Talk:Georg Cantor
Unverified[edit]
- A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood, the more tenaciously it is held.
The earliest source I can find for this is on page 88 on Morris Kline's 1982 book _Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty_, where it is absolutely not (to my mind) presented as a verbatim Cantor quote:
That Euclidean geometry is the geometry of physical space, that it is the truth about space, was so ingrained in people's minds that for many years any contrary thoughts such as Gauss's were rejected. The mathe- matician Georg Cantor spoke of a law of conservation of ignorance. A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dis- lodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held. For thirty or so years after the publication of Lobatchevsky's and Bolyai’s works all but a few mathematicians ignored the non-Euclidean geome- tries. They were regarded as a curiosity. Some mathematicians did not deny their logical coherence. Others believed that they must contain contradictions and so were worthless. Almost all mathematicians main- tained that the geometry of physical space, _the_ geometry, must be Eu- clidean.