A World without Time - The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein - Yourgrau - 2004 - 0465092934.pdf

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

Palle Yourgrau

2005



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 ess 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
natureóa "chronology protection conjecture"óspecifically to negate Godel's contribution to
relativity. Philosophers have been largely silentóand 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 p