25 Sep
2003
25 Sep
'03
3:40 p.m.
On Thu, 25 Sep 2003, I wrote:
This supposes that each sphere touches enough previous ones to effectively define its position, up to symmetry. This supposition does indeed trivialise the proof, but also invalidates it.
This was nonsense, for which I apologise (and also for the remarks that followed it). [It's been a long day!] However, I still think the problem is bigger than you do. In mitigation, I plead that what I said was valid for the sphere-packing problem, with which I was temporarily confusing this one. But I realise that's not much of an excuse. John Conway