Yourgrau P. A world without time.. the forgotten legacy of Goedel and Einstein (Basic Books, 2005)(ISBN 0465092934)(176s)_PPop_

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 success 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 put on the shelf by the scientific 

fashions of their dayóand oursóand attempts to rescue Godel's brilliant work from 

undeserved obscurity. Inspired by Einstein, Kurt Godel made clear for the first time the 

truly revolutionary nature of the theory of relativity, which to this day is hardly 

recognized.

PALLE YOURGRAU is associate professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University. His 1999 

monograph, Godel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Godel Universe, which explores the 

philosophical significance of Godel's cosmological ideas, sparked a resurgence of interest in 

Godel's ideas about time and relativity. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Copyright © 2005 by Palle Yourgrau 

Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group 

First Edition 

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Contents 

Acknowledgments - vii 

1 A Conspiracy of Silence - 1 

2 A German Bias for Metaphysics - 9 

3 Vienna: Logical Circles - 21 

4 A Spy in the House of Logic - 51 

5 It's Hard to Leave Vienna - 77 

6 Amid the Demigods - 89 

7 The Scandal of Big "T" and Little "t" - 119 

8 Twilight of the Gods - 145

9 In What Sense Is Godel (or Anyone Else) a Philosopher? - 161 

Notes - 185 

Works Cited - 195 

Index - 201 

Acknowledgments 

Having already written a book intended primarily for philosophers about Kurt Godel's 

attempt to make sense of Einstein's theory of relativity, I was intrigued when William 

Frucht of Basic Books suggested I write another, this one accessible to normal readers. 

Such a book would focus on the sheer intellectual drama of the companionship of Godel 

and Einsteinóa relationship sorely neglected in the literatureó and would place Godel's and 

Einstein's epoch-making discoveries in the context of the great intellectual movements of 

the twentieth century, some of which, having helped to father, they tried, belatedly, to 

abandon. It was an offer too good to refuse, and I didn't. The task, however, turned out to 

be far from easy, and Frucht had to endure not only the late delivery of the final 

manuscript, but the drumbeat of my complaints about his editorial adventures at the 

expense of my beloved prose; it may not have been much, but it was all mine. I am 

grateful to Frucht both for the initial invitation and for (what turned out to be) his wise 

editorial advice, at every stage, on how to improve the manuscript. 

I have greatly benefited from discussing the book with Mary Sullivan and Ben Callard. 

Sullivan, attentive as ever to the task of trying to keep me honest, read large parts of the 

book and offered acute, sobering advice, which I took to heart. Callard's critical remarks 

on every chapter were of great value and are reflected in the final draft. His strange 

affection for the work, moreover, kept my spirits up during the many dark moments when 

the project seemed to me ill-advised and 

misbegotten. Mark van Atten also read the entire manuscript. His extraordinarily detailed 

remarks, on both substance and style, were a great boon. Robert Tragesser shared with me 

his deep understanding of Godel's theorem, and Eli Hirsch helped make certain that my 

discussions of logic and mathematics were clear, accessible, and to the point. To each of 

these I owe a serious debt of gratitude, but especially to Callard and van Atten, for their 

extensive and thoughtful comments.

I would also like to express my appreciation for the conversations I had over a period of 

years with the late Hao Wang, of Rockefeller University, whom I came to know when I 

taught at Barnard College in New York. With Wang, who was one of Godel's closest 

associates in his final years, I spent endless hours discussing Godel's ideas, published and 

unpublished. The question of time was of particular interest to him. He confessed that, 

finding the topic uncongenial, he had resisted Godel's efforts to discuss his thoughts on this 

theme, and regretted it. I regretted it, too. It did not diminish, however, the fruitfulness 

of our conversations, nor the enjoyment we took in contemplating what Godel has said and 

written. 

In addition to help from my friends, I have also depended on the kindness of strangers. My 

copy editor, David Kramer, in addition to improving the clarity and flow of the text, made 

a number of comments and suggestions of a more substantial nature on a wide variety of 

topics, from music to mathematics, which were an unexpected gift. AnnaLee Pauls, 

photoduplication coordinator at the Rare Books and Special Collections department of 

Princeton University's Firestone Library, provided much needed assistance in the delicate 

task of choosing and reproducing the right photos from the Godel archives, housed in 

Firestone Library. I am grateful both for her assistance and for the spirit with which she 

provided it. I would also, finally, like to thank Arudra Burra, who is not a stranger, for his 

generous help, combined with fine judgment, in the search for the right photos to include 

in the book. 

A World Without Time 

1 A Conspiracy of Silence 

Godel was ... the only one of our colleagues who walked and talked on equal terms with 

Einstein. 

FREEMAN DYSON

In the summer of 1942, while German U-boats roamed in wolf packs off the coast of Maine, 

residents in the small coastal town of Blue Hill were alarmed by the sight of a solitary 

figure, hands clasped behind his back, hunched over like a comma with his eyes fixed on 

the ground, making his way along the shore in a seemingly endless midnight stroll. Those 

who encountered the man were struck by his deep scowl and thick German accent. 

Speculation mounted that he was a German spy giving secret signals to enemy warships. 

The dark stranger, however, was no German spy. He was Kurt Godel, the greatest logician 

of all time, a beacon in the intellectual landscape of the last thousand years, and the prey 

he sought was not American ships bound for Britain but rather the so-called continuum 

hypothesis, a conjecture made by the mathematician Georg Cantor about the number of 

points on a line. Godel was spending the summer vacationing at the Blue Hill Inn with his 

wife, Adele, although fellow visitors at the inn rarely saw either of them. They 

materialized for dinner, but were never observed actually eating. To the locals, Godel's 

scowl betrayed a dark disposition, but the innkeeper saw things differently. For her it was 

the expression of a man lost in thought. His last word to Blue Hill would not decide the 

issue. He sent a letter accusing the innkeeper of stealing the key to his trunk. 

The place Godel would return to in the fall was a long way from Blue Hillóthe prestigious 

Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. There he would no longer have to 

walk alone, arousing the suspicions of neighbors. He had a walking companion, a colleague 

at the institute and his best friend. There was no danger that his reputation would 

intimidate his companion. For his friend, another German-speaking refugee with a 

mathematical bent, was the most famous scientist of all time, Albert Einstein, whose own 

meditative strolls already irritated the residents of Princeton. 

"From a distance," a biographer wrote, "the [residents of Princeton] chuckled discreetly 

over [Einstein's] habit of licking an ice cream on Nassau Street on his way home from Fine 

Hall and were astonished by his utterly un-American long walks through the streets of 

Princeton." Indeed, toward the end of his career, when he was more or less retired, 

Einstein commented that his own work no longer meant much to him and that he now went 

to his office "just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Godel." Ironically, it was 

not the scowling Godel but his smiling companion who had once given indirect aid to the 

German U-boats, when, during World War I, although a courageous and committed pacifist, 

Einstein had helped improve the gyroscopes used by the German navy. Godel's research 

would also, in the end, relate to gyroscopes, but these spun at the center of the universe, 

not in the dank bowels of submarines. 

Washed up onto America's shores by the storm of Nazism that raged in Europe in the 1930s, 

the two men had awakened to find themselves stranded in the same hushed academic 

retreat, Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, an exclusive intellectual club, whose 

members had only one assigned duty: to think. But Godel and Einstein already belonged to 

an even more exclusive club. Together with another German-speaking theorist, Werner 

Heisenberg, they were the authors of the three most fundamental scientific results of the 

century. Each man's discovery, moreover, established a profound and disturbing limitation. 

Einstein's theory of relativity set a limit -the speed of light -to the flow of any 

3

information-bearing signal. And by defining time in terms of its measurement with clocks, 

he set a limit to time itself. It was no longer absolute but henceforth limited or relative to 

a frame of measurement. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics set a 

limit on our simultaneous knowledge of the position and momentum of the fundamental 

particles of matter. This was not just a restriction on what we can know: for Heisenberg it 

signified a limit to reality. Finally, Godel's incompleteness theoremó"the most significant 

mathematical truth of the century," as it would soon be described in a ceremony at 

Harvard Universityóset a permanent limit on our knowledge of the basic truths of 

mathematics: The complete set of mathematical truths will never be captured by any 

finite or recursive list of axioms that is fully formal. Thus, no mechanical device, no 

computer, will ever be able to exhaust the truths of mathematics. It follows immediately, 

as Godel was quick to point out, that if we are able somehow to grasp the complete truth 

in this domain, then we, or our minds, are not machines or computers. (Enthusiasts of 

artificial intelligence were not amused.) 

Einstein, Godel, Heisenberg: three men whose fundamental scientific results opened up 

new horizons, paradoxically, by setting limits to thought or reality. Together they 

embodied the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Mysteriously, each had reached an 

ontological conclusion about reality through the employment of an epistemic principle 

concerning knowledge. The dance or dialectic of knowledge and realityó of limit and 

limitlessnessówould become a dominant theme of the twentieth century. Yet Godel's and 

Einstein's relations to their century were more uneasy than Heisenberg's. 

The Zeitgeist took root most famously in quantum mechanics. Here Godel and Einstein 

would find themselves in lonely opposition to Heisenberg, who, on the wrong side in the 

war of nations, chose the winning team in the wars of physics. Heisenberg was a champion 

of the school of positivism, in quantum physics known as the Copenhagen interpretation in 

deference to Heisenberg's mentor, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. What had been a mere 

heuristic principle in Einstein's special relativityódeducing the nature of reality from 

limitations on what can be knownóbecame for Heisenberg a kind of religion, a religion that 

Godel and Einstein had no wish to join. Some, however, claimed to see in Godel's theorem 

itself an echo of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. That group did not include Godel. 

Einstein, himself one of the great pioneers of quantum mechanics, had known and inspired 

Heisenberg in Germany. In 1911, in Prague, years before Heisenberg came on the scene, 

Einstein once pointed out to his colleague Philipp Frank the insane asylum in the park 

below his study and remarked, "Here you see that portion of lunatics who do not concern 

themselves with quantum theory." By Einstein's lights, a bad situation had become even 

worse after Heisenberg. In an early encounter, Heisenberg, on the defensive against 

Einstein's harangue against quantum mechanics, fought back: "When I objected that in [my 

approach] I had merely been applying the type of philosophy that he, too, had made the 

basis of his special theory of relativity, [Einstein] answered simply, 'Perhaps I did use such 

philosophy earlier, and also wrote it, but it is nonsense all the same.'" 

The two parted before the war, Einstein emigrating to the United States, Heisenberg 

remaining in Germany, to which he would remain loyal to the end. In Princeton, 

Einsteinópacifist, bohemian, socialist and Jewówas a man apart. To be sure, he found 

Godel, but together they remained isolated and alone, not least because of their 

opposition to Heisenberg's positivist worldview, which ruled the intellectual scene even as

Heisenberg's fatherland was attempting to dominate the world. Godel and Einstein were 

not merely intellectual engineers, as so many of their brethren, inspired by positivism, had 

become, but philosopher-scientists. Ironically, while their stars had begun to wane, the 

sheer size of their reputations had made them unapproachable. Not to each other, 

however. "Godel," wrote their colleague Freeman Dyson, "was the only one of our 

colleagues who walked and talked on equal terms with Einstein." 

Their tastes, however, remained distinct. Einstein, a violinist, could never bring his friend 

to subject himself to the likes of Beethoven and Mozart. Godel, in turn, had no more 

success, surely, in dragging Einstein to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, his favorite 

movie. History, 

5 

sadly, does not record which of the seven dwarfs was Godel's favorite, but we do know why 

he favored fairy tales: "Only fables," he said, "present the world as it should be and as if it 

had meaning." (That meaning, of course, may be dark. It is not known whether Alan Turing 

acquired an affection for Snow White from Godel when he visited the institute in the 

1930s, but some have heard an echo of the dark side of that tale in Turing's decision to end 

his life by eating a poisoned apple when, as a reward for his having broken the Enigma 

code of the German navy, the British government ordered him to receive hormone 

injections as a "cure" for his homosexuality.) 

Einstein, before fleeing Germany, had already become a refugee from mathematics. He 

later said that he could not find, in that garden of many paths, the one to what is 

fundamental. He turned to the more earthly domain of physics, where the way to the 

essential was, he thought, clearer. His disdain for mathematics earned him the nickname 

"lazy dog" from his teacher Hermann Minkowski (who would soon recast the lazy dog's 

special relativity into its characteristic four-dimensional form). "You know, once you start 

calculating," Einstein would quip, "you shit yourself up before you know it." Godel's 

journey, in contrast, was in the opposite direction. Having befriended Godel, Einstein 

commented that he knew now, at last, that in mathematics too one could find a path to 

the fundamental. In befriending Einstein, Godel was reawakened to his early interest in 

physics. On their long walks home from the office, Einstein, forever cheerful, would 

attempt to raise the spirits of the gloomy and pessimistic Godel by recounting his latest 

insights on general relativity. Sadly, however, pessimism blossomed into paranoia. The 

economist Oskar Morgenstern, calling one day on his good friend, was shocked to find the 

great Godel hiding in the cellar behind the furnace. 

From those long walks that Einstein and Godel shared, from their endless discussions, 

something beautiful would soon be born. The scene was pregnant with possibility. Time, 

which has taunted thinkers from Plato to Saint Augustine to Kant, had finally met its match 

in Einstein. While the U-boats of his former fatherland were stalking the Allied fleet, 

this most un-German of Germans was hunting a more elusive prey. He had amazed the 

world decades earlier when he alone succeeded in capturing time itself in the equations of

elativity. "Every boy in the streets of Gottingen," his countryman David Hilbert wrote, 

"understands more about four-dimensional geometry than Einstein. Yet, in spite of that, 

Einstein did the work and not the mathematicians." Relativity had rendered time, the most 

elusive of beings, manageable and docile by transforming it into a fourth dimension of 

space, or rather, of relativistic space-time. Sharing with Godel his latest thoughts on the 

four-dimensional universe of space-time that he himself had conjured into being, Einstein 

was sowing the seeds of relativity in the mind of a thinker who would later be described as 

a combination of Einstein and Kafka. 

If Einstein had succeeded in transforming time into space, Godel would perform a trick yet 

more magical: He would make time disappear. Having already rocked the mathematical 

world to its foundations with his incompleteness theorem, Godel now took aim at Einstein 

and relativity. Wasting no time, he announced in short order his discovery of new and 

unsuspected cosmological solutions to the field equations of general relativity, solutions in 

which time would undergo a shocking transformation. The mathematics, the physics and 

the philosophy of Godel's results were all new. In the possible worlds governed by these 

new cosmological solutions, the so-called rotating or Godel universes, it turned out that 

the space-time structure is so greatly warped or curved by the distribution of matter that 

there exist timelike future-directed paths by which a spaceship, if it travels fast 

enoughóand Godel worked out the precise speed and fuel requirements, omitting only the 

lunch menuócan penetrate into any region of the past, present or future. 

Godel, the union of Einstein and Kafka, had for the first time in human history proved, 

from the equations of relativity, that time travel was not a philosopher's fantasy but a 

scientific possibility. Yet again he had somehow contrived, from within the very heart of 

mathematics, to drop a bomb into the laps of the philosophers. The fallout, however, from 

this mathematical bomb was even more perilous than that from 

7 

the incompleteness theorem. Godel was quick to point out that if we can revisit the past, 

then it never really "passed." But a time that fails to pass is no time at all. Einstein saw at 

once that if Godel was right, he had not merely domesticated time: he had killed it. Time, 

"that mysterious and seemingly self-contradictory being," as Godel put it, "which, on the 

other hand, seems to form the basis of the world's and our own existence," turned out in 

the end to be the world's greatest illusion. In a word, if Einstein's relativity was real, time 

itself was merely ideal. The father of relativity was shocked. Though he praised Godel for 

his great contribution to the theory of relativity, he was fully aware that time, that elusive 

prey, had once again slipped his net. 

But now something truly amazing took place: nothing. Although in the immediate 

aftermath of Godel's discoveries a few physicists bestirred themselves to refute him and, 

when this failed, tried to generalize and explore his results, this brief flurry of interest 

soon died down. Within a few years the deep footprints in intellectual history traced by 

Godel and Einstein in their long walks home had disappeared, dispersed by the harsh winds 

of fashion and philosophical prejudice. A conspiracy of silence descended on the Einstein- 

Godel friendship and its scientific consequences.

An association no less remarkable than the friendship between Michelangelo and 

Leonardoóif such had occurredóhas simply vanished from sight. To this day, not only is the 

man on the street unaware of the intimate relationship between these two giants of the 

twentieth century, even the most exhaustive intellectual biographies of Einstein either 

omit all mention of this friendship or at best begrudge a sentence or two. Whereas a whole 

industry has grown up in search of Lieserl, the "love child" of Einstein's first marriage, the 

child of the imagination that was born of the friendship of Einstein and Godel has been 

abandoned. 

Only in the last few years has this child, the Godel universe, received any glimmer of 

recognition. This comes from the redoubtable Stephen Hawking. Revisiting the rotating 

Godel universe, Hawking was moved to deliver the highest of compliments. So threatening 

did 

he find results like Godel's demonstrating the consistency of time travel with the laws of 

relativity, that he put forward what amounts to an anti-Godel postulate. If accepted, 

Hawking's famous "chronology protection conjecture" would precisely negate Godel's 

contribution to relativity. So physically unacceptable did Hawking find conclusions like 

Godel's that he felt compelled to propose what looks like an ad hoc modification of the 

laws of nature that would have the effect of ruling out the Godel universe as a genuine 

physical possibility. 

Hawking's attempt to neutralize the Godel universe shows how dangerous it is to break the 

conspiracy of silence that has shrouded the Godel-Einstein connection. Not only does this 

mysterious silence hide from the world one of the most moving and consequential 

friendships in the history of science, it also keeps the world from realizing the full 

implications of the Einstein revolution. It is one thing to overturn, as Einstein did, Newton's 

centuries-old conception of the absoluteness and independence of space and time. It is 

quite another to demonstrate that time is not just relative but ideal. Unlike Einstein, a 

classicist who forever sought continuity with the past, Godel was at heart an ironist, a 

truly subversive thinker. With his incompleteness theorem he had shaken the foundations 

of mathematics, prompting the great mathematician David Hilbert to propose a new law of 

logic just to refute Godel's results. The Godel universe, correctly understood, shares with 

the incompleteness theorem an underlying methodology and purpose. It is a bomb, built 

from cosmology's most cherished materials, lobbed into the foundations of physics. 

In the footsteps of Godel and Einstein, then, can be heard an echo of the Zeitgeist, a clue 

to the secret of the great and terrible twentieth century, a century that, like the 

seventeenth, will go down in history as one of genius. The residents of Blue Hill, 

preoccupied with war and the enemy out at sea, had failed to take the full measure of 

their man. 

2 A German Bias for Metaphysics

The German man of science was a philosopher. J.T. MERZ 

It is a remarkable fact.. . that at least in one point relativity theory has furnished a very 

striking confirmation of Kantian doctrines. 

KURT GODEL 

Physically they were opposites. Godel, thin to the point of emacia-tion, his spectral body 

hidden, even in the heat of summer, in overcoat and scarf, gaunt, harrowed, and haunted, 

peering through thick glasses like an owl from another dimension, could not fail to arouse 

suspicion. Early in life he had come to the conclusion that the less food one ate the better. 

This dubious insight he carried out with ruthless consistency, unencumbered by the excess 

baggage of common sense, a faculty he approached life without. His preconception, fueled 

by hypochondria that grew out of childhood rheumatic fever and by paranoia about the 

intentions of doctors, developed into a neurosis that would eventually take his life. During 

several periods of extreme stress he was confined to sanatoria, from one of which, by 

some accounts, he enlisted the services of his wife to escape. At his death he weighed a 

mere sixty-five pounds. 

Einstein, in contrast, whose sanity was never in question, was as satisfied by a good 

sausage as by a good theorem. He had a taste for solid German cooking, which he 

consumed with relish, topped off by his omnipresent pipe. Friends and wives would be 

swept aside in the current of 

his turbulent life, but his pipe never left him. Late in life he was the proud owner of a 

respectable professorial paunch. "I have firmly resolved," he wrote his wife Elsa, "to bite 

the dust, when my time comes, with the minimum of medical assistance, and until then to 

sin cheerfully ... smoke like a chimney, work like a beaver, eat without thought or choice, 

and walk only in agreeable company, in other words, rarely." 

With brown hair and blue eyes, Godel measured barely five feet six. This number came as 

a surprise to his colleagues. His intellectual presence was so great that his modest height 

often went unnoticed. His frailty, however, was obvious. "Of course he has no children," 

the proprietor of the Blue Hill Inn said of Godel; "he hasn't the strength to make babies." 

He did, however, have in his youth the strength to pursue women. "There is no doubt," 

wrote a college friend, Olga Taussky-Todd, "about the fact that Godel had a liking for 

members of the opposite sex, and he made no secret about this fact." Godel, she went on, 

was not beyond showing off his acquaintance with a pretty face. Taussky-Todd herself, to 

her dismay, was once enlisted to come to the mathematical aid of one such young woman 

who in turn was trying to make an impression on Godel. Was this interest in women 

confined to Godel's youth? Not if his wife, Adele, is to believed. Teasing her husband, she 

quipped that the Institute for Advanced Studyó which she liked to call an 

Altersversorgungsheim, or home for elderly pensionersówas packed with pretty female 

students who lined up outside the office doors of the great professors. Einstein, who with 

well-knit limbs and hardy disposition measured five feet nine, did actually make babies, in 

and out of wedlock. Early and late, the constraints of marriage did not hamper him, even

as his discoveries in physics were unconstrained by the conventions of classical physics. 

The event itself of entering into the institution of marriage bore the unmistakable stamp 

of unconventionality: Though Einstein wished to marry his cousin Elsa, he desired even 

more strongly to marry her twenty-year-old daughter, Ilsa. "Albert himself," wrote the 

flustered daughter to a friend, "is refusing to take any decision; he is prepared to marry 

either Mama or me." 

11 

Clothing too, like marriage, he considered a bourgeois affectation whose strictures he did 

his best to circumvent, spurning socks, tie, and belt whenever possible. Hair uncut and 

unkempt, he could embarrass a female guest when his robe, with nothing underneath, fell 

open, and then express surprise at her consternation. Bursting with the juices of life, he 

was an indefatigable optimist whose faith in common sense and human nature survived 

even the Holocaust. 

Godel, in contrast, was in the fullest sense of the phrase "buttoned up." Dressed severely 

even in the summer heat, he was the very model of dour reserve: gloomy, pessimistic, 

averse to all human contact except for the closest of friends and the direst of intellectual 

necessities. The institute still echoes with stories of Godel's foolproof method for evading a 

rendezvous. He would carefully arrange a precise location in space and time for the 

projected meeting. With these coordinates in place, he confided to friends, he had 

achieved certainty as to where not to be when the appointed time arrived. Yet this 

method had its limita-tions. Finding himself trapped at an unavoidable institute tea, he 

negotiated the territory between guests, noted the mathematician Paul Halmos in his 

memoirs, with maximum attention to the goal of avoiding any possibility of physical 

contact. 

Against every stereotype of the pure mathematicianóand particularly one who, like Godel, 

had studied and taught in ViennaóGodel was all but allergic to the masters of classical 

music, preferring instead light classics and operettas, and was even more so to the 

abstractions of modern art. He was untouched by intellectual snobbery and made plain his 

love of fairy tales. His fondness for Walt Disney cartoons was no secret to his friends. 

Comedies, however, he disliked. 

Einstein was consumed by his passion for the great Austrian-German classicists, Bach, 

Mozart and Beethoven, but especially Mozart. His friend and biographer, Philipp Frank, 

offered some shrewd observations about what made Mozart special. What passed for many 

as a sign of Einstein's cynicism was for Frank an expression rather of Einstein's urge "to 

make the serious things in the world tolerable by means of a playful guise." But this also 

characterizes much of Mozart's music, 

"which might also be called 'cynical.' It does not take our tragic world very seriously." 

Einstein was always ready to perform Mozart at a moment's notice on his beloved violin, 

which he played, myths notwithstanding, very well. He "was an experienced sight reader," 

wrote the professional violinist Boris Schwartz, "with a steady rhythm, excellent

intonation, a clear and pure tone, and a minimum of vibrato." Only his pipe was as familiar 

a companion. Violin and pipe: these will be forever the icons of the great scientist, 

together with his tousled hair. 

Godel, as is clear from photographs, was meticulously clean-shaven, every hair combed in 

place, whereas as every schoolchild knows, a small brush of a moustache floated above 

Einstein's full lips. Combs, moreover, in the Einstein household were verboten. With the 

visual signature comes the acoustic: When something or someone struck Einstein funny, a 

huge belly laugh welled up inside the scientist and erupted like a volcano that shook his 

entire body. More than a few times it shook up as well the surprised object of this 

laughter, who realized too late its full meaning. Godel, in contrast, had a soft, high 

pitched chuckle, more a musing to himself on the ironies of the universe than a fullthroated 

laugh. Raising the pitch of his voice at the end of each sentence and trailing off 

into silence, he left his audience with a feeling of detached query. (As a child of four he 

had been nicknamed Herr Warum, Mr. Why. "Why is your nose so large?" he asked an 

embarrassed guest.) 

By age a generation apart, Einstein and Godel shared an anniversary by one degree of 

separation. The year of Einstein's birth, 1879, was that of Godel's mother, Marianne. (It 

was also the year that saw publication of Gottlob Frege's masterpiece, Begriffsschrift, and 

thus the birth of modern mathematical logic, a field Godel would raise to unparalleled 

heights.) They were born into different religions, Einstein a Jew, Godel baptized a 

Lutheran. Skeptical of the faith of his fathers in his youth, with the rise of Nazism Einstein 

rediscovered what he called his "tribal companions" and became a passionate, if thorny, 

Zionist. He never did, however, embrace the transcendent God of his people, accounting 

himself rather a "deeply religious unbeliever." His hero was not Moses but Spinoza, the 

pantheist and excommunicant, and he re- 

13 

fleeted this predilection throughout a scientific career in which such seemingly 

transcendent, untouchable things as space, time and light were revealed to be fully 

immanent and subject to physical causality. 

Godel was not a pantheist but rather a self-described theist, "following Leibniz," he said, 

"not Spinoza." Spinoza's God, he said, "is less than a person. Mine is more than a person. . . 

