Discussions FW Lawvere — Grothendieck's 1973 Buffalo Memoir (contd.)

0:00 Anyway, it sounds to me like any place where you and John Bell are around, I think, in philosophy, quite apart from them. Because these days, Bush has succeeded in making the US dollar worth less than the Canadian dollar. This is one of his many, you know, notable achievements. Yeah, you can say that again. Incidentally, 22nd, 23rd, and let me know after I send it to you what you think about the publishing proposal. Yes, absolutely. Yes, he sent me an abstract, he sent me a 400-word abstract of his talk, and, oh yes, he sent me an excellent abstract of his talk, and I got a long, a very, very nice email from him just three days ago, in fact, just after I got back from Moscow. Yeah, I chat about a lot of things. The notion of entity, or bare particular, in philosophy. That very interesting paper that he wrote for the volume that he edited with John McNamara, which had a lot of very sensible things in it, and what a scandal that the so-called analytical philosophers, 40 years, more than 40 years now, after your thesis and more than 40 years after category theory, really started to impact on logic and to... To change the basic understanding of logical constructions and geometrical sources are still completely willfully ignorant of this, still cling to their Phrygian dogmas. I've asked John to change that, and he's promised me he will. He may have done so, actually, in the last day or so. I'm going to speak to him within the next 48 hours. The only thing is I do try to avoid pushing him too hard, because he has been extremely ill, unfortunately.

2:30 He's really pretty frail at the moment. He was hoping that this lady, Mikaela Iftimi, would take a lot of the burden of the administration off him. But she doesn't appear to have done so, at least I haven't been able to get any sense out of her. So every time I've needed a decision, or to get anything done, I've really needed to go to John. And in fact, Gonzalo was asking me to try and find a list of B&Bs, you know, places he, because he likes to book things well in advance. Well, John is saying that they'll have enough money to take care of hotels for all the speakers. But I'm a little bit worried about this because I know how big the budget is and I'm a little bit concerned that he won't and that actually arranging homestays or B&Bs might actually make a lot more sense anyway, especially if they're on campus or nearby. But that's one of the things I'm going to talk to him about this weekend. But I should have definite word on that. He's very firmly plugged in. He sent me, as I say, his title is abstract. He's got a very nice enthusiastic reply to him because I sent him quite a long rambling. Also Maria, you know Marie, his wife. I was reading some of her plays which I find fascinating. We're in close touch and he's definitely going to be participating and seems to be firing on all cylinders. I just need to jog John a bit more firmly into changing the announcement to make sure that his name is in there. It should have been there a month or so ago. I'll try and get that done soon. But no, be assured, he's definitely going to be one of the main speakers. By the way, very quickly, two other things. Do you, I'm sure you do, because he's published a 620-page book on, but do you know a young mathematician at MIT by the name of Jacob Lurie, which thinks very highly of him indeed, you know, thinks he's a kind of rising young genius. I know nothing of his work except what I'm reading now, which is of his PhD thesis. Jean-Pierre wanted me to, we won't have room for any additional main speakers, but he wanted me to ask him if he would give a contributed talk.

5:00 John has got some of the local people in Boston lined up for contributed talks. I thought you might know his work and therefore be able to give me some guidance. It just, I'm not sure, this is what made me a little distrustful. This is exactly how it struck me. I must say it's very comforting to hear you say that because with my relative... In my understanding of these matters, I always distrust my own instincts and judgments in these things, but that's exactly how it struck me that there was an awful lot of very, very, very hand-waving speculation in his stuff. When he was an undergraduate, an elliptic cohomology seemed to be very solid. And this stuff that he's done later in so-called higher dimensional composites, it just struck me as being very speculative and just, you know, empty generalization.

12:30 That, of course, was all going on precisely under this very aegis of the so-called balance of terror between the superpowers.

15:00 Let's say it was an umbrella, the most frightful colonial repressions were taking place. I always thought of him as, you know, having these rather anodyne establishments on the good, but of course I always learn a great deal about these things from you. The more you dig, the more you realize that these people have a very serious and carefully thought out agenda indeed. ...as well, of course. Well, he's certainly, you know, he's certainly a great promoter of Gödel and of Platonism. ...interesting on the Templeton Foundation. This is the, I don't know if you've heard of him, he's a French cosmologist who has written a great deal about the fiber. And he was very interesting. He was one of the people who came to this differential geometry conference in Moscow with me, and he was telling me a good deal about how sinister the Templeton Foundation is as a cosmologist. He, of course, encounters them all the time. He says that they probably provide something like 80% of all of the private funding in the English-speaking world to people doing research in cosmology. Absolutely pernicious agenda, intelligent design under the, the stuff is just absolutely pernicious. They took a whole advertisement in the International Herald Tribune just yesterday, they had a whole double page advertisement in the European edition, the Temple of the Foundation. Asking various people, is there purpose in the universe? Do you see purpose in the universe? Do you see a divine plan?

