When Einstein Walked with Gödel

Author: Jim Holt
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374717842
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
From Jim Holt, the New York Times bestselling author of Why Does the World Exist?, comes an entertaining and accessible guide to the most profound scientific and mathematical ideas of recent centuries in When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought. Does time exist? What is infinity? Why do mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down? In this scintillating collection, Holt explores the human mind, the cosmos, and the thinkers who’ve tried to encompass the latter with the former. With his trademark clarity and humor, Holt probes the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the quest for the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of logic and truth. Along the way, he offers intimate biographical sketches of celebrated and neglected thinkers, from the physicist Emmy Noether to the computing pioneer Alan Turing and the discoverer of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot. Holt offers a painless and playful introduction to many of our most beautiful but least understood ideas, from Einsteinian relativity to string theory, and also invites us to consider why the greatest logician of the twentieth century believed the U.S. Constitution contained a terrible contradiction—and whether the universe truly has a future.

A World Without Time

Author: Palle Yourgrau
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 078673700X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
It is a widely known but little considered fact that Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel were best friends for the last decade and a half of Einstein's life. The two 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 science in which they had grown up. By 1949, Godel had produced a remarkable proof: In any universe described by the Theory of Relativity, time cannot exist . Einstein endorsed this result-reluctantly, since it decisively overthrew the classical world-view to which he was committed. But he could find no way to refute it, and in the half-century since then, neither has anyone else. Even more remarkable than this stunning discovery, however, was what happened afterward: nothing. Cosmologists and philosophers alike have proceeded with their work as if Godel's proof never existed -one of the greatest scandals of modern intellectual history. A World Without Time is a sweeping, ambitious book, and yet poignant and intimate. It tells the story of two magnificent minds put on the shelf by the scientific fashions of their day, and attempts to rescue from undeserved obscurity the brilliant work they did together.

When Einstein Walked with Gödel

Author: Jim Holt
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
ISBN: 0374146705
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
"A collection of essays on philosophy, mathematics, and science, and the people who pursue them"--

Incompleteness

Author: Rebecca Goldstein
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393327604
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
"An introduction to the life and thought of Kurt Gödel, who transformed our conception of math forever"--Provided by publisher.

Godel

Author: John L. Casti
Publisher:
ISBN: 0786747609
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description
Kurt Gödel was an intellectual giant. His Incompleteness Theorem turned not only mathematics but also the whole world of science and philosophy on its head. Shattering hopes that logic would, in the end, allow us a complete understanding of the universe, Gödel's theorem also raised many provocative questions: What are the limits of rational thought? Can we ever fully understand the machines we build? Or the inner workings of our own minds? How should mathematicians proceed in the absence of complete certainty about their results? Equally legendary were Gödel's eccentricities, his close friendship with Albert Einstein, and his paranoid fear of germs that eventually led to his death from self-starvation. Now, in the first book for a general audience on this strange and brilliant thinker, John Casti and Werner DePauli bring the legend to life.

Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

Author: Stephen Budiansky
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324005459
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
A New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 • A Booklist Top Ten Biography of 2021 • A Kirkus Reviews Best Science Book of 2021 The first major biography written for a general audience of the logician and mathematician whose Incompleteness Theorems helped launch a modern scientific revolution. Nearly a hundred years after its publication, Kurt Gödel’s famous proof that every mathematical system must contain propositions that are true—yet never provable—continues to unsettle mathematics, philosophy, and computer science. Yet unlike Einstein, with whom he formed a warm and abiding friendship, Gödel has long escaped all but the most casual scrutiny of his life. Stephen Budiansky’s Journey to the Edge of Reason is the first biography to fully draw upon Gödel’s voluminous letters and writings—including a never-before-transcribed shorthand diary of his most intimate thoughts—to explore Gödel’s profound intellectual friendships, his moving relationship with his mother, his troubled yet devoted marriage, and the debilitating bouts of paranoia that ultimately took his life. It also offers an intimate portrait of the scientific and intellectual circles in prewar Vienna, a haunting account of Gödel’s and Jewish intellectuals’ flight from Austria and Germany at the start of the Second World War, and a vivid re-creation of the early days of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, where Gödel and Einstein both worked. Eloquent and insightful, Journey to the Edge of Reason is a fully realized portrait of the odd, brilliant, and tormented man who has been called the greatest logician since Aristotle, and illuminates the far-reaching implications of Gödel’s revolutionary ideas for philosophy, mathematics, artificial intelligence, and man’s place in the cosmos.

The Goddess of Small Victories

Author: Yannick Grannec
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1590516370
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Book Description
Step into the world of Kurt Gödel: his life, his marriage, his friendship with Einstein, and his legacy in this internationally best-selling novel. Princeton University, 1980. Kurt Gödel, the most fascinating, though hermetic, mathematician of the twentieth century, has just died of anorexia. His widow, Adele, a fierce woman shunned by her husband’s colleagues because she had been a cabaret dancer, is now consigned to a nursing home. To the great annoyance of the Institute of Advanced Studies, she refuses to hand over Gödel’s precious records. Anna Roth is given the difficult task of befriending Adele and retrieving the documents from her. As Adele opens the gates of her memory, the two women travel back into the life she shared with her enigmatic husband: Vienna during the Nazi era, Princeton right after the war, the pressures of McCarthyism, the end of the positivist ideal, and the advent of nuclear weapons. Yannick Grannec brilliantly narrates the epic story of a genius who could never quite find his place in the world, and the determination of the woman who loved him.

I Am a Strange Loop

Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465030785
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 537

Book Description
Argues that the key to understanding ourselves and consciousness is the "strange loop," a special kind of abstract feedback loop that inhabits the brain.

Mathematics Through the Eyes of Faith

Author: Russell Howell
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062094912
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
Book description to come.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher: Penguin Group(CA)
ISBN: 9780140289206
Category : Art and music
Languages : en
Pages : 832

Book Description
'What is a self and how can a self come out of inanimate matter?' This is the riddle that drove Douglas Hofstadter to write this extraordinary book. In order to impart his original and personal view on the core mystery of human existence - our intangible sensation of 'I'-ness - Hofstadter defines the playful yet seemingly paradoxical notion of 'strange loop', and explicates this idea using analogies from many disciplines.