. He can play the role of a person." He noted the oft-neglected fact that the founders of 

modern science were not atheists. More radical than Einstein, he belonged to a rare breed 

of thinker: the true believers. Whereas "ninety per cent of philosophers these days," he 

would say, "consider it the business of philosophy to knock religion out of people's heads," 

he would exploit the machinery of modern logic to reconstruct Leibniz's famous 

"ontological argument" for the existence of God. Though not a Jew, he was nevertheless 

taken for one. In a Vienna teeming with Nazis, his wife once employed her umbrella to 

fend off a group of rowdies who were jostling Godel, mistaking him for a Jew.

The misattribution was not confined to Nazis. While at the Insti-tute for Advanced Study in 

Princeton, Godel was for a time a member of an eliteóa very eliteódiscussion group, 

consisting of himself, Einstein, the German physicist Wolfgang Pauli, and Bertrand Russell, 

one of the founders of modern "analytical" philosophy. Russell reacted badly to the 

discussions, finding them too philosophical in the "old-fashioned sense." (The failings of an 

entire century are crystallized in this fact.) In an unpleasant aside he vented his 

frustration: "All three ol the others were Jews and exiles, and in intention, cosmopolitans," 

he wrote later, "[who shared] a German bias for metaphysics." "I am not a Jew," Godel 

would respond later, "even though I don't think this question is of any importance." He 

admired the tenacity of the Jewish people. "Kurt had a friendly attitude toward people of 

the Jewish faith," said his friend Olga Taussky-Todd. "And once he said out of the blue that 

it was a miracle how, without a country, they were able to survive for thousands of years, 

almost like a nation, merely by their faith." Einstein, wishing to eliminate the Jewish need 

for miracles, pushed hard for most of his life for a homeland for the nation that had 

survived so many years without a home. (Never too concerned with consistencyóunlike his 

logician companionóhe was undisturbed by his earlier briefs against nationalism.) 

Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Einstein and Godel abandoned comfortable university 

positions in Berlin and Vienna when the Nazis came to power in the 1930s. At the zenith of 

their powers, they were snatched up by the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study in 

Princeton, good European root stock for the vineyards of the new world. Together they 

wandered the narrow streets of a cloistered and provincial academic town, they who once 

strode the boulevards of the great capitals of Europe, centerpieces of a once great 

civilization crashing down in ruins. Strangers to each other in Europe, it was not until 1942 

that they began the friendship that lasted until Einstein's death in 1955, a loss from which 

Godel never recovered. Einstein, a German Jew in a nest of Wasps, felt out of place in 

Princeton. Godel, already a recluse, resented less the isolation, although his wife, Adele, 

suffered. A cafe dancer in Vienna, Adele was out of her element in the elite college town. 

When an opportunity opened up to move to Harvard, she pleaded for the more 

cosmopolitan Cambridge, Massachusetts. But Godel was not prepared to accept an offer 

where teaching was required. 

What attraction could have drawn together such opposites as Einstein and Godel? Certainly 

not scientific agreement. This was not a case of the strong force uniting like-charged 

protons in the atomic nucleus. The charges here were opposite. Godel opined, in fact, that 

one of the reasons Einstein enjoyed his company was precisely because he made no 

attempt to hide his very different views, not just in politics and philosophy but in physics. 

"I frequently held an opinion," Godel said, "counter to Einstein's and made no attempt to 

conceal my disagreement." Einstein's failed search, for example, for a unified field theory 

to unite the domain of quantum mechanics with general relativity, which occupied much of 

their discussions, was a particular target of Godel's skepticism. 

Indeed, Godel was skeptical of the ultimate significance of natural science itself, despite 

its great success in enabling us (as he put it) to 

15

uild TVs and bombs. At a faculty dinner at the institute the young John Bahcall, having 

introduced himself as a new astrophysicist on the faculty, was taken aback when Godel 

replied flatly that he didn't believe in natural science. By Godel's lights, physics had taken 

the wrong turn centuries ago when it chose to follow the path laid by the naturalistically 

minded British empiricist Isaac Newton, rather than that of the German idealist Gottfried 

Leibniz. Godel's fascination with Leibniz was boundless, prompting a mathematical 

colleague, Paul Erdos, to offer a rebuke: "You became a mathematician," he told Godel, 

"so that people should study you, not that you should study Leibniz." Godel even succeeded 

in transferring his own paranoia to Leibniz, arguing at length that some of his hero's crucial 

manuscripts had been secretly destroyed by "those who do not want man to become more 

intelligent." "You have a vicarious persecution complex," replied his friend Karl Menger, "on 

Leibniz's behalf." Menger, like most intellectuals a child of the Enlightenment, went on to 

ask why none of Voltaire's papers had been destroyed. "Who ever became more 

intelligent," Godel answered, "by reading Voltaire?" 

Further separating Einstein from Godel was the fact that Einstein never fully resolved his 

native suspicion of mathematics. To the end, the great physicist favored his cherished 

physical intuitions. Even though it was precisely Minkowski's mathematical reworking of 

special relativity in terms of four-dimensional geometry (which Einstein resented at the 

time) that led to the mathematical abstractions of general relativity, the physicist 

remained forever wary of being led by the nose by mathematicians. He confessed once to 

being suspicious of a new move in general relativity that he said he could reach only 

mathematically (i.e., not intuitively). Godel, in contrast, always felt most secure when he 

had formulated a problem in symbolic, mathematical terms. "If you had a particular 

problem in mind," wrote Taussky-Todd, "he would start by writing it down in symbols." Yet 

Godel also believed, famously, that in mathematics too there are intuitions (a doctrine for 

which logicians still have not forgiven him). For Godel the equations of mathematics, as 

opposed to the counsels of common 

sense, would lead us into the promised land of new insights, whereas for Einstein, it was 

precisely common sense that was the final touchstone for assessing what the 

mathematicians had to offer. 

Beneath these disagreements, however, or beyond them, there was much that united the 

two minds. Both had grown to maturity in the ancient capitals of Europe. They were heirs 

to the great Austrian-Germanic philosophical tradition, with "philosophy" understood here 

in its widest sense. Prejudice aside, Russell's comment on the "German bias for 

metaphysics" had not really missed its mark. Raised in this culture, the composer Gustav 

Mahler had kept, quite naturally, in his "composing hut," volumes by both Wolfgang Goethe 

and Immanuel Kant. It comes as no surprise, then, that Godel and Einstein cut their 

philosophical teeth on the great works of Kant, whose fingerprints can be clearly discerned 

throughout the work of each. For Godel, his writings on Einstein were as much an 

expression of his interest in Kant's and Leibniz's ideas of time as of his personal association 

with Einstein. He would characterize his own contributions to relativity theoryóto Einstein's 

consternationóas showing that relativity had "verified" Kant's philosophical idealism.

Einstein's own reading of Kant, in turn, did much to free him from the excessive reliance 

on immediate sensory data to which many of his contemporaries, especially Ernst Mach, 

were susceptible. At the tender age of sixteen Einstein had reread Kant's weighty 

masterpiece, The Critique of Pure Reasonóthe same age at which Godel too read Kantóand 

as a student at the Technical Institute in Zurich he had enrolled in a course on Kant. Still, 

he often made light of the tendency, especially strong in Germany, to venerate the 

German master. "Kant," he said, "is a sort of highway with lots and lots of milestones. Then 

all the little dogs come and each deposits his bit at the milestones." 

"At the Institute in Princeton," Gerald Holton has noted, "[Einstein's] favorite topic of 

discussion with his friend Kurt Godel was . . . Kant." Kant, deeply impressed by 

Newtonómuch of his Critique, indeed, was intended to provide a philosophical foundation 

for Newton and Euclidóhad made famous the doctrine that science is fundamen- 

17 

tal and rigorous exactly to the degree to which it is mathematical. Einstein and Godel, in 

turn, each in his own way, approached the world mathematically. For both, mathematics 

was a window onto ultimate reality, not, as for many of their scientific colleagues, a mere 

tool for intellectual bookkeeping. 

Huddled over a desk in Fine Hall or walking home from the insti-tute, they were a model of 

mathematical companionship. A chance photograph taken by a visiting mathematician 

finds the two friends together on the road, each sporting a white straw hat, Einstein 

beaming tor the camera, his convex body bursting from rumpled, baggy pants held up by 

an ancient pair of suspenders, while the white linen of Godel's fitted coat holds him 

closely, his eyes fixed in a cold stare. (Two gentlemen farmers from a Faulkner novel, 

commented one observer.) Each had found in the other a rare companion who could resist 

the charms of the "new physics" of Bohr and Heisenberg, according to whom mathematics 

could no longer provide for science a picture of the world as it actually is in itselfóa 

worldviewóbut could serve only as a tool for calculation, a means for predicting the 

outcome of experiments. An impossible prescription to follow for "Mr. Why," and no less so 

for Einstein. For a signature of Einsteinian science is the Socratic search tor "definitions," 

for what something "really is," in itself (a favorite expression of Plato's). Einstein, after all, 

was the man who had taught Kant what time "really was" (the fourth dimension of 

relativistic space-time), taught Newton what gravity "really was" (the curvature of fourdimensional 

space-time), and taught everyone what energy "really was" (as every 

schoolchild knows, E = mc2). 

As students of Kant, Einstein and Godel were well aware that although space and time are 

the two fundamental forms of human experienceóspace, as Kant had it, the form of 

intuition of "outer sense," time the form of "inner sense"óit was space that was the natural 

object of scientific inquiry. And it was space that was first captured by the Greek 

mathematician Euclid, whose axiomatic-deductive system of geometryóthe bane of every 

high school studentóbecame the paradigm of science, a model from Newton to Einstein. 

Even in his new

physics of space, Einstein had simply generalized geometry from Euclid to the new non- 

Euclidean geometries, in which the angles of a triangle could sum to less, or more, than 

180 degrees. (To the end of his life, Einstein could wax nostalgic about a boyhood gift that 

had turned his life around, his "holy geometry booklet.") 

Yet as Einstein and Godel well knew, it is not space but time that in the end poses the 

greatest challenge to science. The dynamic nature of time, the fact that it flows, is 

obviously its most striking feature. But it is another thing entirely to make sense of this 

seemingly obvious truth. After all, to flow is to flow in time. What sense can one attach, 

then, to the idea of the flow of time itself? Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, tied himself 

in knots over such conundrums. Western thought as such, one might say, is characterized 

by a kind of geometrical Midas touch. Whatever science touches becomes subject to 

geometry, the science of space. "Time," Kant himself had said, "is nothing but the form of 

inner sense, that is, of the intuition of ourselves and our inner states . . . and just because 

this inner intuition yields no [geometrical] shape, we endeavor to make up for this want by 

analogies." The analogy, for Kant, is to think of time, which is not space, as spatial! "We 

cannot," said Kant, "obtain for ourselves a representation of time which is not an object of 

outer intuition [i.e., of sensory experience] except under the [spatial] image of a line." 

Thus when Einstein in 1905 captured time in special relativity, he once again transformed 

it into space, this time, into the fourth, temporal component of the geometrical structure 

of four-dimensional "space-time." Not for nothing did G.J. Whitrow write, "the primary 

object of Einstein's profound researches on the forces of nature has been well epitomized 

in the slogan, 'the geometrization of physics,' time being completely absorbed into the 

geometry of a hyper-space." The universe, however, not being empty of matter, is not 

governed by the matter-free idealization of special relativity but rather by Einstein's next 

brainchild, the general theory of relativity, the subject of Einstein's free tutorials with 

Godel. Worse, the world of general relativity, much to Einstein's displeasure, was actually 

"expanding," that is, ex- 

19 

panding over time. (God, apparently, had for once failed to consult first with Einstein.) 

But special relativity had taught the world that simultaneity, and thus time, is not, as 

Newton thought, worldwide and absolute, but rather local and relative. In what sense of 

time, then, could the universe itself be expanding, absolutely, over time? Time itself must 

have been smiling over the puzzle it had created. Appearances notwithstanding, Einstein 

had not after all succeeded in trapping this elusive prey in the net of general relativity. As 

Hubble showed, the universe really is expanding! The problem could not be avoided. But if 

even Einstein had run aground on these rocky shoals, who was left to take the lead? Whom 

could one compare with Einstein if not his traveling companion in general relativity, Kurt 

Godel? But what made Godel the logician, whose universe consisted of the timeless 

mathematical realm of sets and numbers, the right person to carry forward Einstein's torch 

into the uncertainties of the new space-time?

3 Vienna: Logical Circles 

After one session in which Schlick, Hahn, Neurath and Waismann had talked about 

language, but in which neither Godel nor I had spoken a word, I said on the way home, 

"Today we out-Wittgensteined these Wittgensteinians: we kept silent." 

KARL MENGER 

Born into the Austrian-German minority of Brno, a city now in the Czech Republic, the 

place where Mendel laid the foundations of the science of genetics, the Godel brothers, 

Rudolf and Kurt, took it as a given that they would undertake their final academic studies 

at the storied University of Vienna. Vienna remained even after the Great War one of the 

premier intellectual centers of the world, distinguished in law, medicine (Rudolf would 

become a radiologist), physics, mathematics, social sciences, economics, philosophy, and 

theology. In those years there passed through the city many of the individuals who created 

the twentieth century, including Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis; the 

composers Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler as well as Arnold Schoenberg, the inventor of 

twelve-tone music; the painters Gustav Klimt and Oscar Kokoschka, as well as the 

revolutionary architect Adolf Loos, who presaged the famous Bauhaus school; the physicistphilosophers 

Ludwig Boltzmann and Ernst Mach; and the philosophers Karl Popper and 

Ludwig Wittgenstein. The list could be extended indefinitely. Wittgenstein, himself a kind 

of minimalist, was an admirer of the minimalism practiced by Loos, and 

harbored architectural designs of his own. The attraction was mutual: "You are me!" said 

Loos to Wittgenstein when they met in 1914. The ratio of intellectual genius to square 

footage in Godel's Vienna takes one's breath away. 

Among those who were privileged to think the unthinkable, however, there is another 

name that belongs here. Adolf Hitler's path to Vienna began in Linz, the city of his birth, 

where in 1904 he attended the same realschule as Wittgenstein. Though the same age as 

young Ludwig, young Adolf was two years behind him at school. There exists a class 

photograph in which Wittgenstein appears to be placed near Hitler. 

Both of the Godel boys excelled in secondary school in Brno, but Kurt's gifts were clearly 

exceptional. He was a standout in all subjects, from science and mathematics to 

languages, and is said never to have made a single error in his Latin exercises. (It was in 

mathematics, ironically, that he received his only less than perfect grade.) Arriving in 

Vienna in 1924, Godel decided at first to concentrate in physics, a choice that would serve 

him well. He also received a solid grounding in philosophy, especially the history of 

philosophy, with Heinrich Gomperz, and excelled in all his classes in mathematics, a 

subject in which he acquired by graduation a remarkable degree of depth as well as 

breadth, from geometry to number theory and mathematical logic. It would soon emerge 

that he was embarked on an intellectual journey in the direction of increased rigor and 

precision, from mathematical physics to mathematics, from there to mathematical logic, 

and finally from mathematical logic to mathematical philosophy.

As an undergraduate, Godel was particularly impressed by the lectures on number theory, 

attended by hundreds of students, given by Philip Furtwangler, a cousin of the legendary 

orchestral conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, whose fame in those years would turn to 

infamy when he declined to leave Germany during the next world war. Godel claimed later 

that Philip Furtwangler, who was paralyzed from the neck down, gave the best lectures he 

had ever heard. It was Furtwangler whom Godel credited with his turn to mathematics. 

The drama of 

his lectures was heightened by the fact that Furtwangler lectured from his wheelchair, 

without notes, while an assistant wrote equations on the blackboard. The feeling of 

disembodiment this engendered fit the subject of the lectures perfectly. The natural 

numbers 0, 1, 2, 3,. . . seem to possess the kind of independent existence and "geometry" 

usually reserved for concrete physical objects. Unsurprisingly, therefore, this branch of 

mathematics is a breeding ground for Platonists, who like Plato believe in the objective, 

independent existence of ideal, disembodied "forms," of which the natural numbers are a 

paradigm. These are no more subject to the arbitrary manipulations of the human will than 

the distant stars, which we observe but cannot touch. (As the minimalist mathematician 

Kronecker put it, "God made the natural numbers; all else is the work of man." For Godel, 

all numbers are "the work of God.") 

Godel's journey from physics to mathematical logic took place just as the new field was 

coming into its own as a well-established intellectual enterprise, although, truth be told, 

logic remains to this day in the eyes of many mathematicians a poor relation, not quite 

mathematics, not quite philosophy. Having for centuries been the province of rhetoricians 

and grammarians, logic emerged as a branch of mathematics at the turn of the century, 

due in large part to the work of the German philosopher-mathematician Gottlob Frege, an 

acquaintance of both Russell and Wittgenstein and a seminal influence on their thinking. 

Frege's early masterpiece, Begriffsscbrift (Concept Script), published in 1879, succeeded in 

simultaneously axiomatizing logic and formalizing it, that is, formulating it in an artificially 

constructed, purely symbolic language, prefiguring today's computer programming 

languages. The rules of such a language are unambiguous and can be followed 

"mechanically," without the need to understand the meaning of the symbols. Not content 

with this, Frege employed this new math-ematized logicówhich for him was not a mere 

calculating device, but a proper science, with its own content and subject matteróas itself 

a foundation for mathematics, in particular for arithmetic, or number theory. 

Another German mathematician, David Hilbert, in turn developed a mathematical theory 

devoted to the study of the new symbolic logical systems like Frege's, a field that came to 

be known as metamathematics, since it involved the mathematical study of mathematical 

systems themselves. (Hilbert had been introduced to the idea of metamathematicsóand 

more generally to the notion of a metalanguageóby the Dutch mathematician L. E. J. 

Brouwer when they shared a holiday in 1909 at the resort of Scheveningen, the 

Netherlands. In the course of time, Brouwer would become Hilbert's nemesis.) This went 

beyond Frege, who believed that there is only one genuine logical system, the one he had 

developed, and that there was no "stepping outside" it to compare it with other systems or 

with the objects themselves, i.e., mathematical modelsóa conception outside the 

mathematical mainstream that would eventually be taken up by Frege's admirer 

Wittgenstein. It was indeed in this new mathematical field of metamathematics that the 

question of completeness was raised by Hilbert, who asked whether a given symbolic

logical system, such as the one developed by Frege in Begriffsschrift, given its axioms and 

proof procedures, was both internally consistent (the axioms and proof procedures could 

not be used to prove two statements that contradicted each other) and complete (the 

proof procedures sufficed to prove every true statement in the system). It was in 

answering just such questions that Godel discovered his famous incompleteness theorem. 

The development of mathematical logic also went beyond Frege insofar as it replaced 

Frege's use of concepts (the Begriffe of his Begriffsschrift) with the extensions of these 

conceptsói.e., the set of objects described by the conceptsówhich came to be known as 

sets or classes. But whereas for Frege the theory of concepts and their extensions had 

been contained in logic itselfóthe very part of Frege's theory that Bertrand Russell would 

later show contained an inconsistencyóas the field developed in the early years of the 

twentieth century, set theory came into being as a new field unto itself, with its own 

axioms. This new axiomatic set theory, developed by such thinkers as Ernst Zermelo 

and Abraham Fraenkel, replaced both the axiomatized theory of concepts and their 

extensions of Frege, as well as the earlier, unaxioma-tized, "naive" set theory of Cantor. 

Frege's work gave birth, then, to two new subfields of mathematics: mathematical logic 

and axiomatic set theory. 

Godel's mathematical advisor, Hans Hahn, kept abreast of all these new developments in 

mathematical logic and set theory. Indeed, he directed a seminar devoted to the classic of 

modern mathematical logic, Principia Matbematica, by Bertrand Russell and Albert North 

Whitehead. Godel did not participate in that seminar, but he did attend one given by the 

philosopher Moritz Schlick on Bertrand Russell's later work, Introduction to Mathematical 

Philosophy (written while Russell was in jail in England for his protests against British 

participation in World War I). Godel also attended a seminar on the foundations of 

mathematics offered by Rudolph Carnap, who had been a student of Frege's at the 

University of Jena. Carnap would shortly become one of the most influential members of 

Schlick's "Vienna Circle." In a city full of cliques, salons and discussion groups on every 

conceivable topic, the Vienna Circle was the most exclusive. 

Outside the circle, Godel's life was not unlike those of other well-off Viennese 

intellectuals. With his brother, Rudolf, his senior by four years, Kurt lived in a comfortable 

apartment in which they were joined regularly by their mother, Marianne. Together with 

her, the two brothers enjoyed automotive vacations in Rudolf's new Chrysler, one of the 

first in the region, to spots as far away as Marienbad. Though the family employed a 

chauffeur, on vacations the brothers preferred doing the driving. Kurt liked to drive fast. 

This, combined with his penchant for indulging in abstract reverie while behind the wheel, 

led his future wife, Adele, to put an end to his driving career. In town, Marianne made 

certain that her two academic sons did not neglect the full cultural offerings laid before 

them by beautiful Vienna. These included plays, with box seats at Max Reinhardt's famous 

Josefstadt Theater, and concerts, especially light opera, of which Godel was especially 

fond. 

Godel's exceptionally clear mind made him a much sought after intellectual companion 

among his fellow students. He was generous with his time and patient with his 

interlocutors. His friend Karl Menger writes that Godel "always grasped problematic points

quickly and his replies often opened new perspectives for the enquirer. He expressed all 

his insights . . . with a certain shyness and a charm that awoke warm and personal feelings 

for him in many a listener." But Godel's shyness should not be mistaken for timidity. When 

the already distinguished Carnap suggested to his young student that he write some 

encyclopedia entries to gain recognition, Godel responded that he had no need for such 

devices to achieve renown. Nor was he timid with women, or above a little showing off. 

His fellow student Olga Taussky-Todd would later describe one particular encounter that 

impressed her, albeit negatively. In a classroom near the mathematical seminar, "the door 

opened and a very small, very young girl entered. She was good-looking . . . and wore a 

beautiful, quite unusual summer dress. Not much later Kurt entered and . .. the two of 

them left together. It seemed a clear show off on the part of Kurt." Later, this same young 

woman sought the reluctant Taussky-Todd's mathematical assistance in an attempt, 

apparently, to impress Godel. (She complained to Taussky-Todd, however, about Godel 

being spoiled, inclined to rise late in the morning, and so on.) According to Rudolf, his 

brother developed a particular fondness for a family-run restaurant near their apartment, 

an attraction he attributed to Kurt's interest in the attractive twenty-year-old daughter, 

who served as a waitress. 

Generally, however, Godel seems to have preferred the company of older women. His very 

first romantic interest, the daughter of friends who used to visit his family, was described 

as an "eccentric beauty," but she was also ten years his senior, and his parents put an end 

to the relationship. More serious was the attachment he formed at the age of twenty-one 

for Adele Porkert, a nightclub performeróself described as a "ballet dancer," a profession 

at that time only marginally more acceptableóemployed at Der Nachtfalter (The Moth). Six 

years his 

senior, Adele was married, her face partially disfigured by a "port wine stain," and Catholic 

(a religion for which neither Godel nor his parents had any sympathy). Her marriage, 

however, was brief and unhappy, and a prolonged romance ensued between the dancer 

and the mathematician. Georg Kreisel, who used to visit Kurt and Adele, described her as 

lacking formal education but possessing "a real flair for le mot juste." In addition, 

according to Kreisel, Adele liked to tease Kurt by constructing "farfetched grounds for 

jealousy," and also by making fun of his curious interest in ghosts and demons. Kurt's 

parents, for reasons that are obvious if not admirable, were not amused by Adele and 

objected strenuously to the relationship. It was only after his father's death in 1929, at the 

age of fifty-four, that marriage to Adele became a possibility, though it took nine more 

years for the deal to be clinched. (The delay, according to Godel's friend in later life, Hao 

Wang, may have been partly responsible lor the fact that the Godels never had children, a 

circumstance that would weigh heavily on the increasingly sad and lonely Adele.) 

The brothers were separated not only by Kurt's interest in womenó his brother never 

marriedóbut by the fact that while Rudolf spent the day at the hospital, Kurt attended the 

university. If not at the university or with a woman or attending a play, he would repair 

frequently to one of Vienna's famous coffeehouses, generally to one of the cafes that were 

the preferred haunts of the Vienna Circle, such as the Reicbsrat, Schattentor, or Arkaden. 

Though far from gregarious, Godel developed close friendships with several colleagues and 

pro-lessors, including Carnap and Hahn, as well as Herbert Feigl and Marcel Natkin of the 

Schlick circle. Von Neumann, too, became a friend, and a close one at that. Feigel, for his 

part, recalled long walks with Godel through the parks of Vienna and coffeehouse 

discussions of matters philosophical, logical, mathematical, and scientific that continued 

late into the night. And Karl Menger, who was reported to have been the favorite student

of Godel's advisor, Hahn, also became a good friend of Godel's, inviting him to participate 

inó and eventually edit the proceedings ofóthe mathematical colloquium 

he founded. The most organized and regular philosophical interactions, however, between 

Godel and other minds were doubtless the weekly discussions conducted in Schlick's Vienna 

Circle, of which he became a regular member in 1926, having been introduced into the 

circle by Hahn. 

Godel's Vienna was a city of coffeehouses, each devoted to a particular intellectual 

themeóthose with white table tops, convenient for writing formulas, being especially 

favored by mathematiciansóas well as of intellectual circles, especially philosophical ones. 

The theme of the Vienna Circle was logical positivism. Though a guest in the house of 

Schlick, Godel was hardly enamored of the circle's credo of positivism, nor of the hero of 

this cult, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The bible of the Vienna Circle was Wittgenstein's Tractatus 

(Tractatus Logico-Pbilosophicus was the full title, suggested by Wittgenstein's friend and 

former teacher, G. E. Moore, emulating Spinoza's Tractatus Tbeo-logico-Politicus), 

completed while the author was a prisoner of war. But Wittgenstein's true war, like that of 

the Vienna Circle, was not against the Allies but against metaphysics. Positivism, a 

particularly severe brand of intellectual minimalismóa spirit that thrived in Godel's 

Viennaóis an antiphilosophical philosophy dedicated to the belief that most of what has 

passed for deep metaphysical thinking over the centuries is nothing more than confusion 

based on an inadequate understanding of language, which, through artifice, leads the mind 

by the nose in all the wrong directions. 

