A world without time : the forgotten legacy of Gödel and Einstein / Palle Yourgrau.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Yourgrau, Palle.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Gödel, Kurt.

Time--History--20th century.

Time.

History.

Einstein, Albert, 1879-1955.

Einstein, Albert.

Physical Description:

viii, 210 pages, 4 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, portraits ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Basic Books, [2005]

Summary:

It is a widely known but little appreciated fact that Albert Einstein, the twentieth century's greatest physicist, and Kurt Godel, its greatest logician, were best friends for the last decade and a half of Einstein's life. They walked home together from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study every day; they shared ideas about physics, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German-Austrian science in which they had grown up. What is not widely known is the discovery that grew out of this friendship. In 1949 Godel published a paper proving that there exist possible worlds described by the theory of relativity in which time, as we ordinarily understand it, does not exist. He went further: if it is absent from those theoretical universes, he showed, time does not exist in our world either. Einstein's great work has not explained time, as most physicists and philosophers think, but explained it completely away.

Einstein recognized Godel's paper as "an important contribution to the general theory of relativity." Physicists since then have tried without success to find an error in Godel's physics or a missing element in relativity itself that would rule out world models like Godel's. Stephen Hawking went so far as to propose an ad hoc modification of the laws of nature-a "chronology protection conjecture"-specifically to negate Godel's contribution to relativity. Philosophers have been largely silent-and their silence, says Yourgrau, is one of the intellectual scandals of the past century.

A World Without Time places Godel and Einstein's epoch-making discoveries in the context of the great and disturbing movements in physics, philosophy, logic, mathematics, and the arts that dominated the twentieth century. It presents a poignant and intimate account of the friendship between these two magnificent thinkers, each put on the shelf by the scientific fashions of their day-and ours-and attempts to rescue Godel's brilliant work from undeserved obscurity. Inspired by Einstein, Kurt Godel made clear for the first time the truly revolutionary nature of the theory of relativity, which to this day is hardly recognized.

Contents:

1 A Conspiracy of Silence 1

2 A German Bias for Metaphysics 9

3 Vienna: Logical Circles 21

4 A Spy in the House of Logic 51

5 It's Hard to Leave Vienna 77

6 Amid the Demigods 89

7 The Scandal of Big "T" and Little "t" 119

8 Twilight of the Gods 145

9 In What Sense Is Godel (or Anyone Else) a Philosopher? 161.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 195-199) and index.

ISBN:

0465092934

OCLC:

57409669