We can represent every Diophantine equation in an analogous way. We can express the unsolvability of a Diophantine equation by negating the corresponding sentence. We can then ask the question of whether the axioms of arithmetic logically entail this negation or, equivalently, whether the axioms of Arithmetic together with the unnegated sentence are unsatisfiable.
The problem is that it is well known that determining whether Diophantine equations are unsolvable is not semidecidable. If we could determine the unsatisfiability of our encoding of a Diophantine equation, we could decide whether it is unsolvable, contradicting the non-semidecidability of that problem.
Note that this does not mean Herbrand Logic is useless. In fact, it is great for expressing such information; and we can prove many results, even though, in general, we cannot prove everything that follows from arbitrary sets of sentences in Herbrand Logic. We discuss this issue further in later lessons.
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