Godel did not share the positivist credo that philosophy begins and ends with an analysis of 

language and its limitations, nor Wittgenstein-ian's doctrine that the subject matter of 

traditional philosophy, as opposed to that of physical science, is precisely that which 

cannot be expressed in language. He had no sympathy for the famous line with which the 

Tractatus concludes, that "what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence," as 

shown in a reminiscence by Menger after the two had attended a session of the Vienna 

Circle: "Today we . . . out-Wittgensteined these Wittgensteinians; we kept silent." 

Apparently, Godel and Wittgenstein never met, though Godel said that he 

29 

saw him once, when both attended a lecture in Vienna by the Dutch anti-Platonist, 

"intuitionist" mathematician, L.E. J. Brouwer. 

In the meetings of the Vienna Circle, Godel rarely spoke, signaling his agreement or 

disagreement only by a slight inclination of the head. Participation in these meetings was 

by invitation only, and membership hovered between ten and twenty. The regular 

participants included Schlick and Carnap, the philosophers Carl Hempel, Otto Neu-rath, 

Friedrich Waismann and Feigl, and finally, Menger, Hahn and Godel. Conspicuous by their 

absence were the philosophers Popper and Wittgenstein, the former because he had not 

been invited due to his views about the latter, the latter because he had declined the 

invitation. The meetings took place in a dingy room filled with rows of chairs and long

tables on the ground floor of the building in the Boltz-manngasse that housed the 

mathematical and physical institutes. Early arrivals were expected to clear the chairs away 

from the blackboard to allow the day's speaker room to maneuver. One table was reserved 

for smokers. Intellectually, the circle was devoted to the theme of positivism, the doctrine 

that physical science, whose ultimate basis is sensory experience, exhausts what can be 

known, leaving philosophy the task primarily of policing the ever-present tendency of 

thought to pretend to more knowledge than can be delivered by science. (Wittgenstein 

himself, though their hero, was not a positivist. What separated him from them was this: 

what must be "passed over in silence" was for Wittgenstein precisely what had value.) 

The note struck by the positivists was hardly new. Immanuel Kant had declared centuries 

earlier that "reason," as such, stands in need of an internal "critique." In the "Dialectic" of 

his Critique of Pure Reason he described in detail reason's attempts to fly through thin 

airóa region, he noted, heavily populated by philosophers. Nevertheless, Kant himself 

proceeded to develop a system of philosophy that pretended to a kind of knowledge not 

derivable from science. This the new positivism rejected. What gave it its "logical" twist 

were the recent efforts by Frege, Russell, Hilbert, and others to develop logic both as an 

instrument that served to formalize the physical sciencesóand 

thus to assist in their policingóand as a new branch of mathematics that was 

simultaneously a foundation for the rest of mathematics and a close cousin to what was 

worth preserving in the philosophical tradition. It was unsurprising that Schlick's logical 

positivists chose as their patron saint the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, since it was one of 

the themes of that slender but potent work that a primary task of philosophy is to separate 

clearly and forever what can be said from what cannot, to clear out centuries of 

philosophical clutter and render a clear path for science. 

For Wittgenstein, the new logic of Frege and Russell provided the tool that made not just 

the attempt but the completion of this task possible: "I. . . believe myself to have found," 

he declared modestly in his preface, "on all essential points, the final solution of the 

problems." Wittgenstein, moreover, had a line on a problem that had haunted the 

positivists. The physical sciences that served as their model for all thought were rigorous 

precisely to the degree that they were mathematical, yet mathematics itself is not a 

physical science. It appears altogether immune to the touchstone of sensory experience 

that forms the very basis of physical science. Without an account of mathematics, then, 

the new minimalist edifice of logical positivism threatened to crumble under its own 

weight. The Tractatus was a gift from God, for if Wittgenstein was right, mathematics was 

not a science at all. Strictly speaking, there is no proper knowledge in mathematics, no 

truth. Rather, the systems of equations represent conventional rules for the manipulation 

of abstract symbols that make possible the genuine knowledge offered by physical science. 

With this approach, mathematics as such is merely a calculus, a calculating device, not a 

language of thought, as it was for Frege. As Frege's former student Carnap put it, 

mathematics is not a genuine language that can express thoughts but rather the "logical 

syntax of language." This was a doctrine that Godel, the true heir to Frege, would spend 

the rest of his life working to defeat. 

Wittgenstein was the patron saint of the Vienna Circle. "I can testify to this . . . ," wrote 

Olga Taussky-Todd. "Wittgenstein was the

idol of this group. ... An argument could be settled by citing his Tractates." The unofficial 

saint, however, was Godel's future friend Einstein, considered by many to be the greatest 

scientist since Newton. (Wittgenstein himself once stated that in a sense he was a follower 

of Einstein.) It was not only that Einstein's theories had revolutionized the scientific image 

of the world. The philosophical aspects of Einstein's theory of relativity held a special 

appeal. In the special theory of relativity, Einstein had rejected Newton's "metaphysical" 

postulates of absolute space and time, which resisted any direct empirical confirmation. 

Time, Einstein insisted, was physically real only to the extent that it could be measured by 

a clock. (As the positivists would put it, the meaning of a term consists in its method of 

verification.) Since physical experimentation demonstrated that not all clocks could be 

definitively synchronized, Einstein declared that time was not after all absolute, as 

Newton had believed, but rather relative to the frame of reference of the clock by which it 

was measured. Similarly, since there existed no definitive empirical method to detect 

whether an object's motion through space was absolute, Einstein declared that all spatial 

relations were also relative to a given reference frame chosen, by convention, as the "rest 

frame." For the positivists, the success of this theory meant that the tenets of their credo 

made for good science, while their rejection could lead to bad philosophy or a scientific 

dead end. 

For Einstein, the rejection of absolute space and time was merely a statement about the 

physical world. It was much more, however, to the Vienna Circle. As much a religion as a 

scientific methodology, positivism denied that science or philosophy, with the help of 

mathematics, could provide a Weltbild, or worldview, a picture or account of ultimate 

reality. They could only supply the scientist with a method of calculation and prediction. 

In addition to rejecting the task of providing a metaphysical picture of realityóthe very 

goal of philosophy itself as it has been historically practicedóthe positivist confined his 

episte-mology to direct sensory experience, rejecting any claims for insight into, or 

intuition of, the concepts of the theorist or the abstract objects 

of the mathematician. Godel and Einstein, in contrast, held the faculty of intuition in the 

highest regard. "I put my faith in organization," John D. Rockefeller Jr. once said on 

meeting Einstein. "I put my faith in intuition," the physicist replied. Godel was even more 

explicit. In perhaps his most (in)famous philosophical remark, he laid down the gauntlet 

against positivism: "Despite their remoteness from sense-experience, we do have 

something like a perception of the objects of set theory, as is seen from the fact that the 

axioms force themselves upon us as being true. I don't see any reason why we should have 

less confidence in this kind of perception, i.e., in mathematical intuition, than in senseperception." 

For the positivist, however, there is neither an abstract realm of concepts nor 

a human faculty of intuition that could provide insight into this realm. The concepts 

invoked by the philosopher must give way to the techniques employed by the engineer. 

Thus Wittgenstein, a sometime aeronautical engineer, in the Tractatus: Mathematics is 

not, as Frege had it, a science of the platonic realm of mathematical concepts and 

objects, but rather a system of techniques for the manipulation of mathematical signs. 

The War of the Titans

That it was Vienna that gave birth to this extreme antiphilosophical philosophy was no 

accident, nor was it an accident that the Vienna Circle was its cradle. Moritz Schlick, the 

founder of the Circle, had in 1922 assumed the chair in the philosophy of the inductive 

sciences formerly occupied by Ludwig Boltzmann, and before that Ernst Mach. The 

philosopher-physicist Mach was a prominent figure at the University of Vienna, occupying 

the chair in the history and philosophy of the inductive sciences from 1895 to 1901. In 

1864, he had been professor of mathematics at Graz, in 1867, professor of physics at 

Prague. He made important contributions to acoustics, electricity, hydrodynamics, 

mechanics, optics and thermodynamics. It was Mach who in 1887 laid the basis for the 

principles of supersonics, 

which demonstrated that a material object traveling past the speed of sound would have 

an effect that is now called a "sonic boom." An object's speed relative to the speed of 

sound is today called its "Mach number," Mach 2, for example, indicating a velocity of 

twice the speed of sound. 

Mach had an enormous influence on his contemporaries. He was an early devotee of an 

extreme version of positivism and was a passionate advocate for his doctrines. His polemics 

succeeded in making a generation of scientists skeptical not only of theorists' speculations 

about the microscopic world, but even of the extended use of abstract mathematics as an 

element of mathematical theories. He was a successful polemicist and popularizer, and he 

acquired a kind of cult following among intellectuals of various stripes. His admirers 

included the young poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a member of the artistic circle Young 

Vienna, who would become famous as the librettist for the operas of the composer Richard 

Strauss. 

Mach advocated a "critique," somewhat in Kant's sense, of physical science, attempting to 

purge it of all elements not verifiable by sensory experience. "Pseudoproblems" he called 

the traditional concerns of philosophy (a term for which Carnap developed a strong 

attachment); "antimetaphysical" he subtitled the introductory remarks to one of his books. 

For Mach, the ultimate foundation of science was the data offered by the five senses. He 

was ruthless in his rejection of any conceptions that resisted empirical confirmation. 

Newton's absolute space and time were for him anathema. Is the sun "really standing still" ' 

while the earth revolves around it, or is it the earth that is "really stationary"? The 

question for Mach was nonsensical, since physical science contains no detector for one's 

position in "absolute space." Einstein, clearly, was impressed. He cited Mach explicitly as a 

seminal influence on his special theory of relativity. But Mach's influence on him was 

primarily negative, clearing the way for Einstein to find, with no help from Mach, a 

positive theory to replace Newton's. "Mach's way," wrote Einstein to his old friend Michele 

Besso, "cannot give birth to anything living; it can only exterminate harmful vermin." 

Mach's other maxims could prove positively harmful to an attempt to find a successful 

scientific theory. For one, he was constitutionally opposed to the forming of "models" in 

physics, simplified abstract simulacra of real, complex phenomena, fruitful in forming 

theoretical constructions that can be tested against empirical facts. He labored under the 

illusion that science could be built upon the basis of "inductions," generalizations based on 

patterns in observed phenomena. Einstein's proclivity was for gedankenexperiments, 

thought experiments, in which the imagination manipulated images to see what would 

happen if a hypothesis not necessarily derived from sensory experience were true. He was

more sympathetic, however, to another of Mach's maxims, against the excessive use of 

abstract mathematics in theoretical physics. Mach's preoccupation with the data of sensory 

experience made him suspicious of high flights of the mathematical imagination. He 

suspected mathematicians of substituting the artful manipulation of symbols for the honest 

work of empirical testing and confirmation. Einstein was sympathetic. The mathematics of 

his revolutionary paper on special relativity was relatively elementary, and at first he 

resisted its reformulation in terms of four-dimensional space-time by his former teacher 

Hermann Minkowski, complaining that "since the mathematicians pounced on the relativity 

theory I no longer understand it myself." Unlike Mach, however, he quickly came to his 

senses, and fortunately so, since the progression from special to general 

relativityóEinstein's crowning achievementówould have been impossible without 

Minkowski's mathematical reformulation. 

Einstein believed that physical reality contained more than what we can derive from the 

data of sensory experience. The real world, for him, was what corresponded to physical 

theory. It consisted of entities like atoms and force fields, in themselves undetectable by 

the senses, but indirectly discernible by their effects on systems that can affect human or 

artificial receptors. Mach, in contrast, had no truck with theoretical constructs and 

remained skeptical of anything that could not be reduced to a law based on a combination 

of sensory experiences. This bias had several consequences, each individually devastating 

to 

scientific inquiry. First, Mach remained to his final days violently opposed to the new 

scientific view that much of the real world consists of entities, like atoms, forever invisible 

to the unaided human senses. This stance by such a powerful figure hindered scientists, in 

their research and in their careers, who did not share Mach's prejudice, and ensured that 

Mach's own scientific worldview would become increasingly irrelevant. As Einstein wrote 

later, "the antipathy of these scholars [Oswald, Mach] towards atomic theory can 

indubitably be traced back to their positivistic philosophical attitude. This is an interesting 

example of the fact that even scholars of audacious spirit and fine instinct can be 

obstructed in the interpretation of facts by philosophical prejudices." 

Second, Mach, by intention the most empiricist of thinkers, was rendered indistinguishable 

from the philosophical "idealists" who believe that the real world is simply a fiction created 

by the human mind. The sensations that for Mach formed the very basis of science are 

after all individual, private, subjective mental phenomena that cannot be shared, in direct 

contrast to the shared, objective, independent physical world that constitutes the 

mainstay of the empiricist worldview. Ironically, it is the mathematical Platonist Frege 

who turns out to be a greater empirical realist than the supposedly hardnosed Mach. In 

"Thought," a late essay, Frege wrote, "We really experience only [our mental] ideas, not 

their causes. And if the scientist wants to avoid all mere hypothesis, then he is left just 

with ideas; everything dissolves into ideas, even the light rays [and] nerve fibers . . . from 

which he started. So he finally undermines the foundations of his own construction." Frege 

was not the only prominent figure to be alarmed by Mach's tendency toward idealism. In 

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, in 1909, V. I. Lenin took time out from the revolution to 

launch a spirited critique of Mach's idealistic tendencies. That the busy Lenin thought it 

necessary to refute him is an indication of Mach's reach.

In direct opposition to Mach stood his contemporary Ludwig Boltzmann, the founder of the 

statistical theory of mechanics. A gifted pianist, Boltzmamn loved to play Beethoven's 

symphonies in their piano transcriptions by Franz Liszt. He was also fond of Wagner 

and at one point took piano lessons from the composer and organist Anton Bruckner. The 

lessons came to an abrupt end when Boltz-mann's mother discovered a wet raincoat the 

composer had left on the bed. Boltzmann had an unstable personality but a warm and soft 

heart. Short and stocky, with thick eyeglasses, curly hair, an equally curly beard, and a 

surprisingly high-pitched voice, he was called by his fiancee "my sweet fat darling." Mach 

felt otherwise. The enmity between the two was such that after Mach accepted the chair 

in the philosophy of the inductive sciences in Vienna in 1895 and began giving lectures to 

large enthusiastic audiences, Boltzmann resigned the chair of theoretical physics and 

moved to Leipzig, where he immediately encountered another scientific enemy in Wilhelm 

Oswald. Depressed by continual arguments with Oswald, Boltzmann attempted suicide. He 

was pleased to return to Vienna in 1901 when Mach, having received an appointment to 

the Austrian parliament, resigned the chair in philosophy, leaving it open for Boltzmann. 

When Boltzmann began lecturing on philosophy, his classes became so popular that the 

university's largest lecture room could not contain them. 

It was Boltzmann who introduced probabilistic thinking as essential to physics. The 

behavior of the molecules of a gas could be seen to obey precise laws only to the extent to 

which their motions were considered in the aggregate, statistically. It is one of the great 

paradoxes of physics that the principles of mechanics are time-symmetricóthey operate 

identically if run in reverseóand yet disorder increases with time. Boltzmann was able to 

demonstrate that the second law of thermodynamicsóthat an independent physical system 

always moves over time in the direction of "maximum entropy" (i.e., maximum disorder)ó 

holds if the system is given a statistical or probabilistic interpretation. Since the direction 

of maximum entropy has been held to account for the "direction of time" and for the 

existence of irreversible physical processes like breaking an egg, Boltzmann's contribution 

was enormous. It was certainly not lost on the young Einstein, who embraced probability 

eagerly, and it later paved the way for the use of proba- 

bilistic methods in quantum mechanics (which an older Einstein found far less palatable). 

Again in opposition to Mach, Boltzmann was a firm believer in the importance of 

mathematical methods in the physical sciences, pointing the way to the future of physics, 

while Mach faced toward the past. In mathematizing a physical theory, not only did one 

escape the idealism and subjectivity of Mach's "sensationalism," one could also use the 

power of mathematical manipulation itself to achieve new insights that would never have 

been discovered through mere empirical observation. Boltzmann, unlike Mach, believed in 

the power of theoretical models to increase the scope of physical theory, and yet again in 

opposition to Mach, he held that these models, if successful, establish a genuine 

conception of the world that describes physical reality itselfó a realm, like the world of 

microscopic atoms, invisible to the unaided human senses. 

A war ensued between the titans Mach and Boltzmann over whether atoms were genuine 

features of the physical world or merely useful fictions formulated to assist the physicist. 

Though a powerful and dynamic teacher, Boltzmann was an inferior polemicist compared

to Mach, who carried the day on that battlefield, whether in person or in print and 

whether in Vienna with Boltzmann or waging battle from afar. In 1897, in one particularly 

unpleasant encounter at a meeting of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna, Mach, 

following Boltzmann's talk, rose to voice his objections, declaring bluntly, "I don't believe 

that atoms exist!" Boltzmann never did recover from such polemics, in spite of the fact 

that in 1905 Einstein would deliver a terminal blow to Mach's epistemological critique of 

the atomic hypothesis. 

In the same year, indeed, in the same volume of the same journal, Annalen der Physik, in 

which he propounded the theory of relativity, Einstein published a paper on "Brownian 

motion," the random dance long observed in the behavior of microparticles, in which he 

made explicit use of the hypothesis of the reality of atoms to explain this phenomenon and 

to make precise and verifiable predictions about the 

behavior of particles based on measurements of real, nonfictional, atoms. In the same 

year, Einstein had managed to make profound physical discoveries employing both Mach's 

verificationist critique of Newton (to produce the theory of relativity) and Boltzmann's 

mathematical and model-theoretic realism (to produce the theory of Brown-ian motion and 

establish the existence of invisible atoms). This was neither the first nor the last time 

Einstein would succeed in overthrowing not just the theories but the very worldview of a 

great thinker who had once been his inspiration or father figure. He would write years 

later that "the scientist must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of 

unscrupulous opportunist; he appears as a realist insofar as he seeks to describe a world 

independent of the acts of perception . . . as a positivist insofar as he considers concepts 

and theories justified only to the extent to which they furnish a logical representation of 

relations among sensory experiences." 

Boltzmann's rescue by Einstein, however, came too late. Worn down by years of verbal 

battles with the ruthless Mach, Boltzmann succumbed to his wildly unstable moods. In 

1906, on holiday at the Bay of Duino near Trieste, the great physicist tried once again to 

take his own life, while his wife and daughters were swimming, this time by hanging. This 

second attempt succeeded. A great influence, not only on Einstein, had come to a sudden 

and tragic end. Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had been hoping to make a career in physics and 

engineering by following Boltzmann's great model, now embarked on a new course that 

would ultimately lead him, via research in aeronautical engineering in Manchester, 

England, to Frege and Russell and the foundations of mathematics. Boltzmann's influence, 

however, had already left its mark. The physicist's prophetic idea of describing a physical 

system by locating it in a logical framework in various dimensions of physical significance 

would have a profound effect not only on the future of quantum mechanics but on the 

bible of the Schlick circle. For it was in Boltzmann's conception that Wittgenstein found 

the germ of his idea of locating an objectóany objectóby its position in what in the 

Tractatus he called "logical space." Where Boltzmann chose to lo- 

cate a physical body by specifying its position in terms of a set of coordinates, three 

spatial and one temporal, as well as a fifth coordinate, temperature, and a sixth, pressure, 

and so on, which gave the "ensemble of possible states" of a physical system, Wittgenstein 

wrote that "the facts in logical space are the world. ... A picture presents a situation in 

logical space. ..."

It was no accident that Wittgenstein's Tractatus was required reading in Schlick's Vienna 

Circle of philosophically minded scientists and scientifically minded philosophers. Moritz 

Schlick himself had been a student of Max Planck, the seminal figure in quantum 

mechanics. He was deeply impressed by Einstein's theory of relativity and published 

extensively on it, as well as on general epistemology. His most influential work was 

probably The General Theory of Knowledge. He was clear, quiet, and soft-spoken, 

politically liberal like most of his associates, but not as likely as they were to mix poli-tics 

with science and philosophy. He did not strike Karl Menger as a German from Berlin. Yet, 

when asked by Menger at a party if he was really from Berlin, Schlick's answer was, "Sad, 

but true." Schlick tended to idolize intellectual figures, though only, as Menger put it, 

"figures of the first order." A fascination with Einstein was succeeded by one for Russell, to 

be succeeded in turn by an even stronger worship of Wittgenstein. It was in the Vienna 

Circle that Schlick tried to bring together the strands of physics, philosophy and 

mathematics that had emerged in recent decades. 

Unlike Boltzmann, Schlick was hardly an exciting speaker. His lectures, delivered in a 

barely audible monotone, were characterized more by precision than by passion. Silverhaired 

and sporting an elegant vest, he was a model of sober dignity. Philosophically, he 

rejected Mach's skepticism about the existence of sense-transcendent entities like atoms, 

cleaving, rather, to Boltzmann's line. But he agreed with Mach that verification is the 

lifeblood of physical theories, and together with Carnap, Hempel and others, he raised the 

methodological maxims that had guided Einstein's first steps in relativity to the level of a 

formal theoretical postulate: the meaning of a scientific term is 

exhausted by its method of verification (the- "verifiability theory of meaning"). The Vienna 

Circle made a serious and honest attempt to come to grips with the extraordinary 

developments that had taken place at the turn of the century in physics, philosophy and 

mathematics, but under Schlick's guidance, positivism reigned supreme, even if not in the 

crude form it had taken under Mach. It was precisely the hegemony of positivism, Godel 

wrote later, that allowed the members of the circle to mistake Einstein for an ally and to 

underestimate the difficulty of rendering mathematics empirically acceptable by 

reconstructing it as a system for the formal manipulation of signs. Einstein himself would 

awaken the positivists from their misconceptions about the ultimate relationship between 

his thought and theirs. And Godel, in short order, would surprise everyone by striking a 

fatal blow to the most rigorous attempt to reconstitute mathematics as a formal theory of 

signs. 

Schlick himself was never fully awakened. In 1936, when he was fifty-four years old, a 

mentally unstable former doctoral student of his named Hans Nelbock began to hound and 

threaten him. Nelbock had been spurned by a fellow student, Sylvia Borowicka, whose 

romantic inclinations were reserved for the leader of the Vienna Circle. Whether her 

affections were reciprocated is not known. In addition, Nelbock's attempts to find work 

had come to nothing, something he also held against Schlick, whose complaints against him 

had been the original source of his treatment for mental disorder. Nelbock would show up 

in class, glaring over his spectacles at the mild professor, and later make menacing phone 

calls when the lecturer had retired to his home. Deeply concerned, Schlick notified the 

police and acquired a bodyguard, but to no avail. Early on the morning of June 21, 1936, 

the deranged student encountered him on the steps of the philosophy building and with an 

automatic pistol fired four rounds point blank, killing him instantly. "Now you damned

astard, there you have it!" he is reported to have screamed as he stood over Schlick's 

body, the gun smoking in his hand. Thus was the Vienna Circle abruptly closed, its history 

framed by a suicide and a murder. 

Long considered a haven for atheism, communism, materialism and assorted other crimes 

of its Jewish professors, Schlick's circle had become a target for the increasingly virulent 

strain of anti-Semitism in Austrian nationalism. Schlick's death was taken to be a promising 

development. "It is to be hoped," wrote one newspaper, "that the terrible murder at the 

University of Vienna will quicken efforts to find a truly satisfactory solution to the Jewish 

question." The writer, apparently, did not know or care that Schlick was neither Jewish nor 

an atheist but rather a German Protestant. He had, in fact, but one Jewish assistant, 

Friedrich Waismann, who had already been dismissed as part of the university's attempt to 

rid itself of Jews. Nelbock's sentencing upon conviction was a rather lenient ten years, 

whereas hanging was the customary penalty. The court cited his mental instability as a 

mitigating factor. He was, however, forced to sleep on a hard bed, with a new one 

delivered every three months. After the Anschluss, Nelbock became a kind of folk hero. He 

was released on probation and spent the war as a geological technician for the Third 

Reich. At long last, Nelbock had found work. 

The Meaning of Relativity 

What Schlick had been seeking in the Vienna Circle was a unified epis-temologyóa 

systematic account of what can really be knownóon the basis of a philosophically coherent 

interpretation of what Einstein had achieved in physics and what Frege, Russell, Hilbert 

and their predecessors had achieved in the foundations of mathematics. What exactly had 

Einstein accomplished, however, and what was the meaning of the new direction in the 

foundations of mathematics? As the century was turning, a perceived tension had arisen 

between Newton's laws of motionóaccording to which measurement should always be 

relative to, and affected by, the state of motion of the observeróand the equations of the 

Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, one of Einstein's heroes, who had unified the 

theories of electromagnetism and optics. 

Maxwell's equations gave as the speed of light a velocity, denoted by c, relative to a 

reference system at rest in Newton's absolute space, known otherwise as the ether, a 

substance whose existence was theorized from first principles rather than empirical 

evidence. This invariance suggested that one could determine whether a given reference 

system was at rest or in motion relative to the ether by testing the speed of light relative 

to this system. Any deviation from c would signal motion relative to absolute space. All 

efforts at measurement, however, such as those performed in the famous (because 

exquisitely precise) Michelson-Morley experiments, failed to detect any variation in the 

speed of light, which seemed impossible: since the reference frames tested were in motion 

relative to each other, they could not all be at rest in the ether! Amazingly, although 

bullets shot from a moving train have a velocity that is increased by the speed of the 

engine, the measurable velocity of a light beam sent out from this same engine is 

unaffected by the train's speed. The classical principle of "addition of velocities" was in 

peril.

Into the breach stepped the Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, Einstein's father 

figure and another of his heroes. It was Lorentz who, having already perfected the form of 

Maxwell's equations, appeared now to save the day by supplying the exact equations, the 

"Lorentz transformations," that made measurements in one reference, or inertial, frame 

equivalent to those obtained in another, including the "absolute" rest frame of the 

postulated ether. In one stroke, Lorentz had succeeded in crystallizing and rendering 

harmless the mismatch between Newton's account and Maxwell's. Once the Lorentz 

transformations were applied, the same physical laws could be seen to hold in the absolute 

rest frame of the ether and in any other inertial frame. 

