elementary particle physics entered into a period of searching for the future, some people, especially many people in Germany, in some senses were reviving this idea of axiomatizing physics, and that was picked up by a number of people over the world. So it became a field called the axiomatic field theory, but by the 1970s that died again. It's today such kind of effort in such a direction is not considered to be a useful way to push physics forward. So we are trying to be physicists and not logicians in discussing physics.