Recent content by Gruppenpest

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_fission U-235 (and U-238 even) can simply fission at random even without absorbing a slow neutron or getting struck by a fast neutron. The rate isn't very fast, but it does happen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass

Gun assembly This more like the method you have described. Actually not that many bomb designs used it. Once implosion-type A-bombs became more compact, it became obsolete as the method has inherent safety issues and is difficult to make efficient in terms of yield for the amount of fissile...

Pressure is needed as well as heat, and for that confinement is a key. Simply suspending an A-bomb inside a vessel of fusion fuel will not work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teller-Ulam_configuration

None of this would be an issue if the theory at hand were, say, Euclidean plane geometry or Presberger arithmetic.

I believe I have found examples in mathematics that can't be dismissed in this manner. See the thread I've started: Classical First-Order Logic, Axiomatic Set Theory, and Undecidable Propositions

To finish that thought off, it appears nobody is a thorough-going formalist anymore, and if you rub any set theorist or logician hard enough, you will find a platonist underneath. ;-)

Cagey, aren't you? Alright. There is at first "glance" a loophole, which is a semantic one. If I recall correctly, the definition of truth and falsehood of mathematical propositions preferred by the mainstream comes down to us from Tarski which is "validity with respect to a structure". Truth...

It has been known for some time that the Axiom of Choice (if you treat it as a proposition to be proved rather than an axiom) and the Continuum Hypothesis are independent of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZF). These and other statements (Suslin's Problem, Whitehead's Problem, the existence of...