For most serious thinkers, including Lorentz himself, these "transformations" signaled at 

most our inability to measure the "real" velocity of light or our real velocity through 

Newton's postulated ether of "absolute space." It was assumed that there were simply 

unavoidable distortions in the measurement of light. lor the young Einstein, in 

43 

contrast, the mismatch demonstrated that space and time themselvesó what Kant had 

called the fundamental "forms of intuition"óneeded to be re-created or redefined. 

Henceforth, with the Einstein revolution, time itself, not just its measurement with clocks, 

would be understood as something essentially relative to the motion of the observer and 

his or her frame of reference, as something in its essence related to the speed of light. 

Instead of trying to explain our inability to detect the "true" speed of light, then, Einstein 

incorporated that speed into the very definition of time and motion. Lorentzian 

engineering had been replaced by Einsteinian metaphysics. 

In a move that contained as much philosophy as it did science, Einstein had succeeded in 

combining the letter of positivismórejecting any properties of space and time that could 

not be determined through measurement with rods and clocksówith the spirit of German 

metaphysics, determining what kind of things space and time are. Though generations of 

physicists, not least the redoubtable Heisenberg, would conclude that Einstein had become 

the self-appointed standard-bearer of positivism, the truth lay elsewhere. He was, if 

anything, an opportunist. 

Einstein was merely exploiting, for his own philosophical purposes, certain elements of 

positivism that in the particular case of special relativity were justified. Godel too would 

come to exploit elements of the positivist methodologyóin his case, the formalism of the 

Hilbert school of mathematicsóto serve his own antipositivist, Pla-tonist ends. Far 

removed, also, from the positivist creed was Einstein's masterpiece, general relativity, 

which went beyond the special theory of relativity by providing an account of gravity. 

Further removed still was his lifelong opposition to the positivistic Copenhagen 

interpretation of quantum mechanics championed by Heisenberg and Bohr. In Einstein, the 

positivists would soon discover, they had acquired not a friend but an enemy.

The same lesson was learned, the hard way, by David Hilbert, a lowering figure in 

mathematics, who, inspired by Einstein, had formulated the equarioiis of general relativity 

five days before Einstein himself 

succeeded, a situation which led, unsurprisingly, to some uncomfortable moments in their 

relationship. The positivistic creedóby its own nature as opposed to the spirit of 

mathematics as to philosophyóhad in the course of time found a home in mathematics as 

well. As the pos-itivists would have it, the hierarchy of transfinite numbers discovered by 

Georg Cantor, a surprising consequence of his theory of sets, was cast into disrepute for 

bearing the stain of Platonism, for pointing to infinite horizons beyond the frame of the 

natural realm. The great Hilbert, however, defended Cantor's set theory, proclaiming, "No 

one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created," and calling it "one of the 

supreme achievements of purely intellectual human activity." 

Cantor's paradise was a lush tropical domain of infinities that he claimed to have 

encountered at the very heart of mathematics. The importance of a sound theory of 

infinity was lost on neither mathematicians nor physicists. Mathematics, a tool 

indispensable to physicists, had been undergoing a gradual development of increased rigor 

and clarification of foundations, a process that came to fruition in the second half of the 

nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth. Infinity played an essential role. 

Once and for all, it seemed, a firm foundation had been laid for the calculus invented by 

Newton and Leibniz, in which so-called infinitesimals (infinitely small quantities) enjoyed 

an ambiguous twilight existence between finitude and infinity. Weierstrass, Cauchy, Cantor 

and others developed the modern theory of limits of infinite sequences, which for the first 

time made rigorous sense of Newtonian concepts like "point" and "instantaneous velocity." 

Further, Cantor, Frege, Dedekind and others put forward a convincing theory of real 

numbersórational numbers as infinite sequences of natural numbers, and irrational 

numbers as infinite sequences of rational numbersówhich was crucial, since the physical 

continuum of space and time could be fully described only by the real numbers. (Frege also 

advanced an account of the natural numbers in terms of infinite aggregates of concepts, 

but this fell on deaf ears.) All of this required, however, a comprehensive mathematical 

theory of sequences, or more generally groupings, sets or classes of numbers, as well as a 

mathematical account of infinity. Cantor, in a single bold move, developed precisely what 

was needed, a set theory that provided a rigorous account of infinite sets. 

His first discovery was that the requisite infinity had to be "actual," which went against a 

two-thousand-year tradition in mathematics, from Aristotle to Gauss, which held that 

infinity is merely "potential." Before Cantor, it was axiomatic that infinity was not to be 

considered a definite number. To say, for example, that the natural numbers are infinite in 

number was taken to mean not that there is an actual number, infinity, that numbers the 

set of natural numbers, but rather that the set of natural numbers goes on forever, and 

that the most that one can say is that no natural number is big enough to number the 

entire set. Cantor, in contrast, produced a powerful argument for the thesis that there is 

an actual number, which he called Xo (aleph null), that numbers the set of natural 

numbers. Naturally, he emphasized a fact that we can put as follows: The number that 

numbers the natural numbers cannot itself be a natural number. It must be an unnatural, 

or supranatural, or (as Cantor characterized it) transfinite number. The king cannot arise 

from the class of peasants. What established the significance of such a transfinite number

was Cantor's second great discovery, a proof that Xo is not the only transfinite number but 

only the first, the smallest. His proof is one of the wonders of the world, like the hanging 

gardens of Babylon or the pyramids of Egypt. 

Cantor, along with Frege, had introduced a rigorous and mathematically fruitful definition 

of when two sets are the same size, namely, when their elements can be put into one-toone 

correspondence. In his proof, he assumed, by way of contradiction, that there exists a 

one-to-one pairing between the natural numbers and the real numbers. Using this pairing, 

he succeeded in constructing, via what came to be called a "diagonal argument," a real 

number that differed from every other real number in the supposedly complete list. Any 

attempt to pair off the natural numbers with the real numbers will fail. It follows that 

there are more real numbers than natural numbers, even though there 

are infinitely many natural numbers and infinitely many real numbers. Since it can be 

shown that the number of real numbers is the same as the number of subsets of the 

natural numbers, namely, 2xo, it follows that 2xo > X0. By generalizing his argument, 

Cantor was able to show that the power set of any set is always larger than the original 

set, and therefore, for any number, including a transfinite one, there will always exist 

another that is strictly greater. Thus, not only is infinity an actual number, but there is an 

infinity of infinities. 

Needless to say, infinity is not accessible to the five senses, and an infinity of infinities was 

clearly too much for any self-respecting empirically minded positivist to bear. Yet as a 

mathematician as well as a physicist, Hilbert realized that mathematics could not do 

without Cantor's new foundation for the theory of sets and infinities, and thereby for real 

numbers and the calculus, indispensable for physics. He therefore took it upon himself to 

make certain, as he put it, that no one would ever be driven from Cantor's paradise. But a 

defense was needed for the set theory that Cantor had constructed. 

From its inception, set theory was haunted by paradoxes and conundrums, which served 

only to make the skeptics more skeptical. For one, as Cantor himself proved, the very 

"universe" of set theory could not itself be a set. There is, provably, no universal set, no 

set of all sets. The reason, in a nutshell, is that if there were such a set, its number would 

have to be larger than any other transfinite number. As we have already seen, however, 

Cantor proved that for any transfinite number, there is always a larger one. Set theory, 

conceived of as a foundational science, was unable to account for itself. It failed even to 

tell us how many sets there are. 

The coup de grace, however, to unreconstructed, or "naive," set theory was the paradox 

that Bertrand Russell discovered in its very foundations. Every concept, every property, it 

was thought, determines the set of things that have this property. The property of being a 

horse determines the set of horses; the property of being a prime number, the set of prime 

numbers; and the property of being a small set, the set of small sets. At worst, the set or 

class of tilings determined by a given

property is empty. As things turned out, however, this was by no means the worst that 

could happen. Russell, annoyingly, asked us to consider the property of being a set that is 

not a member of itself. The set of small sets, for example, is not a member of itself (since 

it is clearly not a small set), whereas the set of big sets surely is. Russell was able to show, 

however, that there could not be such a thing as the set of all sets that are not members 

of themselves. If there were such a set, it would have to be and also not be a member of 

itself. It follows that it is not true that every property determines the set of things that 

have that property. But then, which properties do determine sets, and more generally, 

exactly which sets actually exist? 

Russell's paradox was disarmingly simple. It left mathematicians breathless. How, one 

wonders, did Russell ever come up with his dangerous idea? Historical research has 

revealed that he invented his paradox in the course of trying to refute Cantor's proof, 

rehearsed above, that there are more real numbers than natural numbers. His arrow 

missed Cantor but struck Frege squarely in the chest, toppling his formal development of 

set theory and shattering his life's work. We still have the polite and lethal letter Russell 

sent to Frege in 1902: "Dear Colleague, ... I find myself in agreement with you in all 

essentials. ... I find in your work discussions and distinctions . . . one seeks in vain in the 

works of other logicians. There is just one point where I have encountered a difficulty. ..." 

Russell's paradox threw not just set theory but mathematics itself into a crisis, the third 

great crisis in the history of mathematics. The first had taken place when the Pythagorean 

theorem revealed to the ancient Greeks the existence of irrational numbers, those that 

cannot be expressed as a ratio of two natural numbers. The second came when Newton 

and Leibniz founded the infinitesimal calculus on the basis of infinitesimal numbers, which 

were supposed somehow to be simultaneously nonzero and yet count for nothing. The 

crises had a common cause: mathematicians found themselves confronted with a 

paradoxical new kind of number. If a way could not be found to incorporate this new entity 

into their thinking, they were faced with the prospect of seeing their edifice crumble. 

"The sole possible foundations of arithmetic seem to vanish," Frege wrote, when 

confronted with Russell's paradox. 

With the third crisis, the positivists' star had risen. Mathematics itself, by its very nature as 

an a priori, rationalistic science, had always been a thorn in the side of empiricists. But 

now, with Cantor, mathematics had seemingly overreached itself. It had tried to fly too 

high in the thin air of infinity and was in danger of crashing down on the solid earth below, 

the empirical soil on which natural science is based. For mathematicians like Hilbert who 

were also, in spirit, positivists, this engendered a crisis of divided loyalties. A way must be 

found somehow to preserve Cantor's mathematical paradise. The answer, for Hilbert, was 

to reconstruct mathematics itself along the lines of positivism. The formal proof of the 

mathematician would serve as an analogue of the measuring apparatus of the empirical 

scientist. Formal mathematical proofsówhich can be written down on a blackboard and 

perceived with the sensesóare, no less than the instruments of the physicist, things you 

can actually "get your hands on." Hilbert, then, was the Moses who would lead 

mathematicians through the desert of positivism back to Cantor's paradise. He would 

preserve the letter if not the spirit of Cantor's theory of infinite sets, in a manner that 

satisfied the strict epistemological requirements of positivism.

Some years later, Kurt Godel would describe positivism as but one element, along with 

skepticism and materialism, in what he called the dominant "leftward" worldview. The 

"rightward" view, in contrast, was characterized by spiritualism, idealism and theology (or 

metaphysics). "The development of philosophy since the Renaissance," said Godel, "has by 

and large gone from right to left," reaching a high water mark in the positivistic 

Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. "Mathematics," however, "by its nature 

as an a priori science, has in and of itself an inclination toward the right." But mathematics 

could not escape the Zeitgeist, and so "around the turn of the century its hour struck: in 

particular, it was the antinomies of set theory, contradictions whose significance was 

exaggerated by 

skeptics and empiricists and which were employed as a pretext for a leftward upheaval." 

The result of this upheaval was Hilbert's brainchild, the mathematical program known as 

"formalism," in which the intuitive notion of mathematical truth was to be replaced by the 

formula game of proof from a list of axioms according to a set of rules of derivation. "Thus 

came into being," wrote Godel, "that curious hermaphroditic thing that Hilbert's formalism 

represents, which sought to do justice both to the Zeitgeist and to the nature of 

mathematics." Justice was to be done to the spirit of the time by refusing to acknowledge 

the fundamental axioms of mathematics as in any sense true, and by declaring that the 

inferences to be drawn from these axioms are, in Godel's words, to be "construed as a 

mere game with symbols according to certain rules, likewise not [supported] by insight." 

The "implicit definitions" of such a formula game did not aim at a true account of the 

fundamental entities, such as points, lines, or numbers; rather, a point, line, or number 

was "by definition" simply anything that satisfied the axioms. To this conception the 

positivist attached himself like glue, and refused to consider the possibility of an 

alternative picture according to which there exists a priori insight into an objective 

mathematical world. But such stubbornness on the part of self-described empiricists, 

Godel remarked, was really no more than "an a priorism with the sign reversed." 

Just as Mach's supposedly hard-headed empiricism left him adrift on an ocean of purely 

mental phenomena, so the formalist rejection of the very idea of mathematical truth 

turned mathematics into a purely mental construct, a mere game with formulas, with no 

intrinsic connection to the physical world. As Schlick wrote, "A system of truths created 

with the aid of implicit definitions does not at any point rest on the ground of reality." This 

had the effect of making what Eugene Wigner, decades later, would describe as "the 

unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences" even more 

unreasonable. 

Hilbert's formalism, so beloved of strict empiricists, was a crowning achievement of 

positivism, the most articulate and well-developed 

attempt to put the positivist's money where his mouth is, an attempt to prove once and for 

all that the apparent Platonism of mathematicsó the very foundation, from Plato on, of all 

philosophical Platonismsó could be sidestepped. Godel encountered this achievement of 

Hilbert's in Vienna, the city in which he lived and worked, the home of the Vienna Circle. 

Indeed, his own dissertation advisor at the University of Vienna, the mathematician Hans 

Hahn, was a positivist who concluded a famous essay, "The Crisis in Intuition," with these

words: "It is not true, as Kant urged, that intuition is a pure a priori means of knowledge, 

but rather that it is a force of habit rooted in psychological inertia." And the patron saint, 

as we have seen, of the Vienna Circle was Wittgenstein, its bible, the Tractatus, which 

declared that the only real facts are of the empirical variety. "The essence of this view," 

Godel noted, "is that there exists no such thing as a mathematical fact." Mathematics, for 

Wittgenstein, consists merely of the transformations of formulas to obtain mathematical 

identities. In particular, it is not derived from mathematical facts, whereas physics is 

derived from facts about the physical world. 

Between Hilbert and Wittgenstein, it seemed, the positivists had finally laid to rest the 

ghost of mathematics, which had seemed to resist incorporation into their fold. The ghost, 

however, was hardly dead, as Godel would demonstrate from within the heart of 

Wittgenstein country, Vienna. His incompleteness theorem was a grenade aimed at Hilbert 

that landed in the very laps of the positivists. Vienna's circle could not after all be 

completed. 

4 A Spy in the House of Logic 

Every spy's life has ended in ignominious death. ANAIS NIN 

Russell's Paradox, communicated to Frege in 1902, engendered widespread fear in 

mathematical circles. As Godel put it, in retrospect, "[Russell] brought to light the amazing 

fact that our logical intuitions . . . are self-contradictory." On pain of contradiction, it 

could no longer be assumed that every property determines the class of things that have 

that property. It could still be trusted that the property of redness sufficed to determine 

the set of all red things, but such confidence was no longer justified for every property. 

The concept of class or set, in particular, which had assumed increasing importance in 

mathematics and logic and which seemed intuitively clear, turned out to be so poorly 

understood that in Frege's epoch-making formulation of modern logic it led to a 

straightforward contradiction. The concern was not a communist under every bed but a 

paradox asleep on every mathematical bedspread. 

There was no place to hide. Frege had built a contradiction into the very foundation stone 

of the mighty edifice of logic. Cantor, the creator of modern set theory, had also 

constructed, if not contradictions, then at least paradoxes aplenty in his dizzying hierarchy 

of transfinite numbers. Even Euclidean geometry, the ancestor of all models of 

mathematical rigor and certainty, the soft pillow for two thousand years of sweet 

mathematical dreams, had become suspect due to 

the recent demonstration of the logical consistency of non-Euclidean geometries. If 

Euclidean geometry could be rejected without contradiction as the truth about space (as 

arithmetic is the truth about natural numbers), wherein did its truth lie? Everywhere, 

intuition was under suspicion. If the house of logic was not itself secure, where else could 

safety be found? Something had to be done.

In Gottingen, the dean of mathematicians, David Hilbert, declared, "Where else would 

reliability and truth be found if even mathematical thinking fails?" Cantor's paradise, in 

particular, had to be shored up. "The definitive clarification of the nature of the infinite," 

said Hilbert, "has become necessary, not merely for the special interests of the individual 

sciences, but rather for the honor of human understanding itself." Having spent the first 

years of the century in wide-ranging research, he turned his attention in the century's 

second decade to the crises infecting the foundations of his mighty edifice, devoting his 

considerable resources to a solution. 

In Vienna, Kurt Godel was becoming part of the problem, though in 1930 he did not yet 

know it. Even Hans Hahn, his thesis advisor and a true believer in the positivist credo, 

discovered too late the full extent of Godel's heresy. "As concerns the world," Hahn 

declared, "the only possible standpoint seems to me to be the empiricist one. . .. 

Knowledge concerning reality can in no way be obtained through pure thought." Yet 

mathematics and logic, the tools of scientific empiricism, were not cooperating. As Hahn 

put it, "A very simple fact now seems to stand in the way of realizing this empiricist 

standpoint, namely, the existence of logic and mathematics." These words were uttered at 

the very conference at which Godel would rise to defeat the last best hope for the 

positivists to incorporate mathematics within their religion of ultraempiricism. And he 

would do so by exploiting Hilbert's own weapon of choice: the formalism of mathematical 

logic. Godel, in short, would destroy from within. This is the reason they shoot spies. 

In the case of Godel, the formalisms he employed, though in themselves acceptable to the 

positivists, were Janus-faced by design. On one hand, they were irrefutable mathematical 

theorems. On the other, their 

most natural, indeed irresistible philosophical implications would undermine the very spirit 

of positivism. It was a case of using the letter of a false doctrine to overthrow its spirit. 

And this was a specialty of Godel's, as it was of his future friend Einstein: constructing 

mathematical formalisms pregnant with philosophical meaning. It was a talent guaranteed 

to arouse ire on both sides: the friends of formalism would be hard pressed to reject 

philosophical implications derived from inescapable premises, while the enemies of 

formalism would be forced to admit that something philosophically significant could after 

all be achieved within the narrow confines of the formal. 

The Leitmotif of the Twentieth Century 

who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you. 

e.e. cummings 

(iodel's incompleteness theorem of 1931 began innocently, as an attempt not to refute but 

to fulfill Hilbert's program. Hilbert's idea was to safeguard mathematics from hidden 

contradictions by replacing the intuitive mathematics of each mathematical domain with a

system of axioms written in a pure formula language that, although having a standard 

semantic interpretation, could be manipulated according to the mechanical rules of pure 

syntax (much like a computer program of today). Hilbert's program consisted in finding a 

system of primitive formulas called axioms from which, according to fixed rules of 

proofórules of syntaxóone could derive all the theorems of the given mathematical 

domain. Two features of such a formal system were crucial: consistency and completeness. 

As a prophylactic against unwelcome surprises, a formal system had to be consistent: two 

theorems that contradict each other should not be able to be derived from the axioms. 

And the system should be complete, in the 

sense that all true statements expressible within the system (under a suitable 

interpretation) should be derivable from the axioms. To prevent circularity, the system in 

which consistency is to be proved must not itself employ any mathematically suspect or 

controversial procedures that could render its own consistency suspect. It must be, to use 

Hilbert's invented term, not exactly finite but rather "finitary," in the sense that its proofs 

must be in principle surveyable by sense experience and must not at any point appeal to an 

abstract, completed infinity of the kind proposed by Cantor. 

Hilbert's formalism was just one exampleóthe most rigorous, mathematical oneóof the 

spirit that lies at the very heart of the twentieth century. At its core it involves the 

dominance of form over content, syntax over semantics, proof over truth. It is no surprise 

that the principal embodiment of a formal system, the computer, a pure syntax machine, 

would become the century's dominant mechanical device. But the computer was still just 

one element of the Zeitgeist. In art, science, philosophy, mathematics, music, 

architecture and linguistics, formalism in its most general sense became the dominant 

theme. In painting, for instance, Cezanne's realism was a hidden case of the free play of 

geometrical forms, a fact his subjects came increasingly to appreciate as they realized 

that the geometrical constraints of his canvases dominated any attempt to capture the 

shape or spirit of those who sat before him. This paved the way for the explicit rule of the 

play of free forms by the cubists, led by Gris, Braque, and Picasso. The Cezanne of music 

was Brahms, whose post-Romantic chromaticism hid the dominance of pure logical 

structure at its core. Wittgenstein, in whose Vienna home Brahms performed, put the 

matter darkly: In Brahms, he said, "I can begin to hear the sound of machinery." This 

hidden formalism, this logical machinery, was not lost on Brahms's admirer Schoenberg, 

who would soon champion the freely constructed forms of serial music, the most explicitly 

conventional, mathematical method ever undertaken in music. The principal standardbearer 

of Schoenberg's piano music, Glenn Gould, would speak of producing a structural "xray" 

of the 

score in his performances. As the high priest of bones without flesh, Gould made it clear 

that his first god was Bach, whom Schoenberg also worshipped, his gospel, the fugue. 

Nor was physics left behind. On the contrary, it was in the vanguard. In special relativity, 

Einstein had abandoned the Kantian intuitions of space and time for the mathematical 

formalism of space-time, constrained only by the formal requirement of Lorentz invariance 

and the physical postulate of the limiting value of the speed of electromagnetic signals. 

General relativity, the more inclusive theory, would yield an abstract structure governed 

by yet more general logical constraints. And the cognitive and social sciences would follow 

physics' lead. Later in the century, Noam Chomsky would re-create linguistics as a

structural science modeled on Frege's logic, with syntax explicitly dominant over 

semantics, while Claude Levi-Strauss would stitch the abstractions of structuralism into the 

many-colored quilt of anthropology. In mathematics itself, the trend was increasingly 

toward the reduction of a domain into the structural relationships that obtained between 

its elements. What mattered, Hilbert insisted in his reconstruction of Euclid's geometry, 

was not what points, lines and planes are, i.e., the semantics of the fundamental terms, 

but the logical relationships that obtain between the basic elements, i.e., the syntax of 

the formal system. As Hilbert put it, a point in Euclidean space could be a beer mug for all 

he cared, as long as it obeyed the rules of his formal system. (This idea of a so-called 

implicit definition of a concept via its relationships with other concepts was firmly 

rejected by the father of the formal system, Gottlob Frege. In his account of the natural 

numbers, Frege objected that his own preliminary contextual or implicit definitions failed 

to determine what the individual numbers actually are, in particular whether some 

collection could have the number Julius Caesar attached to it, nor "whether that same 

familiar conqueror of Gaul is a number or not." This was a remark as crazy as it was 

beautiful. No one, of course, is likely to confuse Julius Caesar with a number. But that is 

not, Frege pointed out, due to the power of the implicit definitions.) 

In the division to reduce all to syntax, to focus on form alone, could be found the freedom 

of the creative imagination. There could also be found safety. Because the rules of the 

formal system are our own creation, we would be able to police them, to examine them as 

pure signs to see that they did not lead to inconsistency, to contradiction. Consistency, not 

truth, increasingly became the goal of the formal systems of science, just as authenticity 

became the battle cry of the systems of ethics or forms of life. (Sartre's existentialists, for 

example, attempted bravely, and perhaps foolishly, to replace conscience with 

authenticity. The problem, of course, was that Hitler too was authentic. It was the content 

of his beliefs that was the problem, not their consistency.) Since mathematics is the 

language of formal relationships, it became increasingly clear that the central formalism 

was that of mathematics itself, and that if this could not be rendered secure from 

inconsistency, nothing else could. If, then, formalism is the leitmotif of the twentieth 

century, and Hilbert's mathematical formalism captures the essence of all other 

formalisms, then Godel's incompleteness theorem, which dramatically and inescapably 

refutes Hilbert's program, can well be considered the most significant intellectual 

accomplishment of the twentieth century. 

Godel took up Hilbert's momentous project by attempting first to see whether one could 

prove the consistency and completeness of a formal axiom system for mathematical 

analysis. He began with the task of proving consistency and completeness for the weaker 

axiom system of arithmetic, or number theory, a subsystem of analysis. Here the 

conditions were propitious. For thousands of years, geometry had been the paradigm of an 

axiomatic system, but in the late nineteenth century, Frege, Dedekind and Peano had 

achieved the same result for arithmetic. They constructed a system of axioms, or 

postulatesó known today, for no good reason, simply as the five Peano postulatesófrom 

which it was believed that all truths about the natural numbers could be derived. But 

derived how? By logic alone, the logic that Frege had invented in his Begriffsschrift. 

Whereas the axioms had, semantically speaking, genuine mathematical content, the rules 

of in- 

ference were a matter of pure syntax, a series of mechanical instructions that could be 

followed blindly, with no reference to truth or mathematical content, followed, as the 

logician John Myhill put it, by an imbecile or a computer.

What Godel discovered, however, was that not only are the Peano postulates in fact 

incomplete, any system of axioms or postulates (even if infinitely large) from which 

arithmetic can be derived that satisfies any reasonable mathematical criteria of 

surveyability by a finite mind is of necessity incomplete. (An infinite mind, like God's, 

which can grasp all the numbers at once, presumably has no need of axioms.) So the 

simplest and most basic domain of mathematics, the arithmetic of the natural numbers, 

the rock on which the grand edifice of mathematics stands, turns out to be, from a formal 

axiomatic point of view, incomplete, and even worse, incompletable. Indeed, since a 

computer can prove only theorems based on the axioms its programmer has fed into itóit 

cannot, as Godel emphasized, create new axioms on its ownóit follows that in principle no 

computer or fully specified system of computers, even if infinite, will ever capture all the 

truths of arithmetic (never mind the rest of mathematics). As Godel put it, "Continued 

appeals to mathematical intuition are necessary . . . for the solution of the problems of 

finitary number theory." 

