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

By: Palle Yourgrau

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Synopsis: For 15 years two men, one made like a rapier, the other looking like a pile of laundry, walked together to their respective homes through the Princeton campus, talking as only consummate academics can. In his last years on earth, Einstein would go to his office just to have these walks home. Perhaps he could see a future in which Gödel, the rapier and the world's greatest logician, would run out of time and leave this planet weighing, by his own choice, only 65 pounds. In their walks Gödel concluded that time, which Einstein showed not to exist on theoretical worlds, did not exist in this one either. Yourgrau (philosophy, Brandeis U. ) explains the time they had together, and how Gödel's resulting paper on this crucial aspect of relativity has fared amongst physicists and philosophers. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc. , Portland, OR (booknews. com)