17:30 And asking all these various scientists to give their answers. It was very cleverly contrived so that they had at least half of the people giving the answer no. I see no evidence at all of divine purpose in the universe. Half of them saying yes, and then a few saying maybe. The question isn't really very well... But I'm just taking the question on its own terms, seriously. It's the starting point for the dialectic, which of course is half the battle from their point of view. No, very pretty. But Lachaise Ray was particularly interesting just on the way that they operate in France. He is an absolutely militant atheist and is well attuned to their tricks. I learned quite a lot from talking to him about the things they get up to. It comes as no surprise... In terms of the intellectual battlefront against materialism and against very, very much on cosmology, and is not interested particularly in anti-Darwinist business in the American evangelical churches, and the strategy is very interesting. They distance themselves a long way from that, and, you know, they have no problems with Darwin, but they do put an awful lot of their energy into promoting intelligent design and cosmologies. This is quite interesting, isn't it? ...quantum gravity. The mistake is the exact opposite.

20:00 It was not to take really rigorous... This is going to be the meeting. ...dismissive reviewer. I've got a question. Unfortunately, I've got to go out shortly before... Oh, yes, it's almost five o'clock. I've got to go out to do a couple of things before the place is closed. Something we talked about all... I think it was almost a year ago now, and I mentioned it to Colin as well. You know that the Grosendieck Circle have got this website on the... The memoir that Grotendieck wrote and that he left with Jack Duskin when he was in Buffalo in 1973, which I remember you describing to me in some detail when you were in London just before I moved to France four years ago, which is this kind of chart that he drew of the evening ship using essentially kind of ring tires to organize structures, any possibility of that long since left completely, you know, the practice of mathematics. It might be possible to push that or to make it available to the Grotendieck Circle to say he's probably right, but I mean if there was some, let's hope to God it's not the Temple of the Foundation who will be starting to offer him money for it, but the Grotendieck Circle were willing to try and arrange for publication of it, for a detailed account of it to be made available. It does strike me as something of immense value to scholars, especially if it was accompanied by a commentary from somebody like you as to what's actually going on in the...

22:30 I seriously think, sorry there's a deafening noise going on outside, they're digging up the street outside and there's a hammer, you can probably hear it, there's a steam hammer banging just outside my window, where they're tamping down here, where they've been putting in new drains. Yeah, I don't know what you think about that, but it strikes me, it's a great pity after 35 years, and especially since we are now coming up to the anniversary of Grotendieck's Annus Mirabilis. And there's going to be possibly this workshop in Oberwolfach next year that Colin's involved in. I think it would be marvellous if that could be made available to scholars to study. Exactly, that's what makes it such an amazing document. I mean, logic in the past. Yeah, yeah. In other words... Gordon Deacon, no need of it. His vision... A lot of work systems are just as special. ...sense logic as the study of the roots and supports of intensive quantity. Yeah. Which it has been. Well, this strikes me as a philosophical... Insight and reorientation towards logic in its relation to philosophy is so important and so deep that this document should not be allowed to just molder, inject dust from underneath the debris.

25:00 Well, I wouldn't even raise Wittgenstein to the level of the theorists. It's much more likely that such a document is going to be misinterpreted.

27:30 I think it would be very timely to bring it to light now and to discuss it with the kind of insight that only you and a handful of other people could bring to it, you know, whilst the time is ripe. Pinching it to him when you were discussing with him here. That's something which we could bring up again when he's over in Boston, but I think it would be very, very good if it could be. Well, you know, that's what Gauss did with the original manuscript of the Disquisition Is, Erasmus Arithmetic. Yes, he did. It was literally grabbed out of his hand. He was about to stuff it into the bowl of his pipe and light it with it. I think it would be a major tragedy for, you know, the history of human thought if that was to happen to Duskin, to the memoir that Grothendieck entrusted to Duskin. And, you know, as long as it's there just moldering away, anything could happen to it. I mean, I have this nightmare about the stuff that I've recorded in my archive, but how much more important is something which Grothendieck wrote than anything that I happen to have recorded? So, as I say, think on, as they say in Yorkshire. Oh, I can do quite a bit of digging there, yes, I think. Atiyah is so highly thought of in the British establishment that about ten years ago, when it really looked as if the monarchy in Britain was going into meltdown with all of the gas and public relations disasters that they had managed to engineer for themselves, the business of the death of Diana and all the rest of it,

30:00 And they were probably more unpopular than they'd ever been. At one point there was an opinion poll that showed that something like 65% of people wanted to see the back of them. And there was a think piece in the Times Literary Supplement or somewhere like that where various people were asked to nominate a suitable head of state if the Queen was to advocate. I guess his name came up. Atiyah was seriously spoken of. Well you know our most distinguished living scientist or yeah yeah I mean that's that's the kind of level of uh you know which this guy's thought of in the establishment so you can imagine what he's you know he's reached at the stage now I'm afraid where he he's just been you know resting on his horse for such a long time now and he gives these

32:30 You say this is in the October notices of the AMS? Get that online. I'm not sure if you can access it online without a subscription, but I'll see. If not, try and do that and get back. Bill, it's lovely to talk to you. Please give my love to Fatima. I do hope that you do completely recover from this dreadful thing that you've undergone. I'll see you in Paris on the 22nd or 23rd of November, but I'll be back in touch with you before that, obviously, after speaking to John. And if you do get the chance to send me a short abstract of the talk, that would be great.