The mathematical fact of the incompleteness of formal arithmetic, moreover, is accessible 

not only to us, thinkers with minds and mathematical intuitions; ironically, a computer can 

be programmed to prove Godel's theorems, the very theorems that establish the intrinsic 

limitations of computers. The truths of arithmetic, then, cannot in principle be confined to 

a formal system. Here is a crucial difference between truth and proof: a mathematical 

proof, in the sense in which we are discussing it here, is always a proof in, and relative to, 

a given formal system, whereas truth, as such, is absolute. What Godel proved is that 

mathematical truth is not reducible to (formal or mechanical) proof. Syntax cannot 

supplant semantics. The leitmotif of the twentieth century, it turns out, stands in need of 

revision. Mechanical rules cannot obviate the need for meaning, and what gives us access 

to meaning, 

namely, intuition, cannot be dispensed with even in mathematics, indeed, even in 

arithmetic. This was the first nail in Hilbert's coffin. 

The second nail was not long in coming. Godel soon proved his second incompleteness 

theorem, which demonstrated, with yet further irony, that if a given system of axioms for 

arithmetic were in fact consistent, then it could not be proved consistent by the system 

itself. Put otherwise, only an inconsistent formal system can prove its own consistency! 

Von Neumann, the quickest of the quick, having heard Godel announce his incompleteness 

results, derived, shortly thereafter, the unprovability of consistency. "I would be very 

much interested," he wrote Godel, "to hear your views on this. ... If you are interested, I 

will send you the proof details." One can imagine his disappointment when Godel informed 

him that the manuscript for the second theorem was already on its way to the editors. It 

was Von Neumann, however, who argued, against Godel himself, that the unprovability of 

consistency, as Godel had demonstrated it, left no wiggle room for the Hilbert program. 

Whereas for several years, Godel was cautious not to prejudge the question of whether 

Hilbert might discover a finitary proof of consistency to which Godel's second theorem did 

not apply, Von Neumann, from the beginning, was confident that this could never happen. 

Assuming that one rejects Russell's controversial "axiom of reducibility," he said, "one 

cannot obtain a foundation for classical mathematics via logical means." Von Neumann's 

striking prescience, however, concerning the full significance of what Godel had 

discovered may well have served only to deepen his regret that he had not been the first 

to make these discoveries. Even the fact that he was one of the fathers of the modern

computer and a chief architect of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos did not suffice to 

assuage his disappointment. 

The incompleteness theorems sent a shock wave through the world of mathematics. 

Hermann Weyl, one of the first permanent members of the mathematical faculty at the 

Institute for Advanced Study, spoke of the Godel "debacle," the Godel "catastrophe." The 

two-thousand-year-old ideal of axiomatization inaugurated by Euclidóthe paradigm 

of captured rationalityóhad been shattered, and the blow had been struck, annoyingly, 

just when Frege and Hilbert had succeeded in perfecting the very idea of a formal system 

of axioms. Not only the results but the very methods employed in Godel's theorem were so 

unexpected that it was years before mathematicians and logicians began to grasp their full 

significance. Godel had carried even further than 1 filbert the idea of treating formal 

systems of mathematics as mathematical objects in their own right, which resulted in 

conclusions exactly opposite to what Hilbert had intended. (This is an instance of what 

Hegel called the "cunning of history," whereby history itself con-trives, somehow, to 

subvert the intentions of its most dramatic actors.) 

In the case of Godel's theorem, as with his later writings on rela-tivity, the difficulty in 

taking the true measure of its significance was due not just to the mathematical but to the 

philosophical hurdles that had to be overcome. In the next few paragraphs, we will take a 

firsthand look at some of the details of Godel's mysterious and beautiful proof. If the going 

gets tough, the tough may either get going or they may, without loss, simply skim lightly 

over the details to get the gist of (lodel's argument, or they may even take off, fly over 

and pick up the thread at the clearing after the forest. Do not, in any case, be 

intimidated; to switch images, you can admire the music without attending to the words. 

To appreciate Godel's theorem is your birthright; let no one, including the mathematical 

police, deprive you of what you have a right to enjoy. 

Bear in mind also what Godel proved and what he did not. He did not discover some deep 

and mysterious mathematical proposition that no formal system was powerful enough to 

count among its theorems. That would have demonstrated the existence of an absolutely 

unprovable mathematical proposition, something that Godel, like Hilbert, was deeply 

skeptical of. Rather, what he showed is that in any particular formal system of sufficient 

strength, given the limitations imposed on such a system insofar as it is truly formal, there 

would always be some formula which, while intuitively true, could not be proved in or 

relative to that system. And the same holds for its negation. But the 

formula would be a perfectly ordinary, though complex, mathematical proposition, which 

nevertheless, because of its form, slipped through the net of the given formal system. That 

very formula, however, could always be proved in a more inclusive formal system; only 

that new formal system, in turn, would be unable to prove some new formula, which was 

nevertheless intuitively true. And so on. There was, then, no "supervirus" that affected all 

formal systems. Instead, for each particular formal system, there would be some perfectly 

ordinary bug or virus that rendered that system incomplete.

Triple Fugue: Intuitive Mathematics, Formal Mathematics, and Metamathematics 

Godel's beautiful fugue was constructed from three distinguishable mathematical 

languages or theories. The beauty was to be found in the pattern of relationships woven 

from the three parts. To begin with, there was intuitive arithmetic, the arithmetic found 

in mathematical textbooks written in the language of ordinary mathematics. Call this 

language or theory IA (for intuitive arithmetic). The propositions of IA are sentences with 

content: they express truths or falsehoods about numbers. Next there was a formal 

deductive system for arithmeticóin Godel's proof, a system of pure syntax put forward by 

Bertrand Russell, modeled on the original by Fregeówith a specified set of axioms and 

explicit rules of deduction that determined which formulas were theorems. Call this 

system FA (for formal arithmetic). The "sentences" of FA are simply formulas without 

semantic content. In themselves, they are neither true nor false. They are, however, 

either provable from the axioms of FA or not. If provable, they are called theorems. FA, 

however, is so designed that we can give it an interpretation, a semantics, under which it 

can be read as corresponding to IA. That is, FA is designed to mirror IA, so that if all goes 

well, there will be an exact one-to-one correspondence between the numerals in FA and 

the numbers in IA, and a similar correspondence between the true sentences 

of IA and the theorems or FA. Pur succinctly, FA is designed to represent IA. 

The third language or theory is the metatheory of formal arithmetic, the framework in 

which the syntactic rules, the proof theory, of FA is spelled out. Call this language MFA 

(for the metatheory of formal arithmetic). If FA is the machine, MFA is the owner's manual 

that specifies how the machine works. Like IA, it consists of meaningful sentences that 

have truth values. MFA specifies which formulas of FA are "well-formed formulas," meaning 

that they satisfy the official rules of formula construction. Crucially, it also specifies what 

it means to be a proof in FA. 

Godel's insight was to see that FA could be used to represent not only IAóto the extent to 

which this is possibleóbut also MFA. He proved the latter by showing how MFA could be 

represented in IA, via a revolutionary device known today as the "arithmetization of metamathematics." 

But then if FA can represent IA, it can also, via the interpretation of MFA in 

IA, represent MFA. That is, FA can represent its own metatheory. The trick, then, was to 

construct a formula of FA that would have two simultaneous meanings in two languages, 

MFA and IA. Godel was able to exhibit just such a formula and to prove that it was 

simultaneously unprovable in FA and, intuitively, true in IA and MFA. This would be a 

formula provably unprovable in FA, and yet expressing a true proposition in IA about the 

natural numbers as well as a true proposition in MFA about its own unprovability. 

Nothing like this had ever been seen before. Godel had skirted around the deadly liar's 

paradox, substituting for it an unproblematic unprovability paradox (which was not really a 

paradox at all); established the possibility and harmlessness of self-reference; 

demonstrated representability relationships among three distinct languages; arithme-tized 

the syntax of one of those languages; and finally, exhibited a formula of one language that 

was provably unprovable and simultaneously true. This was logic, it was mathematics, but 

it didn't look like logic or mathematics. It looked more like Kafka. Indeed, when the 

mathematician Paul Cohen, a Fields medalist who proved the independence

of the continuum hypothesis, first encountered Godel's theorem, he was skeptical, 

remarking that it seemed more like philosophy than mathematics. After discussing the 

theorem with the logician Stephen Kleene, however, his doubts evaporated. Still, "I was 

rather depressed," he commented later, "when I realized Godel was right." 

Reusable Numbers: 

The Arithmetization of Syntax 

Godel's first task was the easy one, showing that FA could be usedóat least a fortiorióto 

represent IA. The hard work had already been done by Frege, Dedekind and Peano in 

establishing the Peano postulates, finding the crucial definitions of number-theoretic 

concepts needed to employ these postulates to represent the facts of number theory, and 

constructing a system of strict logical rules that would specify precisely which inferences 

were permitted in FA. The second task, showing that FA could stand in for MFA, was the 

real challenge. Not only its implementation but the very suspicion that it could be done 

required a stroke of genius. 

In effect, Godel was borrowing a leaf from Descartes's book. Descartes, by assigning 

numbers to figures in geometrical space through what are now known as Cartesian 

coordinates, was able, as we would now say, to "arithmetize geometry." In this system of 

so-called analytic geometry, statements about geometrical figures are translated into 

statements about numbers, and the powerful rules of manipulation of numbers, in turn, 

can be exploited to make discoveries about geometry. Godel's insight was to realize that 

the elements of the formal system FAóprimitive signs, sequences of these signs (such as 

formulas), and sequences of formulas (including proofs)ócould also be assigned a numerical 

representation. Through a system now known as Godel numbering, Godel assigned unique 

natural numbers systematically to every primitive symbol of FA, and then showed how to 

construct, again uniquely, the number assigned to a sequence of 

63 

primitive symbols, i.e., a formula, and to a sequence of formulas, including a sequence 

that constituted a proof. To ensure uniqueness in the system of numbering, Godel relied on 

well-known facts about natural numbers such as the fundamental theorem of arithmetic: 

every positive integer can be resolved uniquely into a product of prime numbers. This 

arithmetization of syntax established, in effect, a language translation scheme between 

symbols of FA and natural numbers, so that a statement about the syntax of FA could be 

translated, via the rule book of Godel numbering, into a statement about natural numbers, 

just as in the Cartesian system, a fact about figures in the geometrical plane could be 

translated into one about real numbers.

So far, the system of Godel numbering as we have described it only sets up a 

correspondence between numbers and symbols, sequences of symbols, and sequences of 

sequences of symbols of FA. But there is more to the syntax of FA than this. There is also 

the question whether a given formula of FA is a well-formed formula, and, crucially, the 

question whether a sequence of formulas constitutes a proof. What Godel proved is that all 

the crucial functions needed to describe the complete syntax of FA, including being a wellformed 

formula and being a proof of FA, corresponded to certain recursive functions in IA. 

A recursive function is one that, intuitively speaking, can be mechanically computed. This 

kind of function can also be characterized strictly mathematically, and this Godel 

proceeded to do. An example of a so-called primitive recursive function, the "+ function," 

also known as the "addition function," will illustrate what is meant by recursivity. Let us 

call the number that comes right after a natural number x the successor of x, or s(x). The 

"+" function, then, is given by two rules: 

(a) x + 0 = x; 

(b) x + s(y) = s(x + y). (This can be read aloud as "x plus the successor of y equals the 

successor of x-plus-y.") 

The successor of x, namely, s(x), can be defined as x + 1. This kind of recursive definition 

can be used to compute mechanically, by a 

kind of "bootstrapping," the sum of any two natural numbers, since every natural number is 

either 0 or the successor of some other natural number. 

Recursive definitions were studied by Dedekind, Peano, Skolem and others, and recursive 

functions had been used implicitly throughout the history of mathematics, but the first to 

elaborate a precise and forceful account of such functions was Godel, who cited his young 

French colleague Jacques Herbrand as having influenced his understanding of these ideas. 

Herbrand had written to Godel on hearing of his incompleteness results from Von 

Neumann. Godel wrote a detailed and deeply respectful response, at the end of which he 

suggested that in the future they correspond each in his mother tongue. (Godel was very 

good at languages.) He never received a reply. What he did receive was a touching letter 

from Herbrand's father informing him that the reason for his son's silence was that he had 

fallen to his death while climbing in the Alps. Jacques Herbrand had been just twentythree 

years old. 

Godel demonstrated, then, that the fundamental concepts of MFA, in which was found the 

metamathematics, or proof theory, of FA, corresponded to certain recursive functions in 

IA. In particular, the function Bew(x, y), i.e., x is a proof of y (from the German for proof, 

Beweis), when coded into natural numbers, yields a recursive function. This was important 

because in proving that FA can represent IA, Godel had already shown that any recursive 

function contained in IA could be represented in FA. Specifically, if there was a truth 

about a recursive function in IA, there would be a corresponding formula that was a 

theorem of FA. Once he had demonstrated that the basic functions in MFA when coded into 

natural numbers yield recursive functions, he could conclude that MFA, just like IA, could

e represented in FA. Further, via Godel numbering he had already arithmetized the 

syntax of FA, so a fact about the syntax of FA would correspond to a fact in IA about the 

natural numbers. Godel had shown, then, that the theorems of FA could represent 

simultaneously the arithmetic truths of IA as well as, via Godel numbering, the 

syntactic truths of MFA. That is, a given theorem of FA would represent a mathematical 

truth in IA that would itself, via Godel numbering, represent a syntactic truth about FA. 

Godel had succeeded in proving, then, that FA, though in itself a system of formal, 

meaningless signs, could be "double stuffed" with meaning, i.e., assigned meanings that 

ensured that it could be used to represent, simultaneously, number theory and the syntax 

or proof theory of FA itself. 

In other words, FA could speak about itself via the natural numbers. The natural numbers, 

Godel had shown, were "reusable," in the spirit of Descartes: they could be used as 

elements of arithmetic and at the same time as representatives of the syntax or proof 

theory of formalized arithmetic. 

I Cannot Be Proved 

With these elements in place, the coordination of the three languages IA, FA, and MFA and 

the implementation of Godel numbering, Godel made his move. He constructed a formula 

of FAóknown, familiarly, today, as the Godel formula, or Gówhose interpretation in IA was 

a statement, either true or false, about the natural numbers. But G also had, via Godel 

numbering and the arithmetization of the syntax of FA, another meaning. On this 

interpretation it asserted a proof-theoretic fact about a certain formula of FA, via the 

Godel number assigned to that formula, to the effect that the formula with that Godel 

number g was unprovable in FA. But Godel had set it up that the formula whose Godel 

number was g was none other than G! In effect, then, on one interpretation, what G stated 

was, "I cannot be proved." The question then was, Is G provable in FA? (Equivalently, is G a 

theorem of FA?) 

Clearly, this question was a close cousin of the ancient liar paradox in which a sentence S 

says of itself, "I am not true," whereupon one asks, Is S true? But the liar paradox really is a 

paradox, or more precisely an antinomy, insofar as the natural answer to the question, "Is 

S 

true?" seems to imply both that S is true and that it is not. What Godel realized is that the 

question posed about G, which concerned not its truth but its provability, did not lead to 

paradox or antinomy. The Godel formula, after all, is simply a formula in the formal 

system, and as such it was a clear-cut, unproblematic question whether or not G was 

provable, i.e., was a theorem. Similarly, interpreted as a statement about numbers via the 

coordination of FA with IA, G was a statement not about itself but about natural numbers, 

and as such it said something unproblematically either true or false, but not both, about 

the natural numbers.

So is G a theorem of FA? We assume first that FA is consistent. If it were not consistent, it 

would obviously be useless for mathematics, and the game would be over. Assume next 

that G is provable in FA. That means that some sequence of formulas S of FA is a proof of 

G. Using the abbreviation we introduced earlier, that means that Bew(S, G). But we saw 

earlier that Godel had shown that the function, Bew(x, y), when coded into natural 

numbers, yields a recursive function and is thus rep-resentable in FA. The representation 

occurs via the arithmetization of the syntax of FA, so corresponding to a given syntactical 

truth Bew(x, y) of MFA, there is an arithmetical truth Bew(x, y) of IA that corresponds to a 

formula Bew(x, y) in FA that can be interpreted as saying that the sequence of formulas 

with Godel number x is a proof of the formula with Godel number y, and this formula, 

Bew(x, y), is a theorem of FA. Thus if G is provable in FA for some s, then Bew(s, g) is a 

theorem of FA (where s is the numeral in FA for s, the Godel number of the sequence of 

formulas S that constitutes the proof of G, and g is the numeral in FA for g, the Godel 

number of G). But as we saw at the beginning, what G states is that formula number g 

(i.e., G) is unprovable, that is, for any sequence x, it is not the case that Bew(x, g). Using 

a little logic, however, it follows from Bew(s, g) that there exists a sequence of formulas x 

such that Bew(x, g), hence, using a bit more logic, that it is not the case that for any 

sequence x it is not the case that Bew(x, g). That is, if something is a proof of formula 

number g, it can't be that there is no proof of g. But since G can be interpreted as saying 

that there is no proof of g, this last 

conclusion is evidently equivalent to not-G, the negation of G, and since it was derived, 

logically, from Bew(s, g), which, by hypothesis, is a theorem, it too is a theorem. That is, 

not-G is also a theorem. The assumption that G is provable, then, leads to the conclusion 

that both G and not-G are theorems, i.e., that both are provable in FA. Hence FA is 

inconsistent. But the assumption was that FA is consistent. If FA is consistent, then, G is 

not provable. That is the first part of GodePs theorem. 

How about not-G? Godel assumed for this half of his theorem that FA is not just consistent 

but "omega-consistent." (Omega is the traditional symbol for the natural numbers.) If a 

system is omega-consistent, the following cannot happen: some statement F( ) is provable 

individually of each natural number, i.e., F(0), F(l), F(2), etc., but it cannot be proved 

that for all x, the statement F(x) is true. Clearly, if FA is to represent all the natural 

numbers via its coordination with IA, omega-consistency if nonnegotiable. If not-G is a 

theorem, then, of FA, given what G says, it follows that the following is provable: it is not 

the case that every sequence of formulas number x does not constitute a proof of formula 

number g. But we have already learned that formula number g, i.e., G, is not provable in 

FA. Thus, for every individual sequence of formulas x, not-Bew(x, g) holds. Given the 

representability of the function Bew(x, y) in FA, it follows that for every natural number x, 

it is provable in FA that not-Bew(x, g). Since we are assuming that FA is omega-consistent, 

it follows that it cannot also be provable that it is not the case that for all sequences of 

formulas x, not-Bew(x, g) holds. But the latter is precisely what we assumed when we 

agreed for the sake of argument that not-G is a theorem. If FA is omega-consistent, then it 

follows that not-G is also not provable. This is the second half of Godel's theorem. Barkley 

Rosser later showed that one can construct an unprovable statement assuming only 

consistency, not omega-consistency. 

But Godel wasn't done yet. He was able to prove, quickly, his second incompleteness 

theorem, also on the assumption that FA is consistent. Using techniques similar to his proof 

of the first theorem, Godel proved easily that if FA is consistent, it cannot prove that it is

consistent. Not only was truth not fully representable in a formal theory, consistency, too, 

could not be formally represented. The Hilbert program had suffered a fatal blow. Godel 

had proved that there was in principle no method by which a mathematician, regarding his 

theories simply as uninterpreted formula games, could prove them free from hidden 

inconsistency. There simply was no such thing as a magic shield that would resolve all a 

mathematician's fears of an assault from some unsuspected inconsistency. (Similarly, as a 

direct consequence of Godel's incompleteness theorems, there can never be a foolproof 

antivirus computer program that we can be certain will not alter the program being 

protected but that will detect the presence of any other program that is attempting to 

alter the protected program.) 

Yet lest we be tempted to complain that GodePs theorem brought only bad news for our 

cherished computers, we should recall that the very existence of the modern computer, 

which is after all no more than a sophisticated calculation or deduction machine, is a 

direct consequence of the isolation and clarification by Godel and Herbrand of those 

recursive mathematical functions that are at the heart of the incompleteness theorem. It 

was Alan Turing, who developed his idea of what came to be called a Turing machine on 

the basis of the concept of recursive functions, who became the modern computer's most 

direct parent. What is crucial to a computer, after all, is that the instructions that are 

programmed into it can be followed mechanically, syntactically, without recourse to 

meaning, and in a manner that is "iterative" or "bootstrapping," so that one instruction 

leads directly to another. This is the heart of the idea of a Turing machine. 

These same recursive functions served ultimately to render GodePs theorem a yet more 

decisive refutation of Hilbert's program. For the mathematical characterization of a 

function as recursive, developed by Godel and Herbrand, was closely followed by a similar 

characterization, by Turing, of Turing computable functions, and a likeminded 

characterization of a class of mathematical functions introduced by the American logician 

Alonzo Church in his calculus of lambda conversion. Soon, Church's students Kleene and 

Rosser (Turing too, it should 

he noted, was a sometime student) proved that these three classes of mathematical 

functions are in a strict sense equivalent. This prompted Church to propound what is today 

called Church's thesis, which states that this class of mathematical functions, the recursive 

functions, corresponds exactly to the intuitively characterized class of functions that are 

mechanically or effectively calculable. 

Church's thesis is today widely accepted, and it gives Godel's theorems yet greater force in 

two respects. First, it made definitive the characterization of a formal system like FA as 

one whose syntactic rules must be mechanically specifiable, and thus specifiable by 

recursive functions. Since Godel's proof clearly could be extended to any formal system 

whose syntax was fully characterized by recursive functions, that meant that his 

incompleteness theorem applied with equal force to any system characterizable as a 

genuinely formal one. Second, Church's thesis added force to Godel's second theorem, 

since it could plausibly be argued that the methods that Hilbert would find acceptably 

"finitary" were exactly those that could be characterized as mechanically specifiable, and 

once these were identified with the precisely specified class of recursive mathematical

functions, it was an inescapable consequence of the second theorem that it directly 

refuted Hilbert's program of establishing a finitary proof of consistency for formal 

arithmetic. Through the work of Church and Turing, then, the full force of Godel's theorem 

began to be appreciated. 

The Formal and the Intuitive 

God's mercy preserves mathematics from being drowned in mere technique 

SIMONE WEIL 

But it was not always so. The mathematical shot heard round the world began as a 

whisper. Godel may have been a spy in the house of logic, a revolutionary, an intellectual 

bomb thrower, but he was also a 

citizen of Vienna, the city of coffeehouses. So he first communicated his momentous 

discoveries to Rudolf Carnap in the Cafe Reichsrat, shortly before they both left for a 

conference on the foundations of mathematics in Konigsberg (today, Kaliningrad, in which 

both Kant and Hilbert were born), where Godel would announce his results publicly. The 

first to be apprised of what the young man had done, however, seems to have been the 

first to fail to appreciate it. At the Konigsberg conference a few days later, Carnap 

proceeded, in good positivist style, to recommend consistency once again as the 

touchstone of formal mathematical theories. 

Carnap had been a student of Frege and of the philosopher Edmund Husserl and by 1931 

was an established logician. If Frege can with justice be called the father of modern 

"analytical" philosophy, Husserl can be considered the father of the "continental" branch. 

The two reviewed each other's books and corresponded, but their followers assembled into 

armed camps that exchanged intellectual gunfire. The influence Husserl came to have on 

Godel late in his life was an anomaly; to his colleagues, it was an embarrassment. In 1931, 

however, it was not an embarrassment for Carnap to have studied with Husserl. That such 

a man as Carnap failed to grasp the force of GodePs accomplishment is an indication of the 

break with tradition that Godel was inaugurating (a phenomenon his future friend Einstein 

had already encountered with relativity theory). Even a year later, Carnap confided that 

he still found Godel's results hard to understand. 

Von Neumann alone immediately grasped the force of the discovery. He was present at the 

meeting as one of the principal speakers, and after this encounter he would become a 

lifelong friend and admirer of Godel. But Von Neumann, as was so often the case, was the 

exception. So little impact did GodePs announcement have on his immediate listenersóthe 

cream of the foundationalist mathematicians and formal logiciansóthat when Hans 

Reichenbach, another prominent member of the Vienna Circle, wrote up an account of the 

conference for the journal Erkenntnis, he did not even mention Godel. The mathematical 

community, however, was quick to recover from this

71 

slight. Immediately after the conference, when news of the paper Godel had submitted for 

publication began to circulate, he was invited by the editors of Erkenntnis to add a 

postscript summarizing his soon-to-be published results. 

Often, a mathematical resultólike Fermat's last theoremóis believed even though its proof 

is unexpected, so that the appearance of a genuine proof creates a sensation. But in the 

case of Godel's theorem, the result itself was unexpected, so the appearance of a proofóa 

proof like nothing seen beforeówas explosive. But fame does not bring with it 

comprehension, and Godel's methods as much as his results were so revolutionary that it 

would be years before the mathematical and philosophical communities could fully digest 

them. 

Paul Bernays, Hilbert's assistant and a great logician in his own right, who would go on to 

become one of GodePs closest associates, was perplexed by some of the details of GodePs 

proofs and asked for Hilbert's assistance. Hilbert's response was at first merely anger, 

followed by denial. He became the first, but by no means the last, to propose, in effect, 

an "anti-Godel" principle: a formal principle, concocted ad hoc, to be appended to formal 

mathematics simply in order to block the application of GodePs theorem. Godel, usually 

unflappable even in the face of opposition or incomprehension, was genuinely irritated by 

this. Hilbert's ideaówhich he would give up soon enoughówas to propose that there be 

adjoined to his formal systems a new rule of deductive inference that would allow for the 

employment of infinitely many premises. As Godel pointed out, however, this proposal 

violated the very idea of a formal system, an idea Hilbert, following Frege, had been at 

pains to develop. The proposed cure would kill the patient. 

If Hilbert did not come off well in his first response to GodePs theorem, he displayed 

charm and fairness elsewhere. Two characteristic incidents bring this out clearly. Before 

World War I, he stood out by his willingness to take on as a doctoral student Jakob 

Grommer, who had attended a Talmudic school in Eastern Europe and lacked a gymnasium 

certificate. In addition, Grummer's hands and feet were de- 

formed, which led the daughter of the rabbi he was to replace to reject him. Hilbert, 

however, did not reject him, declaring that "if students without the gymnasium diploma 

will always write such dissertations as Grommer's, it will be necessary to make a law 

forbidding the taking of the examination for the diploma." The second incident concerns 

the physicist Max Born, who began his academic career in mathematics. Before his 

examination, he asked Hilbert for advice, and was asked what the area was in which he 

was the least prepared. It was ideal theory. To Born's dismay, in the examination that 

followed, just this was the topic on which Hilbert chose to focus his questions. His 

explanation to Born? "I was just interested to find out what you know about things about 

which you know nothing."

