Einstein & Gödel, Time Bandits
The New Yorker recently ran an article about Albert Einstein’s relationship with Kurt Gödel (not that kind of relationship, if that’s what you’re thinking). While Einstein has entered our vocabulary synonymous with genius (as well as the radiant energy of a given frequency required to effect the complete photochemical transformation of one mole of a photosensitive substance being equal to about 0.004 erg second times the frequency in question), few know the name Gödel, and fewer still know that that’s an umlaut over the o. Gödel, Kurt (1907-1978) was a mathematical logician with a keen interest in philosophy with a Platonic twist. Famous for his incompleteness theorems, he was largely responsible for destroying the ideal of complete knowledge, held by most scholars for as long as they could remember. He did this by arguing that:
1. no logical system can capture all the truths of mathematics,
2. no logical system for mathematics could, through itself, be show to be free from inconsistency.
And all at age 24, younger than Einstein with his Theory of Relativity.
Read Time Bandits, New Yorker, by Jim Holt.