Godel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Godel Universe

by Palle Yourgrau

Overview

What happens when the century's greatest logician meets the century's greatest physicist? In the case of Kurt Gödel and Albert Einstein, the result is Gödel's revolutionary new world models for relativity theory

Although most famous for his Incompleteness Theorems in mathematical logic, Gödel was a philosopher in his own right, with a special interest in the philosophical problem of Time.

Most people are unaware that Gödel and Einstein were close friends for many years at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. Gödel extended Einstein's General Theory of Relativity with cosmological models—now known as "Gödel Universes"—with extraordinary properties, including the possibility of closed, timelike curves that allow the philosophical fantasy of time travel to become a scientific reality.

For Gödel, however, the reality of time travel signals the unreality of time. If he's right, the real meaning of the Einstein revolution remained a secret for half a century and is only being revealed now.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812694086
Publisher:	Open Court Publishing Company
Publication date:	11/28/1999
Edition description:	NEW & EXPANDED
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.96(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

Palle Yourgrau is a professor of philosophy at Brandeis University. He lives in Cambridge, MA.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS
Preface to the New Expanded Edition (1999)
Preface to the First Edition (1991)
CHAPTER 1
The Reception of Gödel's Results
CHAPTER 2
Gödel's Idealism
CHAPTER 3
Time Travel in the Gödel Universe
CHAPTER 4
Not Everything Can be Relativized
CHAPTER 5
From Kant to Star Trek: A Philosopher's Guide to Time Travel
CHAPTER 6
Formalization and Representation
CHAPTER 7
Being and Time

APPENDIX A
Brouwer and the `Revolution': The Philosophical Background of `Temporal
Mathematics'
APPENDIX B
Zeno's Revenge: On the Mathematical Dogma of Infinite Divisibility
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Lawrence Sklar

Combining careful scholarship with imaginative philosophical insight, Yourgrau has produced a stimulating investigation into the often neglected philosophical aspects of Gödel's thought. Taking as its centerpiece Gödel's discovery of models of general relativity with closed causal curves, Yourgrau goes on to give enlightening accounts of Gödel's platonism in mathematics, his idealism with regard to time, and his subtle views about the philosophical consequences we may draw about the actual world from features of worlds that are merely possible."
—University of Michigan

Shaughan Lavine

Time flows. What is past is real, while what is future is not yet real. Gödel Meets Einstein demonstrates that modern mathematical physics, especially relativity theory, is incompatible with those simple ideas, that the incompatibility needs to be taken seriously, and that standard dissolutions of the incompatibility fail. It analyzes Gödel's fascinating views on this problem, showing that Gödel's work on relativity is a part of the same philosophical program as is his more widely celebrated incompleteness results.
—University of Arizona

Michael J. White

Gödel Meets Einstein is an attempt, often breathtaking, to bring various current scientific, methodological, and philosophical topics into real dialogue with a bona fide Big Issue: the nature of reality and the question of what is or fails to be part of that reality -- such as change, time, infinity, the dead. Even in those cases where most of us will join the forces of orthodoxy against him -- as in his discussion of the Zenonian Dichotomy paradox, where he denies the significance of the standard distinction between convergent and divergent infinite series -- Yourgrau cogently challenges us to see to it that our dogmatism is not of the unexamined, `slumbering' variety.
—Arizona State University

Mind

Yourgrau has done an amazing job of drawing out the physical, ontological, logical, and semantic complexities of the problem, and integrating Gödel's ideas within the context of contemporary discussions." The Disappearance of Time

Editorial Reviews

This is an expansion of the author's 1991 work published as . Yougrau (philosophy, Brandeis U.) investigates the implications of G<:o>dels writings on Einstein's theory of relativity as they relate to the fundamental questions of the nature of time and the possibilities for time travel. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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