Hilbert soon recovered from the shock of GodePs discovery and proceeded to incorporate 

and develop it in his and Bernays's new textbook on mathematical logic. The same cannot 

be said, however, for Ernst Zermelo, the mathematician who had inaugurated the 

axiomatic development of set theory after Russell's paradox had demonstrated that the 

naive set theory developed by Cantor lacked a coherent philosophical foundation. Even 

today, the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory are the most widely used and accepted 

in the field. Yet Zermelo, from beginning to end, was unable to understand or accept 

GodePs results. He became their principal mathematical opponent. (Wittgenstein bears the 

honor of being their chief philosophical detractor.) 

Zermelo's difficulties were understandable. GodePs theorems traded on crucial distinctions 

such as truth versus proof, semantics versus syntax, and completeness versus formal 

consistency, distinctions that, though in the air, became fully clarified for the first time 

only after GodePs proofs had appeared. It was not that Hilbert, the founder of formalism, 

distinguished carefully between truth and proof and simply opted for the latter. Rather, as 

Godel himself put the matter years later, "formalists considered formal demonstrability to 

be an analysis of the concept of mathematical truth and, therefore, were of course not in 

a position to distinguish the two." In the realm of mathematics, proof, for the 

formalist, was indistinguishable from truth, and so any attempt to draw distinctions 

between them was simply incomprehensible. Zermelo's philosophical framework, in turn, 

though different from Hilbert's, was so contrary to GodePs that reconciliation was 

impossible. 

Fate brought the two men together at another mathematical meeting, this time in Bad 

Elster, a year after the conference at Konigsberg. When it was suggested to Zermelo after 

the talks were over that he meet with Godel for lunch on a nearby hill, he demurred, 

complaining first that he "did not like GodePs looks," then that the supply of food was 

insufficient, and finally that the climb would defeat him. Zermelo should have trusted his 

instincts. He was finally talked into meeting with Godel, but the encounter, though polite, 

was fruitless. He would soon write to Godel that he had a discovered a "major gap" in his 

argument, and a lengthy replyórunning to ten handwritten pagesóby Godel did little to 

disabuse him of his doubts. Having once failed to enlighten Zermelo, Godel apparently 

gave it up as a lost cause, declining to respond even when Zermelo published his criticisms. 

Carnap, when shown Zermelo's letters, agreed that he had "completely misunderstood" 

GodePs achievement. 

If Zermelo's intransigence was to be expected, Bertrand Russell's ambivalence was not. The 

coauthor of the monumental Principia Mathematical, which provided the actual formal 

system for GodePs proof, continued, late in life, to refer to GodePs results only guardedly. 

In a letter written in 1963, Russell, while acknowledging the greatness of Godel's 

achievement, did not conceal that he remained puzzled by it, asking rhetorically "are we 

to think that 2 + 2 is not 4, but 4.001 ?" This suggests that Godel had purported to have 

demonstrated a flaw in classical mathematics, which precisely misses the point of Godel's 

theorem. Russell knew, however, that he had not yet fully thought this through. He 

commented, dryly, that he was "glad [I] was no longer working at mathematical logic." 

(Apparently, Godel was too. In a letter to a colleague he wrote that "Russell evidently 

misinterprets my result; however, he does so in a very interesting manner. ... In 

contradistinction

Wittgenstein, in his posthumous book, advances a completely trivial and uninteresting 

misinterpretation.") 

Still, most logicians and mathematicians came to appreciate Godel's achievements, which 

eventually assumed their rightful place as part of the new orthodoxy. Hilbert's program 

was largely abandoned, in company with other mathematical misadventures like squaring 

the circle and proving Euclid's parallel postulate. There simply was no safe method by 

which the security of formal mathematical systems powerful enough to represent the 

natural numbers could be ensured. And there simply was no such thing as a formal system 

that could adequately and completely represent the natural numbers. GodePs 

mathematical methods, too, found their way into daily mathematics, including the 

employment of recursive functions, the arithmetization of metamathematics, and the 

construction of "Godel formulas" to establish, via self-reference, the incompleteness of 

formal systems. Never again would syntax be substituted for semantics, proof for truth. 

But the wider significance of GodePs achievement, its true meaning, was something else. 

One would have thought that after GodePs incompleteness theorems, which established 

the essential limitations of formalization, the very enterprise of formalizing mathematical 

domains would have been reconsidered. Yet nothing of the kind happened. The American 

logician Emil Post was one of the few to take note of this curious fact. In an essay 

submitted to a mathematical journal in 1941 (and rejected), Post observed that as a result 

of Godel's theorems we know that "mathematical thinking is, and must be, essentially 

creative." He went on to remark, however, that "it is to the writer's continuing amazement 

that ten years after Godel's remarkable achievement current views on the nature of 

mathematics are thereby affected only to the point of seeing the need of many formal 

systems, instead of [a single] universal one." One would have expected, he went on to say, 

that the fascination with formal systems, with proof and syntax, would give way to "a 

return to meaning and truth." Yet this never happened. The 

zeitgeist would not be denied, (Even the members of the explicitly an-tiformalist 

"intuitionist" school of mathematics championed by L.E.J. Brouwer would in the course of 

time expend a great deal of energy constructing formal systems for parts of intuitionist 

mathematics.) 

A more general aspect of Godel's results remains neglected to this day. "Godel's program," 

though closely related to Hilbert's, was different in an important way. Whereas Hilbert 

wished to do for certain parts of mathematics what the positivists wished to do 

everywhereóreplace the intuitive with the formalóGodel's overarching ambition throughout 

his career consisted in the attempt to establish, by formal means, the limits of formal 

methods in capturing intuitive concepts. The goal of his incompleteness theorem was thus 

to establish, by the most formal of methodsómethods that could be programmed into a 

computeróthe limits of formal systems of proof in capturing the intuitive concept of 

mathematical truth. Church's thesis, in turnówhich made precise the concept of a formal 

system, and thus demonstrated that Godel's results applied to any formal system 

whatsoeveróitself constituted a chapter in Godel's program, insofar as the intuitive notion 

of effective calculability or mechanical solvability, an epistemological concept, concerning 

what we can come to know using mere calculation, was to be identified with the formal,

mathematical concept of a (general) recursive function. As Church himself made clear, his 

thesis was based on an idea of Godel's, inspired by a suggestion of Herbrand's, that it might 

be possible to identify the intuitive concept with the formal one. What was remarkable 

was that here, unlike the case of Godel's theorem, there turned out to be no essential 

limitation on the effort to find a formal characterization of an intuitive concept. In this 

instance, the "Godel program" achieved a positive result. Godel himself found this 

astonishing. With the concept of [general] recursiveness or Turing computability, he said 

later, we have " for the first time succeeded in giving an absolute definition of an 

interesting epistemological notion." It was, he said, "a kind of miracle" that the diagonal 

procedure (as in his incompleteness theorem) "does not lead outside the defined notion." 

What was striking in the case of Godel's incompleteness theorems, however, was not just 

that his program was satisfied negatively, but that this result was proved formally. 

(Church's thesis, though convincing to most, including, eventually, Godel, cannot be 

proved formally, since one of the concepts involved, effective calculability, is of course 

precisely not formal, but rather, intuitive.) That is what made his results so irresistible and 

so aggravating. This was the secret of Godel's strategy: where possible, he would establish 

the limits of the formal from within the formalism itself. He was a mathematician one of 

whose principal tasks was proving, mathematically, what formal mathematics can and 

cannot accomplish. 

This overarching methodology of Godel's, however, while practiced in plain sight, has 

proved invisible. No one noticed that Godel's later contribution to relativity theory 

provided yet another example of his program of discovering the limits of formal methods in 

capturing intuitive concepts, this time, however, with a reversed conclusion. It was not 

only Godel the logician who was a spy. Godel the philosopher proved to be a figure yet 

more difficult to discern. 

5 It's Hard to Leave Vienna 

In the midst of the exultant joy that is pervading our country . .. you will be very happy if. 

. . in accord with the true will of the Fiihrer you may be allowed to support the decision of 

his now united people with all your strength. 

ERWIN SCHRODINGER, AUSTRIA, 1938, "CONFESSION TO THE FUHRER" 

Having announced his incompleteness results at Konigsberg and published them shortly 

thereafter, Godel rocketed to international fame in mathematical and logical circles. In 

the months and years that tollowed, he presented these results, and a slew of others, in a 

host of mathematical colloquia, including those presided over by his advisor Hans Hahn and 

by Hahn's friend and colleague Karl Menger. In Menger's colloquium, in 1933, Godel 

delivered a paper on the rela-tionship of classical to intuitionist logic. In the audience was 

the American mathematician Oswald Veblen, newly recruited by Abraham Flexner to join 

the mathematical faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. 

Veblen, impressed, assisted Flexner by doing some recruiting of his own.

Abraham Flexner Goes Shopping 

In 1929, just moments before the stock market crashed, the owners of the New Jersey 

department store Bamberger's, Louis Bamberger and his 

sister Mrs. Felix Fuld, sold the business to R.H. Macy and Co. with the intention of using 

their profits to found an institution of higher learning. To assist them in this endeavor they 

enlisted the services of Abraham Flexner, a distinguished educational reformer. Flexner 

proposed an Institute devoted entirely to the exercise of pure thought of the highest 

order, where the faculty, the elite of the elite, would be unencumbered with the usual 

burdens of teaching and administration. (The burden of publication, of course, would 

remain.) He quickly convinced Bamberger and Fuld that this Institute for Advanced Study 

should be located in Princeton, New Jersey, where it could take advantage of the 

resources and the tradition of academic culture provided by Princeton University. Flexner 

argued as well that the institute's first and fundamental faculty should be in the area of 

mathematicsóincluding mathematical physicsówhich combined purity, significance, and 

universally accepted canons of objectivity. Wasting no time, he began by recruiting, in 

1932, Oswald Veblen and Albert Einstein as permanent full professors. Ve-blen he stole 

from Princeton University, the first of several thefts that would strain the relationship 

between the two institutions. A vigorous and enthusiastic shopper with an eye for 

geniuses, within a year Flexner acquired the mathematicians Hermann Weyl, James 

Alexander, and John Von Neumann. 

Getting Einstein, clearly, was a coup. In California in 1931, trolling the halls at Caltech for 

his new institute, Flexner learned that Albert Einstein happened to be visiting. The great 

physicist was intrigued but cautious, having already received offers from prestigious and 

well-established centers of learning around the world. He advised Flexner to approach him 

again in Oxford, England, where he would be spending the spring semester of 1932. 

Flexner did, but Einstein remained ambivalent, suggesting that Flexner approach him again 

that summer, when Einstein would be at his country home in Caputh, Germany. The third 

time was the charm. Ambivalence was replaced with enthusiasm: "I am fire and flame for 

it," announced Einstein. 

If Flexner's shopping trip had been productive, so was Veblen's. A guest at Menger's 

mathematical colloquium in Vienna, 1933, Veblen 

was so impressed with Godel's presentation, which confirmed, no doubt, what he had 

already heard from others, that he invited the young logician to visit the Institute for 

Advanced Study during its inaugural year, 1933-1934. Godel would not be a permanent 

professor, like Veblen himself, but one of twenty-four "workers," as they were then called. 

(They would soon acquire a more genteel title, "temporary member.") Veblen enticed 

Godel by offering him the opportunity to attend a seminar on quantum mechanics to be 

offered at the Institute by Von Neumann. Godel responded that he had a "lively interest" in 

quantum mechanics and would welcome the opportunity. (His interest in physics was 

indeed lively. He returned from the library in those years with volumes by Schrodinger, 

Dirac, Planck, Mach, Born, and Lorentz.)

If he came to Princeton, Veblen pointed out, Godel would have the opportunity to work 

with the American logician Alonzo Church, who had taken his doctorate under Veblen and 

who had just developed a new system of formal logic, including what would later be known 

as the lambda calculus. It would be interesting, Veblen hinted, to see whether Godel's 

incompleteness theorem applied with equal force to Church's system of logic. Godel agreed 

that it would indeed be very interesting. So, it turned out, did Church, who believed, 

however, that his formal system was sufficiently different from the one Godel had focused 

on in his proof, the Principia Matbematica of Russell and Whitehead, that it would be 

untouched by Godel's reasoning. (Church, it turned out, was mistaken. Worse still, his own 

students, Kleene and Rosser, proved his system inconsistent. In time he would become a 

champion of attempts to prove Godel's results inescapable by any genuinely formal 

system.) A third benefit that would attend a visit was suggested by Godel himself: the 

opportunity to improve his English. The offer was too good to refuse. So, in the course of 

time, was a second invitation, and then a third. Yet in spite of the nightmare that was the 

political scene in Austria, Godel remained hesitant about a permanent move to the 

institute and America. Even on the eve of the Nazi occupation (a conquest welcomed in 

the streets with patriotic fervor), he strengthened his commitment to Vienna. 

The Vienna Syndrome 

Other Viennese intellectuals suffered from the same syndrome: an attachment to the city 

of charm and culture so unreasonably strong that even the rumblings of the approaching 

German war machine could not dislodge them. In its worst hour, the German-speaking 

world of Austria-Hungary and Germany still offered such intellectual depth and warm 

collegiality to likeminded thinkers that its luminaries feared, perhaps rightly, that nowhere 

else would their light ever again burn so bright. Erwin Schrodinger, one of the pioneers of 

quantum mechanics, certainly thought so. Having abandoned Germany in the tumultuous 

early 1930s, he became disenchanted with life in Britain and America and decided in 1936 

to return to his native Austria, where, and only where, he could flourish. He would later 

describe this decision as "an unprecedented stupidity." 

Having deliberately climbed into a hole, Schrodinger proceeded to dig it deeper. A selfadvertised 

apolitical man, he was especially allergic to Nazis. Newly appointed to the Karl 

Franzen University of Graz, he couldn't resist the opportunity, in giving a lecture in Vienna 

on "World Structure in the Large and in the Small," introduced by Hans Thirring, who had 

taught physics to Godel, to append at the conclusion a political remark. "When one returns 

again from the kingdom of the stars," he said, "to our world, one finds there a liking for a 

concept that wants to place one of the nations that live in this world over or under another 

one." 

The audience cheered wildly; the Nazis took note. When the Anschluss occurred, it became 

clear that if he were to remain at Graz, Schrodinger would have to make an equally public 

retraction. This he proceeded to do in a "Confession to the Fiihrer" on March 30, 1938, 

published in all the Austrian and German papers. "In the midst of the exultant joy that is 

pervading our country," he wrote, ". . . you will be very happy if ... in accord with the true 

will of the Fuhrer you may be allowed to support the decision of his now united people 

with all your strength." This embarrassing statement he tried to explain afterward

to his friend Albert Einstein. He knew, of course, that his return to Austria would be 

dangerous, but he had not anticipated that "the fortress would be surrendered without 

striking a blow." "I hope you have not seriously taken amiss," he wrote to Einstein, "my 

certainly quite cowardly statement... I wanted to remain free and could not do so without 

great duplicity." The duplicity paid off, but its effect was brief. Within months he received 

a short note from the interior ministry dismissing him from the university, "with no right to 

any legal recourse to this dismissal." The reason for the action: "political unreliability." An 

embarrassment had turned into a disaster. 

Not all who suffered from the Vienna syndrome were so unsuccessful. The Wittgenstein 

family was one of the richest and most prominent in Vienna. Assimilated Jews for 

generations, they like many others were awakened by the Anschluss to the fact that in the 

eyes of the new regime they were not Austrians or Germans but Jews. Ludwig 

Wittgenstein, the philosopher, was safely in England, his brother Paul, the pianist, in 

America, where their sister Margarete would also live out the war. The sisters Hermine and 

Helene, however, could not be cured of the Vienna syndrome. Nazis or no Nazis, the city 

was their home, and they were not about to leave it. The problem was that the Nuremberg 

laws declared Jewish anyone with at least three Jewish grandparents, a criterion the 

Wittgenstein sisters appeared to satisfy. There was, however, a way out. The Nazi regime 

had a procedure for reclassification of Jews, a Befreiung. The Wittgensteins were of 

"mixed race," Mischlinge, but if they could prove that in fact they had only two Jewish 

grandparents, thenóassuming they had not been so unwise as to actually practice Judaism 

or to marry a Jewóthey could be relabeled "Mischlinge of first degree" and permitted to 

remain, albeit tenuously, in the new Reich. 

Successful attempts at Befreiung were extraordinarily rare. The year the Wittgensteins 

made their attempt, 1939, saw 2,100 petitions for reclassification. The Fiihrer approved 

twelve. It seemed, however, that the Wittgensteins had a chance, since service in the 

Great War counted loward reclassification, and Ludwig and Paul had accumulated their 

share of medals in service to the fatherland (Paul losing his right arm in the process, 

Ludwig working on the Tractatus in his spare time in the army). But a case would have to 

be made to the Fiihrer, who declared himself deluged by requests forwarded by the 

interior ministry: "I get buckets and buckets of such applications . . . my fellow party 

members! Obviously you know of more decent Jews than there are Jews in the whole of 

the German Reich." In the end, however, Ludwig and Paul were able to assist their sisters. 

Medals did not impress the Reich, but gold did, and the Wittgenstein wealth, much of it 

invested abroad, came to the attention of the German ministry. With the active assistance 

(if not the approval) of the brothers Paul and Ludwig, and a Viennese lawyer who 

specialized in such things, Dr. Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who would later be hanged as a war 

criminal, it was arranged, after extensive negotiations, to transfer a vast amount of the 

Wittgenstein fortune into the coffers of the Reichsbank in Berlin. In exchange, the ministry 

agreed to accept as true the story that the Wittgensteins' paternal grandfather, Hermann 

Christian, was in fact the illegitimate son of the "princely" house of Waldeck, leaving the 

Wittgenstein sisters with just two Jewish grandparents and permitting their official 

reclassification as Mischlinge of first degree. No price, it seems, was too high to pay if it 

enabled the Wittgenstein sisters to remain in Vienna. Her-mine and Helene survived the 

Vienna syndrome without having to undergo a cure.

The Viennese disease also had a German strain. It unmistakably stamped Wilhelm 

Furtwanglerócousin of Philip Furtwangler, the mathematician whose lectures had so 

inspired Godelólegendary conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, with whom Paul 

Wittgenstein had once performed with left hand alone. Forced to dismiss musician after 

talented musician from his beloved philharmonic to satisfy the demands of racial purity, 

compelled for the same reason to delete composers from Mendelssohn to Mahler from his 

concert programs, Furtwangler at no point considered the possibility of abandoning his 

post or his fatherland. He believed it his duty to preserve the sacred legacy of German 

music, 

evenóindeed, especiallyóin a time of political madness. His contempt for Nazis, his 

unceasing attempts to assist Jewsó"Can you name me a Jew on whose behalf Furtwangler 

has not intervened?" bemoaned Josef Goebbelsóput him on a permanent short list for the 

concentration camps. On the knife edge of execution throughout the war, he was 

preserved only by the patronage of his greatest fan, Adolf Hitler. (The attempt by the 

Nazis to replace Furtwangler with a brilliant young upstart named Herbert von 

Karajanówho enthusiastically joined the Nazi party not once but twiceófell on deaf ears; 

the suggestion was dismissed by Hitler with contempt.) 

Hated by many Germans for his opposition to the Nazis, Furtwangler was yet more hated 

by the allies for his refusal to leave Germany, a twin fate he shared with his compatriot, 

the physicist Werner Heisen-berg. Heisenberg was, with Schrodinger, a founding father of 

the "new" quantum theory: Heisenberg of the abstract, algebraic matrix theory beloved of 

positivists, Schrodinger of the more metaphysical and intuitive wave mechanics. (It was 

Godel's friend Von Neumann who would prove them, in a strong sense, equivalent.) 

Between the Austrian and the German no love was lost. "I. .. felt discouraged, not to say 

repelled, by [Heisenberg's] methods of transcendental algebra," wrote Schrodinger, "which 

appeared very difficult to me, and by the lack of visualizability." Heisenberg, for his part, 

complained that "the more I reflect on the physical portion of Schrodinger's theory the 

more disgusting I find it... . What Schrodinger writes on the visualizability of his theory ... 

I consider trash." Yet they shared more than their creation of quantum mechanics, for 

Heisenberg too suffered from the Vienna syndrome, albeit, like Furtwangler, from the 

German strain. He too could not bring himself to leave his fatherland during the war, 

despite his contempt for the Nazis and all they stood for, despite his longstanding 

admiration for the "Jewish physics" of his friend and hero Albert Einstein, which rendered 

him, like Furtwangler, a German outcast in the fatherland. At war's end, Heisenberg, like 

Furtwangler, was a hunted man in his own country; to the outside world, a traitor. 

Red Roses from Dr. Einstein 

Einstein himself appeared to be immune to the Vienna syndrome. Appearances, however, 

can be deceptive. Though his exit from Germany in the early 1930s, before many of his 

colleagues realized it was time to leave, has been widely noted, what has achieved less 

attention is Einstein's decision in the first place to take up residence in Berlin after his 

epoch-making papers in the "miraculous year" of 1905 catapulted him to world fame. (This 

neglect has begun to be remedied.) Having taken the extraordinary step of abandoning his 

German homeland in his teens to take up residency and citizenship in the less bellicose and

academically rigid domain of Switzerlandó where he received his degree in physics, where 

in seven years as a patent clerk he established himself as "the new Copernicus," and where 

he became established as a professor in Zurichówhy did he decide in 1913 to return not 

just to Germany, but to Berlin, the very heart of Prussia? 

Max Planck and Walther Nernst approached the young Dr. Einstein in Zurich and gave him a 

day to think over their offer of a professorship in Berlin. He would meet them at the train 

station, bearing white roses if he declined, red if he accepted. The roses were red. "It is 

not entirely clear why Einstein accepted the invitation to Berlin," writes his biographer 

Albrecht Folsing, nor why he chose to stay there after the Great War for which he held his 

own country to blame. Folsing offers some suggestions: Planck was after all the first to 

recognize, and publicize, the importance of the theory of relativity; the position in Berlin 

was free of any teaching obligations; Elsa Lowenthal, Einstein's cousin and soon his 

paramour, would be there. Each persuasive, but none conclusive. He seems to have come 

under the German strain of the Vienna syndrome. This would help to explain why Einstein 

remained in Germany during and after World War I, when he was a lone pacifist in a sea of 

not merely German citizens but Prussian scientists caught up in the hysteria of the war, 

and why he continued to reside in Germany during the early years of the N.v/.i madness. 

The handwriting, after all, had been on the wall a long time. As early as 1920, an 

"antirelativity," i.e., "anti-Einstein," club had been formed in Berlin, bearing the name 

"Study Group of German Natural Philosophers." This group was devoted to denouncing 

Einstein's "Jewish physics," even offering money to those who would join their cause. On 

August 24, 1920, the insanity found a home. In Berlin's Philharmonic Hall, where 

Furtwangler had conducted the Berlin Philharmonic and Paul Wittgenstein had performed 

concertos for the left hand, the antirelativists staged a meeting to make their voices 

heard. Einstein himself attended, and amazingly found the time afterwards to publish a 

response. The debate was a tar baby, and Einstein, together with his unhappy friends, 

became chagrined that he had allowed himself to be drawn into this fray. Yet it would 

take well over a decade's worth of such events to induce Einstein to leave Germany. The 

Vienna syndrome indeed, in its Berlin strain. 

The Eleventh Hour Plus One 

If Einstein left Berlin not quite at the eleventh hour but perhaps at the tenth, Godel left 

Vienna not at the eleventh hour but even later, just before midnight. He would visit the 

Institute for Advanced Study not once but three times before finally making the decision to 

leave Vienna. He accepted invitations to be a "worker" at the IAS from 1933 to 1934, 1935 

to 1936, and 1936 to 1937. Though the visits were on the whole successfulówith the 

exception of the second, which Godel terminated abruptly, citing health reasonsóthe years 

immediately following his great discoveries took a heavy toll on his mental and physical 

well-being. The lengthy ocean voyages to the States were a great strain, and the work 

itself (which he engaged in excessively, quickly producing a string of important 

mathematical results) was also clearly a burden; but the need to defend his work against 

critical misunderstandings no doubt had the most devastating effect. Unlike Einstein, who 

would have toasted Franklin Roosevelt's statement that "I am an

old campaigner and love a good fight," Godel throughout his life was deeply averse to 

dispute and controversy. This had an unfortunate effect on his published papers, which 

were carefully designed to put forward not all that he knew or believed but only what he 

could establish beyond all reasonable doubt, what even his opponents would be forced to 

accept. The manuscripts of his publications, sadly, contain vast amounts of valuable 

material crossed out, no doubt because they failed to meet his excessive standards of 

acceptability without controversy. In the end, ironically, this strategy of safety failed 

completely. All along, Godel was understood to be a man apart from his times, whose 

beliefs on a host of topicsófrom truth and proof, to language-centered philosophy, to God 

and spiritsówere wildly out of step with those of his contemporaries. 

With fame came not only friends but enemies, and this Godel was unprepared for. It was 

during these years that he suffered his first bouts of depression and began to show signs of 

the eating disorder that would eventually kill him. Three visits to sanatoria are 

documented: 1934 at Sanatorium Westend in Purkersdorf, near Vienna; 1935 at 

Breitenstein am Semmering, and 1936 at a sanitorium at Rekawinkel, near Vienna. These 

inner struggles were complemented by the outward turmoil of his beloved Vienna, which 

was coming down around him in ruins. It was in these years that Germany invaded 

Czechoslovakia and that Austria succumbed to the Anschluss, in this period that Schlick, of 

the Vienna Circle, was murdered and Herbrand fell to his death while mountain climbing. 

In addition, Godel's teacher Hahn had also died, and his friends Menger and Carnap had left 

for America. He also had more immediate concerns. His mother had been forced by 

financial circumstances to return to Brno, where her vociferous objections to the Nazis put 

her at considerable risk. 

