A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy Of Godel And Einstein

By Palle Yourgrau

Book Overview

In 1942, the logician Kurt Godel and Albert Einstein became close friends; they walked to and from their offices every day, exchanging ideas about science, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465092934
• ISBN13: 9780465092932
• Release Date: December 2004
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 0.8" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

A great, thought-provoking ride with joyful poignancy at the end.

I have little or no background in math. My last foray (prior to reading this book) into the world of math was when I rolled a joint on my high school trigonometry text book (but I didn't inhale -I swear). A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel And Einstein, by Dr. Palle Yourgrau, explores the intellectual contributions of Einstein and Godel to the history and development of physics, mathematical logic, and philosophy. It also looks at such fundamental questions as to what extent abstract mathematics corresponds to the real world. The book presents cogent arguments on both sides of this issue. Is a formal system of mathematics sufficient to prove its own axioms? To what extent do Godel's Incompleteness Theorems have a bearing on the ultimate question of what is knowable? Does Einstein's Theory of Relativity imply that time in the formal sense does not exist? What is the difference between our intuitive understanding of time and time as a relativistic component of space-time? To what extent is the the philosophy of Immanuel Kant confirmed by Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Is time travel possible? All of these questions (and many more) are explored in this highly readable, thought-provoking book. From a biographical point of view, A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel And Einstein is just like a great movie. I found the stories of these two men, Godel and Einstein, most fascinating. It is one of life's painful ironies that these men who ventured into such esoteric realms of thought and soared so high in such rarefied intellectual space could be subject to the same mundane woes (ie. romantic estrangement, petty condescension from their peers, the horrors war, etc.) as the rest of us. As tragic as it may be, it is also somewhat reassuring that no one is exempt from the frailty of being human. Finally, I believe that the author, Palle Yourgrau, deserves a great deal of credit for restoring to Kurt Godel, the proper justice that Godel's colleagues denied him during his lifetime. It is perfectly proper and even necessary to examine, criticize, or even supecede Godel's contributions to physics and philosophy, but it is utterly wrong, and the height of intellectual arrogance (not to mention professional jealousy) to dismiss Godel. Much praise should go to Dr. Yourgrau for keeping his colleagues honest.

The Real Deal

It sounds strange to say it of a book about mathematical logic, cosmology, and metaphysics, but this would make a fantastic summer/beach read. It is an absolute page-turner, full of vivid scenes (the chapter on Old Vienna is like a time machine--you can practically taste the whipped cream on the hot chocolate), exhilarating discoveries, and poignant human moments. I read it in one sitting (late at night, not on the beach). Woven into the historical narrative is a first-rate presentation of some of the most difficult intellectual issues of all time, which brings them out without dumbing them down. (For example, there have been numerous attempts to give a non-technical explanation of Godel's incompleteness results--Nagel and Newman, Hofstadter, Casti, etc., but none, in my opinion, as successful as Yourgrau's.) This is "intellectual history" at its best: a book that helps you to make sense of the almost impossibly tangled and deep career of the last hundred years. (Yourgrau claims, in effect, to provide one of the keys to understanding the twentieth century (see his discussion of formalism), and he's pretty convincing.) Goldstein's is a good book; this is a great book.

Yourgrau's book on the concept of time:

One should mention, in regard to Yourgrau's book, that this subject is also beautifully expanded by the Oxford physicist, Julian Barbour in his related book, "The End of Time." Barbour has contributed a fundamental modification to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity that leads to an understanding of the meaningless of our concept of time as well as a surprising simplification of its mathematics.

Two of a kind--with a difference

Terrific vignette history, heretofore little known, of the friendship and mutual discourse of Goedel and Einstein after their exile from the Germany of the thirties to the Institute for Advanced Study. Interspersed with biographical data not found elsewhere is a tale of two eccentrics, and of the philosophical asides and unpublic views of this duet, from Kant, and idealism, to much else. The central story is of Goedel's work on relativity and the discovery of solutions to the general equations that opened up the possibility of time travel and the illusion of time. This finding, unwelcome in mainstream physics, and the object of a posited 'chronology postulate' by Hawking to rule out its implications for cosmology, had lurked in the underground of physics history--until now, perhaps. This is not only important info on the state of physics but scuttlebutt of the highest order. Be sure to check it out...