A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein

Beyond the apocalyptic sense, we might be running out of time; not the 'time' handed down from a Homeric Chronos or from Ecclesiastes (For everything there is a season...) or Prufrockian events (There will be time, there will be time. To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet...). Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (GTR) introduced a much more elemental, modern and, at least for some of us, counter-intuitive idea of 'time' that melded a constant (the speed of light) and a mass-curved geometry into spacetime, whose effect was, nevertheless, relative! In GTR, the temporal space from "here" to "there," from "now" to "then," massively complicated, shrinks and expands in the tangled warp. At least it did until Kurt Godel, in his searing analysis, added new, astonishing gyrations befitting his place as a preeminent mathematician, erstwhile physicist and most celebrated logician since Aristotle. Palle Yourgrau, the Henry A. Wolfson Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University has devoted a great deal of his academic career to understanding Godel and particularly what most of us take for granted - the concept of time - which Godel believed was THE key issue of philosophy (p. 111). In A World Without Time, Yourgrau continues the explication of Godel's insights into GTR that he explored earlier with his Godel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Godel Universe (Open Court Press, 1999). Godel and Einstein were colleagues and close friends at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, NJ, where both had been given safe haven from the Nazi scourge of the 1930s. Together, they walked to and from their offices talking philosophy, politics and especially relativity theory. As Yourgrau describes it, on one of these walks Godel pushed beyond Einstein's particular and arbitrary example of a relativistic universe, which Godel detailed later in an Einstein Festschrift [P.A. Schilpp (Ed.), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Open Court, 1949/1988]. In GTR there could be alternative universes including one whose rotation on its axis would make time stand still. Yourgrau provides fascinating detail about the lives of both men, describing their academic roots in mathematics, physics and philosophy with particular emphasis on the cross currents between Kantian (epistemological) and Leibnitzian (ontological) fundaments; Newtonian theory; the ideas of Frege, Husserl, Russell and Whitehead, Wittgenstein and Hilbert; the development of Positivism in the heady atmosphere of Viennese culture; the Einstein-Godel preference for the Platonic tradition; the elements in the development of GTR; Godel's logical system and incompleteness theorems; the vexing concept of time in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Heidegger; the Einstein-Godel special relationship in Princeton. Yourgrau does a wonderful job of presenting this rich intellectual background while, at the same time, bringing Einstein and Godel, 20th Century titans, down to earthy, everyda

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.

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.

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.

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...