Godel himself was eerily silent about the political events surrounding him, both in person 

and in correspondence, which resulted in a considerable cooling of his friendship with 

Menger. If this silence sprang from Godel's excessive caution, then once again it was 

ineffective. The Nazi authorities noted his association with "the Jewish pro- 

fessor Hahn," adding that "it redounded to his discredit" that he "traveled in liberal-Jewish 

circles." The signs were all around him. His cleaning lady presented him with a bill at the 

bottom of which were appended the words, "Heil Hitler!" Yet in spite of everything, he 

made no decision to leave. On the contrary, as late as 1939 he and Adele, whom he had 

married in 1938 in a civil ceremonyósurprising his brother, who had only just been 

introduced to herómoved from a rented apartment to one they had purchased in the city 

of Vienna. The Vienna syndrome, in spades. More still needed to happen before Godel 

could be persuaded to flee. 

More did. One day late in 1939, Godel was accosted by a gang of youths who took him for a 

Jewóor at least someone who associated with Jewsóand roughed him up, knocking off his 

glasses. Adele, fortunately, was able to beat them off with her umbrella. This incident, 

however, seems to have done the trick, especially when combined with the order he had 

recently received to take a physical examination to determine whether he was fit for 

military service with the German army, an examination which, amazingly, the frail, thirtytwo-year-old 

logician, who had been in and out of sanatoria, passed. With the considerable 

assistance of the new director of the IAS, Frank Aydelotte, who wrote to the authorities 

that Godel should be given special treatment as an Aryan who was a world-famous 

mathematician, Godel succeeded, in December 1939, in securing a visa to travel to

America. The great logician escaped from Austria just as the door was closing behind him. 

"I am told in all steamship bureaus," he wrote to Aydelotte, "that the danger for German 

citizens to be arrested by the English is very great on the Atlantic." He decided, therefore, 

to travel with Adele via the trans-Siberian railway to Japan, from there to voyage across 

the Pacific to San Francisco, and thence by rail to Princeton. A grueling journey about 

which Godel, typically, made no comment. Adele, however, remarked afterward that they 

traveled frequently at night, in constant fear of being detained and returned to Austria. 

The journey itself, however, was without incident, and Godel arrived at last in San 

Francisco harbor on March 4, 1940. Soon he 

would be at the IAS with another survivor, Albert Einstein, whose friendship would be a 

watershed in two lives that had already marked some of the greatest intellectual 

achievements of the twentieth or any other century. Godel and Einstein would discover 

that what they had left behind in Vienna and Berlin they would never find again. Each in 

his own way would become increasingly isolated and lonely, a creature of another time and 

another culture, their native language a constant reminder of their origins in the land that 

had become their adopted country's mortal enemy. A historic empire had dwindled to the 

company of two, what Kurt Vonnegut would describe in his novel Mother Night as "das 

Reich der Zwei." But what a two! While lesser souls might look only to the glories of their 

past, Godel and Einstein in their remarkable friendship would explore a new world of 

ideas. More and more, their thoughts would turn to a topic at the very center of Einstein's 

relativity, at the core as well of Godel's preoccupation with Kant and Leibniz, the German 

idealists. The question was time. The answer would be yet another surprise from Dr. 

Godel. 

Participants at Einstein's 70th birthday celebration. Left to right: Eugene Wigner, Hermann 

Weyl, Godel, I.I. Rabi, Einstein, Rudolf Ladenburg, J. Robert Oppenheimer. 

Photo by Howard Schrader 

Kurt Godel with his 

brother, Rudolf, and 

his mother, Marianne. 

Courtesy of the Godel Archives, Firestone Library, Princeton University, and the Institute 

for Advanced Study 

Kurt and Adele Godel dining outdoors.



Kurt and Adele 

Godel dining 

indoors. 

Courtesy of the 

Godel Archives, 

Firestone Library, 

Princeton University, 

and the Institute for 

Advanced Study 

Godel, dressed for driving. 



Godel, dressed for hiking. 



Young Adele Porkert at the piano.



6 Amid the Demigods 

When pygmies cast such long shadows, it must be very late in the day. GIAN-CARLO ROTA 

Princeton is not Vienna. Having fled Nazi-occupied Austria, Godel and Adele found 

themselves in an Ivy League college town, small, provincial and inbred, dominated by the 

imposing presence of Princeton University, itself outclassed by the still more prestigious 

Institute for Advanced Study. Princeton's students may have touted themselves as the 

creme de la creme; the institute could boast that mere students, ol whatever caliber, 

were not welcome. In these streets it was hard to avoid rubbing shoulders with the 

intellectual elite, and with those who thought of themselves as such. Bertrand Russell was 

unimpressed. He found Princeton "full of new Gothic, and ... as like Oxford as monkeys can 

make it." Einstein was more delicate: "Princeton is a wonderful piece of earth and at the 

same time an exceedingly amusing ceremonial backwater of tiny spindle-shanked 

demigods." The pygmies on stilts would have to make way for the entrance of two giants. 

Godel, however, was content with his new home. Unlike Adele, who struggled with English, 

he had long been fluent, and he found the people and culture in Princeton "ten times more 

congenial" than those in Vienna. He admired also the "prompt functioning of government 

officials in America," which he said made life "10 x 10 x . . ." better than in the old 

country. The very fact that intellectual life was more narrowly focused, centered at the 

institute on mathematics and 

mathematically oriented sciences, could not fail to please him. But in such a rarefied 

atmosphere, it is no surprise that Adele, lacking academic pretensions, found it hard to 

breathe. In the cafe, opera, club, and cabaret scene of prewar Vienna, the easy charm of 

social life had blended smoothly with the life of the mind, professors mingled with 

dancers, and composers dined with philosophers. In Princeton, such mixing would be hard 

to imagine. (There were, in any case, few cabarets or opera houses to be found.) 

Without children, Adele sought refuge in a menagerie of pets that would eventually 

encompass a pair of love birds, a dog named Penny and a cat, though not one of the 

tailless Manx variety of which she had become inordinately fond. (Only the desperate pleas 

of her friend and neighbor, Bobbie Brown, dissuaded her from removing the tail of the cat 

she did purchase.) In time, the Godels would also sponsor a foster child abroad. Their first 

home in Princeton was an apartment at 245 Nassau Street. Later, they moved into an 

apartment at 108 Stockton Street, where their neighbor, George Brown, already knew 

Godel. During one of Godel's early visits to the institute, Brown, a graduate student in 

mathematical statistics who had studied logic at Harvard with W.V.O. Quine, had been 

given the task of taking notes on Godel's lectures to prepare them for publication. He and 

his wife Bobbie quickly befriended the new arrivals. But during their visits with the

eclusive Godels, they were put off by their hosts' decision to remove the screens from the 

windows. Godel claimed that this allowed him to breathe properly, but it also allowed easy 

access to dust and insects, which considerably dampened Bobbie Brown's enthusiasm for 

coming over. 

This residence, too, was temporary. The Godels moved again, this time to an apartment at 

120 Alexander Street, near the train station. Godel was fond of his new abode, remarking 

that it was located "directly opposite the most elegant hotel in town" (the Princeton Inn). 

They occupied the entire upper floor of the building, with windows on all sides, which 

Godel found helpful in surviving the hot Princeton summers. Adele, however, was unhappy 

with the poor condition of the 

91 

premises, which she considered unhygienic, and she found the neighborhood dreary. 

Her disappointment turned to enthusiasm when she discovered a house for sale at 129 

(later 145) Linden Lane, at the outskirts of town. Built just a few years earlier, it was a 

small one-story structure of "sturdy cinder block" with an automatic oil furnace and built-in 

air conditioning, and included a wood-burning fireplace. Adele would not rest until she had 

persuaded her husband to purchase it. The house was beyond their means, but Godel was 

able to secure a mortgage for three-fourths of the purchase price, while the director of 

the institute, J. Robert Oppenheimer, arranged for a salary advance to cover the rest. It 

was, to GodePs mind, a "somewhat shaky" arrangement, but he went along with it, and in 

August 1949 they moved in to stay. Adele arranged the furnishings, which were for the 

most part modest, but she did indulge her weakness for oriental rugs and chandeliers. Over 

the years, she would oversee the construction of a sun porch, refinish a room to serve as 

GodePs study, and plant a flower garden. Evergreens would also be planted in front of 

their home, as a barrier to shield the Godels from passersby. Adele engaged in traditional 

domestic activities. She was, friends noted, a good cook, though with a penchant for heavy 

German fare. In the summertime, she was relieved to escape the confines of Princeton by 

accompanying Godel to resorts in Maine. 

Still, it was a sad life, centered on the principal occupation of tending to her fragile 

husband, a task Adele shared with a succession of Princeton luminaries. In the early years 

it was Oswald Veblen, the one who had first moved to acquire Godel for the institute, who 

took it on himself to look after him. The job then passed to Einstein, and after Einstein's 

death to the economist Oskar Morgenstern. Shepherding the logician became increasingly 

necessary, for Godel's eccentricities, already evident in Vienna, had blossomed to such an 

extent that as early as 1941, Frank Aydelotte, director of the institute before 

Oppenheimer, took the extraordinary step of inquiring of GodePs doctor whether "there is 

any danger of his malady taking a violent form 

which might involve his doing injury cither to himself or to others ..." He was assured that 

violence would not he a problem.

These eccentricities included Godel's conviction that "bad air" was emanating from his 

refrigerator as well as from the heating system. Fear of air was accompanied by an 

aversion to cold. Even in midsummer, his gaunt figure could be seen enshrouded in a 

winter coat, along with hat and gloves. His nascent hypochondria developed into a 

fullblown syndrome in which imaginary maladies were given the same status as real ones. 

Worse, fear of disease was accompanied by fear and mistrust of doctors. There was also 

Godel's increasingly reclusive behavior. He endeavored to abstain from all "unnecessary" 

social and intellectual interaction and was at pains to avoid, at all costs, actual physical 

contact with other human beings. The telephone became his preferred method of 

communication. (His penchant for waking up long-suffering friends at all hours of the night 

to engage in endless telephone calls puts one in mind of another reclusive genius, the 

Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who could also be seen in the summer heat bundled up in 

coat, hat and gloves.) Fear of disease finally grew into a generalized fear of others, a 

paranoia that may or may not have evolved into psychosis. The significance of his mental 

instability had been presaged by his great mathematics professor at the University of 

Vienna, Philip Furtwangler, who, on learning of Godel's incompleteness theorems, asked, 

"Is his [mental] illness a consequence of proving the unprovability [of the consistency of 

formal arithmetic], or is his illness necessary for such an occupation?" Godel's eccentricities 

would eventually contribute to his death, cited by his doctor as due to "inanition" brought 

on by personality disorder. 

Einstein's eccentricities also flourished in his new homeland, but they were of an 

altogether milder order and affected his family and friends far more than himself. The 

great scientist's colleagues were embarrassed by his unprofessorial penchant for strolling 

down Nassau Street, Princeton's leafy main thoroughfare, while licking an ice cream cone, 

and female friends were taken aback by his sexual frankness and disdain for traditional 

mores. More generally, Einstein's attitude to- 

ward women was nothing to boast of. Peter Bucky, who had plenty of opportunities to view 

the great physicist up close while serving as chauffeur and companion for his father's 

friend, has written that "in today's terms, Einstein would have been considered a classic 

male chauvinist. He once wrote a letter to a friend, a Dr. Muesham in Haifa, that his 

definition of a good wife was someone who stood somewhere between a pig and a chronic 

cleaner." In Princeton, a bastion of bourgeois intellectual respectability, Einstein raised his 

bohemian lifestyle to an art. His unkempt hair became longer with each succeeding year. 

He wore shoes without socks and a leather jacket, not from a sense of fashion but from the 

belief that what doesn't wear out won't need to be replaced. His son Hans, who came to 

America already estranged from his famous father, was especially embarrassed by 

Einstein's manner of dress and became, in protest, a dandy. The complete neglect of all 

surface appearances may be the signature of a deep thinker, but it does little to smooth 

over the already fractious relations among human beings. The one companion that suffered 

no harm was the omnipresent pipe. His friend Gariella Oppenheim-Errara recalled an 

occasion when his sailboat, Tannef, capsized, leaving the great physicist paddling in the 

water, puffing contentedly on his faithful pipe. There is no doubt that Einstein's pipe was 

his closest associate, while othersóincluding wife and familyówere never permitted the 

illusion that they would ever be at the center of his life. 

Einstein the bohemian was also a Jew in a town whose university still enforced Jewish 

quotas for its students, something Einstein had personally protested during the

negotiations for his appointment, Caught in this net was Richard Feynman, one of the great 

physicists of the modern era, who was forced to attend MIT due to Columbia University's 

quota system. We can infer that his acceptance at Princeton University for graduate 

studies was also subject to ethnic strictures: Philip Morse, Feynman's professor at MIT, felt 

compelled to note in his recommendation that Feynman's "physiognomy and manner . . . 

show no trace of this characteristic [i.e., being Jewish] and I do not believe the matter 

will be any great handicap." (Feynman would go on to 

become the third winner of the Einstein Prize, after Godel and Schwinger.) In this 

environment, as an eccentric Jewish professor with a bohemian lifestyle and a heavy 

German accent, who moreover had devoted much of his life to a doomed search for an 

elusive theory that would unite relativity with quantum mechanics, Einstein was 

unquestionably an outsider. Clearly, he would appreciate the appearance in Princeton of 

another outsider whose eccentricities, if not genius, surpassed his own. 

It was in 1933 that Godel first met Einstein, during a visit to the institute, when they were 

introduced by another emigre, Paul Oppen-heim. They became friends in 1942, after 

Godel, too, had joined the institute, and remained close until Einstein's death in 1955. 

When Godel was ill in February 1951, he wrote to his mother, Marianne, that "during my 

sickness Einstein was of course extraordinarily nice to me and visited me many times both 

in the hospital and at home." The exact circumstances surrounding the transition from 

acquaintance to friendship remain unknown, and not by accident. The two men cherished 

the privacy of their relationship. After his good friend died, Godel wrote to his mother that 

the fact "that people never mention me in connection with Einstein is very satisfactory to 

me (and would be to him, too, since he was of the opinion that even a famous man is 

entitled to a private life). After his death I have already been invited twice to say 

something about him, but naturally I declined." 

He was happy, however, to confide some details of their friendship to satisfy his mother's 

curiosity. Godel, it emerged, would meet Einstein at his home each day between ten and 

eleven in the morning, and the two would walk to the institute, a journey that generally 

took half an hour. At one or two in the afternoon, they would return home, discussing 

politics, philosophy and physics. This schedule gives new meaning to Einstein's comment 

that he went to his office "just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Godel." 

These walks, in fact, consumed some thirty percent of his workday. They could also be 

dangerous. "I know of one occasion," wrote Einstein's secretary, Helen Dukas, in 1946, 

"when a car hit a tree after its driver suddenly recog- 

nized the face of the beautiful old man walking along the street." Godel's more severe 

countenance, by contrast, was no threat to traffic. "I have so far," he wrote to his mother, 

"not found my 'fame' burdensome in any way. That begins only when one becomes so 

famous that one is known to every child in the street, as is the case of Einstein." 

Godel, by nature a pessimist about human affairsóthough an optimist about the power of 

reasonówas balanced by the more optimistic Einstein. Yet Einstein too, as Godel wrote to 

his mother, "was in many respects a pessimist. In particular, he didn't have a very good 

opinion of humanity in general. Among other things, he based this on the fact that those

who wished to do some good, like Christ, Moses, Mohammed, etc., either died a violent 

death or had to use violence against his followers." 

Both men were skeptical of Bohr and Heisenberg's Copenhagen interpretation of quantum 

mechanics, and Godel was skeptical as well of Einstein's efforts to unify relativity with 

quantum physics. Each lived in a modest home, while colleagues like Von Neumann 

inhabited mansions. Their households mingled; they exchanged housewarming gifts. Their 

lives became interconnected. It was a familiar sight in Princeton to see the two friends 

walking home from the institute, arguing in their mother tongue about politics and general 

relativity. Einstein, like many intellectuals, favored Adlai Stevenson for president. "Godel," 

however, Einstein remarked, "has really gone completely crazy. He voted for Eisenhower." 

Whoever came to know the one, ipso facto became acquainted with the other. 

Submarines Again 

Their most famous discoveries behind them, Einstein and Godel led increasingly quiet lives 

in the backwaters of their respective fields. In domains they had once ruled as titans they 

were now but part of the furniture, albeit, as Einstein cracked, "museum pieces." "In 

Prince-ton," he told friends, "I am known as the village idiot." As the war 

years dragged on and the light of science prepared to cast the shadow of the atomic bomb, 

the two brightest minds in the scientific firmament drifted ever farther from the center. A 

few doors away from Einstein's office in Fine Hall, Neils Bohr and John Wheeler were 

working out the details of nuclear fission for employment in a nuclear device. Einstein, 

meanwhile, alone and all but inaccessible, pursued his dream not of splitting the atom but 

of unifying physics. Visiting the institute a few years earlier, the father of the atomic 

bomb, J. Robert Oppen-heimer, commented that "Einstein is completely cuckoo." The 

gods, as is well known, love irony. After the war, Oppenheimer found himself director of 

the institute and thus, nominally at least, Einstein's boss. 

In 1935, the year Oppenheimer paid his visit to the institute, the father of relativity 

announced that in his view, the idea of constructing a bomb by splitting the atom was as 

promising as "firing at birds in the dark, in a neighborhood that has few birds." Yet Einstein 

would eventually coauthor a letter to Roosevelt suggesting that the prospects for an 

atomic bomb be explored, becoming thus, in effect, the father of the father of the bomb. 

Einstein's paternity, however, was at most symbolic. The causal efficacy of his letter to 

Roosevelt appears to have been minimal. Nevertheless, the sometime pacifist put his 

fingerprints on the most lethal weapon ever devised by man, and he would spend the rest 

of his life preaching against the deployment of the weapon he had urged Roosevelt to 

develop. 

While the cream of the physicists and mathematicians, many of them close associates of 

Einstein and Godel, including Von Neumannó whose brilliance stood out even among the 

cluster of luminaries at Los Alamosóhad assembled for the bomb project in Oppenheimer's 

back yard in New Mexico, Godel and Einstein remained behind in Princeton, lost in clouds 

of abstruse mathematics and philosophy. Godel had embarked on an intellectual task that

would prove as elusive as Einstein's search for a unified field theory. He took up the quest, 

inaugurated by Georg Cantor, of determining the cardinality of the continuumóin plain 

English, counting the number of points on a line. (It was this that had 

preoccupied Godel on his nocturnal sojourns during his summer break at Blue Hill in Maine, 

not, as nervous locals thought, assisting German submarines prowling off the rugged 

coast.) Everyone knew, of course, that the number of points on the real number line is 

infinite, but after Cantor's epoch-making discovery that infinity itself came in different 

sizes, the hunt was on to discover the exact size of this infinity. 

Cantor had begun the quest in 1878 with his "continuum hypothesis" in which he speculated 

that the number of points on a line, 2x∞, is the very next infinite number, X1? after the 

smallest infinite number, X0, the cardinality of the set of all natural numbers. He thus 

hypothesized that 2X∞ = X1.But he died defeated, having failed to prove his conjecture. 

Plagued by bouts of depression, he was several times confined to a sanatorium, a sad 

precedent repeated by Godel. Godel, for his part, after much effort, was finally able to 

prove in the late 1930s and early 1940s that the continuum hypothesis was consistent with 

Zermelo-Fraenkel set theoryóthat is, that it could not be disproved. Later, in 1963, a brash 

young mathematician, Paul Cohen, of Stanford University, who had worked on the problem 

for two years at the institute, looking down his nose at the petty concerns of mere 

logicians, succeeded in proving that it could not be proved from these same axioms. 

Cohen's result is known as the independence of the continuum hypothesis, Godel's as the 

consistency of the continuum hypothesis. 

Einstein, embracing his doomed search for a unified field theory and deemed a security 

risk for his sympathies for and contacts in the world of "socialism," discovered that he was 

not to be trusted with the defense of his adopted land. His opportunity to serve (a lesser 

one) came not from the desert at Los Alamos but from the sea. The U.S. Department of the 

Navy engaged him not to design new gyroscopes, as he had once done for his fatherland, 

but to calculate the explosive potentialities of torpedoes. Calculate he did, but though 

expensive experiments would later confirm that Einstein's results had indeed been 

accurate, there is no evidence that his contributions were put into practice during the 

war. 

If Einstein's mathematics did little to advance the war effort, he had greater success in 

contributing financially. Not, to be sure, by emptying his pockets (which were already 

empty, as his wife made certain, distrusting his financial competence). Instead he was 

asked to donate the original manuscript of his 1905 treatise on special relativity for an 

auction to produce funds to support the war. But Einstein, untouched by manuscript 

fetishism, had discarded the original. Unfazed, the authorities asked him simply to rewrite 

it. The amazed professor was happy to oblige, and in due course wrote again his famous 

paper, this time dictating it to his faithful assistant, Helen Dukas. "Did I really say that?" he 

interjected from time to time to the unflappable Ms. Dukas. Reality, here, clearly, has 

competed with fiction. It was Jorge Luis Borges who wrote "Pierre Menard, Author of the 

Quixote," in which Menard "did not want to compose another Quixoteówhich is easyóbut 

the Quixote itself." Did he succeed? "Cervantes' text and Menard's," Borges notes dryly, "are 

verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer . . . more ambiguous ..." 

Whether or not Einstein's second writing of his 1905 paper is more ambiguous than the

original, it is certainly richer: an insurance company bought the new manuscript for $6.5 

million. 

It is a sign of both her boredom and her skill as a seamstress that throughout the war years 

Adele is said to have contributed to the Austrian relief services a dress a day to be given to 

a young child, in recognition of which she received a bust of her late father from the 

Viennese authorities after the war. Godel is not known to have made any direct 

contribution to the Allies' war effort. He told his friend Atle Selberg, however, that he 

volunteered after the war ended to serve as a civil defense aircraft spotter. He also 

proceeded to formalize his commitment to the United States, becoming a citizen of his 

adopted country in 1947. As witnesses for the ceremony he brought along Morgenstern and 

Einstein. He had already alarmed the former by confiding to him, in consternation, that he 

had discovered an "inconsistency" in the Constitution. Apprised by Morgenstern of the 

danger ahead, Einstein took it upon himself to distract his friend on the way to the 

swearing 

in, entertaining him with worn-out jokes and twice-told anecdotes. Einstein might have 

been even more concerned if he had known that for years the FBI had been intercepting 

and reading parts of Godel's correspondence with his mother, who was living in Vienna. 

The strategy proved unsuccessful. When judge Philip Forman, who only a few years earlier 

had ushered Einstein himself into the land of liberty, asked Godel casually, "Do you think a 

dictatorship like that in Germany could ever arise in the United States?" he received a 

spirited reply in the affirmative. Godel launched into an account of how the United States 

Constitution formally permitted just such a regime to arise. Shrewdly, however, the judge 

cut off the great logician before he could hit full stride, and the ceremony came to a 

peaceful conclusion, leaving Godel's new homeland to fend for itself against the opening 

he had discerned in its founding principles. Years later, asked for a legal analogy for his 

incompleteness theorem, he would comment that a country that depended entirely upon 

the formal letter of its laws might well find itself defenseless against a crisis that had not, 

and could not, have been foreseen in its legal code. The analogue of his incompleteness 

theorem, applied to the law, would guarantee that for any legal code, even if intended to 

be fully explicit and complete, there would always be judgments "undecided" by the letter 

of the law. 

If Godel made no explicit contribution to the war, still his mathematical work, in particular 

his foundational papers on recursive functionsówhich constitute the soul, if one can put it 

thus, of the computing machineówould contribute in a profound way to the project of 

building bigger and bigger thermonuclear bombs, and more generally to the still ongoing 

program of computer-based military technology. Similarly, while Einstein took no part in 

the deliberations of Oppenheimer's bomb makers at Los Alamos, his foundational work in 

relativity formed part of the theoretical background of the very practical results reached 

in the heart of the New Mexican desert. Godel and the computer, Einstein and the bomb. 

Neither man contributed to the technology (or its ethos), but each one's research was 

essential background for those who did. 

Not only did Einstein and Godel refrain from contributing to the ethos of these 

technologies, they were completely against it. Their "unfashionable pursuits" gained them

fame but not friends. Einstein, pursuing the elusive unified field theory, was a lone figure 

unwilling to forgo determinism in physical theory or realism in the quantum world. Godel 

was a rare spirit keeping the faith that in spite of his incompleteness theorem and the 

independence result achieved by Paul Cohen, the mathematical universe of sets and 

numbers was a fully determined, complete reality. Where Cohen led the way for the 

majority with his belief that there was no more objective truth value attached to Cantor's 

continuum hypothesis than to Euclid's parallel postulate, only a choice of which convention 

to follow, Godel never ceased believing that the comparison with Euclid was misguided. 

The true axioms that would settle the continuum hypothesis, he felt, were out there to be 

found. As he wrote to Alonzo Church, who shared Cohen's beliefs, "You know that I 

disagree about the philosophical consequences of Cohen's result. In particular, I don't think 

realists need expect any permanent ramifications as long as they are guided, in the choice 

of the axioms, by mathematical intuition and by other criteria of rationality." 

"Einstein and Me": Scientists as Philosophers 

The increasingly philosophical turn taken by the two thinkers was becoming more and more 

unfashionable. In 1935, Einstein, with the assistance of Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, 

published a kind of philosophical manifesto (which contained what is known popularly as 

the EPR paradox), "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered 

Complete?" The authors suggested that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum 

mechanics, pioneered by Bohr and Heisenberg, led to paradoxical results, including 

instantaneous, noncausal action between spatially separated events (which they dubbed 

"spooky action at a distance"). Not only did this little essay 

arouse the ire of the quantum-mechanical establishment, including Bohr and Wolfgang 

Pauli, but on its own terms the document seemed as much philosophy as physics. Einstein 

brought to bear what seemed to be a priori philosophical considerations concerning the 

"completeness" of a physical theoryówhich, the reader was informed, requires the 

correspondence of each significant element of the theory with an "element of reality"óas 

well as what constitutes physical reality, "no reasonable definition of which," Einstein 

insisted, permits what is real in one system to depend on the measurement of another 

system. 

Einstein's philosophical perspective was a form of realism. Godel too was committed to 

realism, in the physical as well as the mathematical realm. He believed that mathematical 

objects and properties exist objectively and independently of knowledge of them by the 

human mind. He was aware of the parallel between his and Einstein's philosophies. "The 

heuristics of Einstein and Bohr," he told Hao Wang, "are stated in their correspondence. 

Cantor might also be classified with Einstein and me. Heisenberg and Bohr are on the other 

side." His own philosophical manifesto appeared in 1947, disguised as a popular survey of 

the status of the continuum hypothesis, entitled "What is Cantor's Continuum Problem?" He 

had been invited in I 946 by Lester Ford, editor of the American Mathematical Monthly, to 

make a contribution to a "What is . . . ?" series whose purpose was to provide an 

introduction to "a small aspect of higher mathematics" in "as simple, elementary and 

popular a way" as possible. Godel, however, took this as an opportunity to formulate a 

manifesto declaring and defending his mathematical Platonism. As an epistemological 

adjunct, he introduced the concept of mathematical intuition, for which formal proof was 

no substitute. "I don't see any reason," he wrote, "why we should have less confidence in

this kind of perception, i.e., in mathematical intuition, than in sense perception, which 

induces us to build up physical theories." According to Godel, since the continuum is a real 

object, it was only a matter of time before new axioms would be discovered that would 

settle the continuum hypothesis, axioms that would "force themselves upon us as being 

true." 

The manifesto, though shocking, was no surprise. The stage had been set by a previous 

essay, his contribution to the volume on Bertrand Russell for the "Library of Living 

Philosophers," edited by P.A. Schilpp. This series, inaugurated in 1938, was devoted to 

great living philosophers at the twilight of their careers. The person to whom a volume was 

dedicated would contribute an intellectual autobiography, followed by critical assessments 

of his philosophy provided by leading figures in the field, to be succeeded by the author's 

responses to those essays. In the volume on Russell, Godel cited with approval Russell's 

remark (written before his encounter with Wittgenstein) that "logic is concerned with the 

real world just as truly as zoology, though with its more abstract and general features." 

This expression of logical realism Russell himself later rejected under Wittgenstein's 

influence, a rejection for which Godel took him to task. Much of Godel's contribution to 

the Schilpp volume consisted of a sustained critique of Russell's mathematical philosophy, 

and he looked forward to Russell's response. 

He had reason to look forward to it. In his letter of November 1942 inviting Godel to 

contribute to the volume, Schilpp had said that "in talking the matter over last night with 

Lord Russell in person, 1 learned that he too would not only very greatly appreciate your 

participation in this project, but that he considers you the scholar par excellence in this 

field." In the event, however, Godel was late in submitting his essay, and Russell claimed 

that having already responded to the other contributors, he "lacked the leisure" to 

compose a proper reply to Godel. Deeply disappointed, Godel attempted unsuccessfully to 

change Russell's mind. The only response that appeared in the Schilpp volume was Russell's 

comment that since it was "eighteen years since [I had] last worked on mathematical logic" 

it would have taken him "a long time to form a critical estimate of Dr. Godel's opinions." 

Behind this remark lurked an ambivalence on Russell's part toward his great colleague. The 

incompleteness theorems were not calculated to arouse warm feelings in Russell's breast. 

As we saw earlier, it is likely that Russell did not fully grasp them. He also claimed that, in 

any case, he hail never subscribed to the dream of the Hilbert school 

that a consistency proof could be found for his logical system. This would take some of the 

sting out of Godel's discoveries, but it would apply only to the second incompleteness 

theorem. The first theorem, which neither Russell nor anyone else had expected, 

demonstrated the essential incompleteness of any formal logical system in capturing the 

truths of mathematics. Its effect, therefore, was to deal a mortal blow to the formalist 

project of which Russell's masterpiece, Principia Mathematica, was the crowning 

achievement. Godel had added insult to injury by deciding, in the proof of his theorem, to 

focus exclusively on Principia Mathematica as an example of a formal system that is 

essentially incomplete. Not only had Russell been surpassed by Godel as the preeminent 

logician of their time, his magnum opus had been shown by Godel to be in an important 

respect a failure.

If Russell had been eclipsed in logic by Godel, he was overshadowed in philosophy by his 

former student Ludwig Wittgenstein. "It is not an altogether pleasant experience," wrote 

Russell late in life, "to find oneself regarded as antiquated after having been, for a time, in 

the fashion. It is difficult to accept this experience gracefully." He attributed this change 

of fashion explicitly to the rise of Wittgenstein, "by whom I was superseded in the opinion 

of many British philosophers." Not only the content but the very form of Russell's writings 

was rendered obsolete by Wittgenstein's works, which called to mind the Zeus-like 

pronouncements of pre-Socratic philosophers such as Par-menides and Heraclitus more 

than the didactic, quasi-scientific prose that Russell had made his trademark. And 

Wittgenstein was not the end of it. The final grain of salt in Russell's wounds came from 

Einstein, whose revolution in physics eclipsed in the popular imagination not only Russell's 

contributions to logic and philosophy but Godel's and Wittgenstein's as well. If he had it to 

do over again, said Russell wistfully at the end of his life, he would have become a 

physicist. 

Triply eclipsed, Russell came to the Institute for Advanced Study in the spring of 1943, 

while Godel was composing his critique of Russell's philosophy of mathematics, with a large 

chip on his shoulder. He noticed Godel in the audience when he lectured but was so out of 

touch 

with recent developments in logic and mathematics that he failed to recognize Von 

Neumann. When he met for discussions at Einstein's home with Godel, Einstein and Pauli, it 

was predictable that Russell would be unsatisfied, as revealed by the barbed comments he 

committed to his Autobiography about "the German bias for metaphysics" of his 

companions, "all three of them Jews." That his application, several years earlier, for 

membership at the Institute for Advanced Study, though supported by Einstein, had been 

declined was the final insult. On the other side, Russell's dismissal of Godel as an 

"unadulterated Platonist" did not earn him a warm spot in Godel's heart. 

That the only professional philosopher in the quartet of Russell, Einstein, Godel and Pauli 

was disappointed with the others' attachment to the grand old style of "German 

metaphysics" is a clear sign of the low estate to which philosophy had been reduced. As the 

last of the great philosopher-scientists, Einstein and Godel were anomalies. But if the 

physicist and the logician had both become increasingly philosophical since joining the 

institute, there remained a difference. For the most part, Einstein's philosophy was 

immanent in his physics, just as the God of his beloved Spinoza, the great pantheist, was 

contained in the world. Much of Godel's philosophy, too, was contained in his mathematics, 

but he took pains to make some of it explicitóseparate, though closely related to his 

formal discoveriesójust as the God of his philosophical hero, Leibniz, was a being apart. 

Godel's desire was to become a great philosopher in the tradition of Plato, Leibniz, and 

Kant, but he discovered that he had set this goal too late in his life, having devoted his 

best years to logic, mathematics and physics. The scope of his ambitionsóand the degree 

to which he was at cross purposes with the Zeitgeistócan be seen in the fourteen 

philosophical theses he committed to his notebooks in the 1960s under the title "My 

Philosophical Viewpoint." "Concepts," he states, "have an objective existence." Along the 

same lines he writes that "materialism is false." Neither thesis is surprising or unexpected. 

But he goes further: "The world is rational." This puts one in mind of philosophical theism, 

according to which the order of the world reflects the order

of the supreme mind governing it. Plato, a philosopher Godel greatly admired, held 

similarly that all order is a reflection of rationality. Concerning religion Godel asserts, 

"Religions are, for the most part, bad, but religion [i.e., belief in God?] is not." 

He goes on: "There are other worlds and rational beings of a different and higher kind.... 

The[se] higher beings are connected to the others by analogy, not by composition." And so 

on. Godel was striving for a new picture, a worldview that would put the world into a 

better perspective than it is at present. From his discussions late in life with Hao Wang, it 

emerges that he believed that the proper philosophy should capture axiomaticallyóthough 

not purely formallyóthe fundamental concepts that underlie reality, which he took to 

include "reason, cause, substance, accidens [a traditional Latin term], necessity, value, 

God, cognition, force, time, form, content, matter, life, truth, idea, reality, possibility." 

Godel the philosopher, according to Wang, said he wished to "do for metaphysics as much 

as Newton did for physics." 

Einstein, of course, had already done for physics what Newton did for physics. But if his 

philosophical aspirations did not match Godel's, the direction of his thought often did. Like 

Godel, he was opposed to positivism, but had, when necessary, exploited its weapons to 

further his own scientific and philosophical objectives. The protopositivism of Einstein's 

special theory of relativity, which identified time with what could be measured by 

synchronized clocks, was not a philosophical calling cardóthough the Vienna Circle seized 

on it as suchóbut simply the right tool for the job. Minkowski's generalization of special 

relativity into the geometrical theory of four-dimensional space-time was a different tool 

for a different job, which in turn opened the door for Einstein's broader geometrization of 

space-time in his general theory of relativity, a development that is cold comfort to 

positivists hoping to adopt Einstein as a true believer. In like manner, with his 

incompleteness theorem, Godel exploited the favorite tool of the mathematical positivist, 

formal systems of proof, to construct a proof that formal systems for number theory will 

always be incomplete. In essence, the theorem was a mechanical, algorithmic 

demonstration of the limits of 

mechanical, algorithmic methods, and as it turned out, of the inescapable limitations of 

the computer. It was at once a jewel in the crown of formalism and a warning to those 

who would embrace it. 

At the heart of Godel and Einstein's opposition to positivism was their unfashionable 

realism, their reluctance to make ontology, the theory of what is, subservient to 

epistemology, the theory of what can be known. At bottom, the positivist mentality 

consists in deriving ontology from epistemology. This was the source of Ernst Mach's positivistic 

objection to atomic theory, since individual atoms will never be directly 

encountered by humans. But the springs of Mach's philosophy ran deeper. His rejection of a 

reality "beyond" what appears to human sensibility was a simplified version of Kant's 

philosophy. The "Copernican Revolution" in epistemology inaugurated by Kant consisted in 

the radical doctrine that the known must conform to the knower. The hard-nosed, 

ultraempiricist Mach had derived his positivism from Kant, who was not a realist but an 

idealist, albeit of the deep, German, transcendental variety, not (as Kant saw it) of the 

shallow British strain of George Berkeley.

Still, idealism is idealism, whether British or German. Although Kant, unlike Mach, 

recognized the existence of a reality beyond what appears to us, he made it clear that the 

objects of science are not the "things in themselves" that lie behind "the appearances," but 

rather the appearances themselves. This was a doctrine rejected by both Einstein and 

Godel. Godel made his objections explicit: Whereas it was a "fruitful viewpoint [to make] a 

distinction between subjective and objective elements in our knowledge (which is so 

impressively suggested by Kant's comparison with the Copernican system), [when such a 

doctrine] appears in the history of science, there is at once a tendency to exaggerate it 

into a boundless subjectivism. . . . Kant's doctrine of the unknowability of the things in 

themselves is one example. ..." 

Godel, however, was not through with Kant. In an essay written in 1961 but never 

published, he noted that it was "a general feature of Kant's assertions that literally 

understood they are false, but in a broader sense contain deeper truths." He had in mind 

Kant's doctrine 

that in proving geometrical theorems we always need new geometrical intuitions. This, 

Godel pointed out, is provably false. But if we substitute "mathematical" for "geometrical," 

the result is a truth that follows directly from Godel's incompleteness theorem. What was 

needed, then, for the continual development of mathematics (and, one might add, 

philosophy), was "a procedure that should produce in us a new state of consciousness in 

which we describe in detail the basic concepts we use in our thought, or grasp other basic 

concepts hitherto unknown to us." This he claimed to have found in the later 

"transcendental phenomenology" of Edmund Husserl. "Transcendental phenomenology," he 

wrote in a draft of a letter to the mathematician-philosopher Gian-Carlo Rota, "carried 

through, would be nothing more nor less than Kant's critique of pure reason transformed 

into an exact science," which "far from destroying traditional metaphysics . . . would 

rather prove a solid foundation for it." In Husserl, Godel thought he had found a form of 

idealism that, though derived from Kant's, was not incompatible with realism. That Husserl 

shared Godel's disdain for unreconstructed Kantianism is apparent from a remark he made 

in 1915: "German idealism has always made me want to throw up." 

Einstein's objections, in turn, to the new quantum mechanicsóin particular his formulation 

of the EPR paradoxóreflected a rejection of the Kantian turn in epistemology in its 

simplified reconstruction by pos-itivists like Mach. The uncertainty principle, after all, is 

an example of the same tendency to draw ontological conclusions from epistemologi-cal 

premises, in this instance, from our inability in principle to know simultaneously the 

position and velocity of a subatomic particle, to the nonexistence of such a combined 

state. Not only did Einstein reject this reasoning, he resisted what he took to be 

Heisenberg's more fundamental belief that we should abandon the very idea of "quantum 

reality." For Einstein, as for Godel, philosophy without ontology was an illusion, and 

physics without philosophy reduced to engineering. (And for Einstein, engineering was a 

poor substitute for physics. When his eldest son, Hans, decided on an engineering career, 

his father wrote that he was pleased that Hans had found a subject to concentrate on but 

also that

"what he is interested in isn't really important, even if it is, alas, engineering. One cannot 

expect one's children to inherit a mind.") 

An Offer That Couldn't Be Refused 

Before Princeton, Einstein's and Godel's philosophical sentiments had proceeded on parallel 

but independent lines. At the institute, however, the lines began to converge. In thought 

as in life, Einstein found himself increasingly entwined with Godel. In 1949 Godel received 

from his friend an unexpected housewarming gift, "a wonderful flower vase." At the time 

Einstein was celebrating his seventieth birthday, and "after long searches" Godel finally 

settled on a birthday gift for his friend, an etching. (Adele had knit Einstein a sweater but 

decided against sending it.) 

There was another gift as well. Godel had been invited by P.A. Schilpp to contribute to a 

new volume in his series, "The Library of Living Philosophers," a volume in honor of 

Einstein's seventieth birthday, to be entitled Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist. It is the 

only volume in the series to be devoted to a scientist. No doubt aware of Godel's friendship 

with Einstein, Schilpp must have assumed his invitation was an offer Godel couldn't refuse. 

He didn't. Godel's essay would be his second exercise in this venue, following the 1944 

essay on Russell. (In time he would draft a third essay, this time on Rudolph Carnap, 

though he never submitted a final version, and he declined a fourth invitation to write on 

Popper.) 

Godel wasted no time setting to work. Schilpp suggested a title, "The Realistic Standpoint 

in Physics and Mathematics," but Godel rejected it. He had in mind an ontological 

investigationóthe grand philosophical quest for the reality of timeóreinterpreted as an 

examination of what relativity theory has to teach us about this question, which has 

exercised the philosophical imagination from Parmenides and Plato to Kant. Godel 

informed Schilpp that he would submit a brief essay, of three to five pages, on the topic, 

"The Theory of Relativity and Kant." It is not known whether Schilpp appreciated the per- 

versify of Godel's proposal, in which he would put forward the thesis that Kant had 

anticipated Einstein. For Einstein was (and is) widely viewed not as having confirmed Kant 

but rather as refuting him. Kant dedicated a large part of his Critique of Pure Reason to 

the attempt to establish a priori that Newton was the final truth about physics and Euclid 

the last word on geometry, whereas Einstein demonstrated empirically that both Euclid 

and Newton were wrong. (Kant also claimed that logic would never take a step beyond 

Aristotle, a view made nonsense by Frege and Godel. The great philosopher, it seems, got 

it completely wrong about Newton, Euclid and Aristotle. No one's perfect.) 

What on earth was Godel thinking? One thing is clear. It was not simply the long walks with 

Einstein that had aroused Godel's interest in the problem of time. On his first visit to the 

institute, he had been delighted to attend a seminar on quantum mechanics given by his 

friend Von Neumann. He had begun his studies at the University of Vienna in physics and 

had maintained an active interest ever since. ("Active interest" in Godel's case means a 

level of competence that for any normal person would constitute a career.) Since the

question of time is at the center of special relativity, he could not have failed to attend to 

it. The primary source of his interest in time, however, was his preoccupation with 

"idealistic" philosophers, from Parmenides and Plato to Leibniz and Kant. Each of these 

thinkers, in his own way, questioned the ultimate reality of time. For Plato, things in time 

never really are but are always coming-to-be. Time itself, he said in his cosmological 

dialogue the Timaeus, is but a "moving image of eternity." Godel was deeply sympathetic 

with Plato's philosophy, but his true hero was Leibniz. Why then did he choose to discuss, 

for the Schilpp volume, the relationship of relativity theory not to Leibniz but to Kant, for 

whom he had mixed feelings? 

A partial answer is that in composing an essay on Einstein, Godel was operating from 

within the modern scientific framework inaugurated by Newton. It is true that Godel 

believed that physics in the modern era should have followed Leibniz, a philosopher in the 

tradition of German idealism, rather than his rival, Newton, but the fact remained that 

Einstein's framework was Newtonian. Consistent, then, with his 

methodology of undermining from within, Godel chose to demonstrate certain (radical) 

formal and philosophical consequences from within the "host framework," modern physics 

from Newton to Einstein. As with his incompleteness results, he believed that this strategy 

made his formal derivations inescapable and his philosophical conclusions hard to resist. A 

consequence of Godel's methodology is that the question of "realism" in his Einstein essay 

becomes delicate. In that essay, he defends the reality of relativistic space-time, much as 

he promoted, in the philosophical implications he drew from his incompleteness theorem, 

the reality of the natural numbers, and, in his consistency proof for the continuum 

hypothesis relative to set theory, the reality of sets. But whereas he remained convinced 

of the fundamental reality of numbers from within his own philosophical system, not just 

that of its "host" framework, his preference for Leibniz leaves open the question of 

whether, from within his own (never fully realized) philosophy of space and time, he 

believed that the physical world as such was founded on something yet more fundamental, 

like the "monads" introduced by Leibniz. In his discussion of Einstein, however, he is 

operating within the philosophical framework of relativity theory, and so he adopts the 

familiar standpoint that space-time is part of the ultimate furniture of reality. The 

question he poses, then, is precisely this: if we believe in the ultimate reality of 

relativistic space-time, are we forced to be idealists about time? 

Ontology and Epistemology: The Two Axes of Philosophy 

. . . Almost all accounts of the concept of mathematical truth can be identified with 

serving one or another of these masters [semantics and epistemology] at the expense of 

the other. 

PAUL BENACERRAF 

The importance Godel attached to his investigation of this question in his contribution to 

the Einstein volume cannot be overstated. A month

after beginning his work in earnest, he wrote his mother that he was so preoccupied with 

it, he would have to give up writing letters until it was completed. Time, he told Wang 

years later, remains, even after Einstein, the philosophical question. Contrast this with 

what the influential ("analytical") philosopher of science Hilary Putnam has written: "I do 

not believe that there are any longer any philosophical problems about Time; there is only 

the physical problem of determining the exact physical geometry of the four dimensional 

continuum we inhabit." And Putnam is hardly alone. For Godel, however, time is "that 

mysterious and seemingly self-contradictory being which, on the other hand, seems to 

form the basis of the world's and our own existence." Plato could not have put it better. 

Godel's preoccupation with the question of the reality of time went against the grain of the 

philosophical tradition that dominated (and still dominates) his adopted country. His 

project more closely resembled that of "continental" philosophers like Martin Heidegger, 

whose magnum opus gives away the central problem in its title, Being and Time, and, more 

closely still, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, by Edmund 

Husserl, a work to which Godel would in the course of time devote a great deal of 

attention, with special reference to Husserl's distinction between physical time and 

"internal time-consciousness." Unlike Heidegger, however, as well as other philosophers of 

time such as Henri Bergson and J.M.E. McTaggart, who, like Godel, took the question of 

the ontological implications of the reality of time seriously, Godel had no interest in yet 

another inconclusive metaphysical debate in which the elusiveness of the subject would be 

matched only by the density of the surrounding prose. He chose instead to examine the 

traditional philosophical question from within an untraditional mathematical context, 

Einstein's theory of relativity. The idea, as with his incompleteness theorem, was to 

establish formal results that would have deep philosophical implications. Godel would be a 

pathfinder, then, along two directions: a mathematical approach to the philosophy of 

time, and a philosophical assessment of the mathematics of relativity. Einstein himself had 

been reluctant to engage in the latter. The few 

remarks he did allow himself verged on inconsistency. He agreed with the philosopher 

Emile Meyerson that the temporal component of space-time was not a mere fourth 

"spatial" dimension, but at other times he spoke of the "rigid four-dimensional space of the 

special theory of relativity." When his friend Michele Besso died, he wrote to his widow 

that "now he has preceded me a little by parting from this strange world. This means 

nothing. To us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future [i.e., 

between what is now and what is not now] has only the significance of a stubborn illusion." 

Yet Carnap wrote that Einstein had told him that "the now means something special for 

man, something which physics cannot speak to." His physics was already deeply 

philosophical. He had no wish to take time away from scientific research to match the 

philosophers in discussions about the nature of existence. 

Godel did. He would complete the philosophical journey Einstein had begun in the theory 

of relativity. By stretching Einstein's mathematics to the limit, he would simplify and 

clarify the philosophy, showing the world that one can plumb the depths of being and time 

without disappearing into a Black Forest of Heideggerian prose. To appreciate how Godel 

was able to accomplish this it is necessary to understand that the two fundamental axes 

along which the course of philosophy is plotted are ontology and epistemology. 

You can assess any position in philosophy by the relationship it proposes between being 

and knowing. Some traditions, like the Greek one of Plato and Aristotle, place ontology in

the center, while others, like the modern period inaugurated by Descartes, put the 

emphasis on epistemology. Clearly, however, a complete philosophy will have to do justice 

to both. Unfortunately, there is a deep and irreducible tension between the two 

perspectives that makes a reconciliation difficult to achieve. The ontological perspective, 

"the view from nowhere" (to exploit Thomas Nagel's evocative phrase) seems to leave no 

room for "the world as I found it" (to borrow an expression from Wittgenstein). If we note 

further that the world as we experience it, "our world," is essentially temporal, whereas 

the logical and empirical conditions for 

existence as such are more spatial, in the most general sense, than temporal, we begin to 

take a true measure of the problem Godel set for himself. We also begin to appreciate the 

sympathy Godel would come to feel for Husserl's later phenomenology, the goal of which 

was to do justice to ontology without neglecting epistemology, a goal attempted by Kant, 

whose system, nevertheless, by GodePs lights, failed to do justice to one element of the 

dialectic: ontology. 

Now, Godel understood that the advent of relativity theory enabled one for the first time 

to cast the question of the reality of time into a theoretical context amenable to formal 

mathematical methods. His approach to the philosophy of time, then, would take the form 

of a frontal assault on the ontological implications of relativity theory. Can one 

consistently maintain both the existence of time, intuitively understood, and the truth of 

relativity theory? This was a peculiar question, however, because special relativity was an 

epistemologically inspired theory (which is what made it the apple of the positivists' eye) 

that sprang from such a priori assumptions as that time is determined by the measurement 

of simultaneity via synchronized clocks, and such a posteriori observations as that different 

clocks in different inertial frames deliver different simultaneity results and that there is no 

objective method for privileging one inertial frame above all others. Einstein himself, 

then, had already drawn ontological conclusions from episte-mological premises. Godel 

continued drawing conclusions beyond the point where Einstein stopped. He would out- 

Einstein Einstein by taking the physicist's own ontological reasoning to its logical 

conclusion. And he would do this by answering a question that Einstein, though fully aware 

of it, wished to sidestep: is the temporal component t of four-dimensional relativistic 

space-time, i.e., what remains of "time" after relativity theory, really time? 

In his response to Godel's paper in the Schilpp volume, Einstein acknowledged that "the 

problem here involved disturbed me at the time of the building up of the general theory of 

relativity." This problem he described as follows: "Is what remains of temporal connection 

between world-points in the theory of relativity an asymmetrical relation 

[like time, intuitively understood, and unlike space|, or would one be just as much 

justified ... to assert A is before P las to assert that A is after P] . . . ?" The issue could also 

be put this way: is relativistic space-time in essence a space or a time? 

An Atom Smasher for the Mind

Even to raise this question, one must first distinguish between time intuitively understood 

and t, the temporal component of relativistic space-time. While Einstein himself was 

attuned to this distinction, the very success of relativity theory had encouraged most 

thinkers to conflate the two concepts. The situation was deeply reminiscent of what Godel 

had encountered when he constructed his incompleteness theorem in response to the 

Hilbert program, where the issue was the relationship of formal demonstrability to 

intuitive mathematical truth. Here too, many researchers conflated the two, making the 

idea of a "relationship" seem moot. Let us recall Godel's comment to Wang: "... formalists 

considered formal demonstrability to be an analysis of the concept of mathematical truth 

and, therefore, were of course not in a position to distinguish the two." With equal 

justification, he could have said that relativistic physicists and analytical philosophers of 

science were not in a position to distinguish the temporal component of four-dimensional 

relativistic space-time from the intuitive concept of time. Godel's essay on Einstein, then, 

was not an "excursion," as it is often taken to be, but rather a continuation of the "Godel 

program" of testing the limits of formal methods in capturing intuitive concepts. Having 

raised this issue, how does one then devise a thought experiment to distinguish the two 

mathematically (if indeed they are distinguishable)? In subatomic physics, one can submit 

particles to the extreme forces of an accelerator, or "atom smasher," which results in 

particles that are indistinguishable under less-extreme conditions revealing themselves as 

distinct. Godel would devise a method for sub- 

jecting the concept of space-time to similarly extreme conditionsóin this case, 

geometrically, not dynamically, extremeóso that invisible differences between the two 

concepts would become manifest. This too was a continuation of a methodology Godel had 

employed in his incompleteness theorem. The method consists in creating what can be 

called limit cases, formal constructions that by design are so extreme that they limit, 

mathematically, the possible intuitive interpretations they will admit. For his 

incompleteness theorem, Godel devised a formal system together with a series of 

ingenious definitions and coordinations for which it could be demonstrated that the 

concept of formal proof, as it appeared in the system, could not, on pain of contradiction, 

be interpreted as representing intuitive mathematical truth. He did this by constructing a 

formula that was provably unprovable, but intuitively true. 

In his contribution to the Einstein volume, Godel would construct a world model for the 

equations of general relativity whose geometry was so extreme that the temporal 

component of the resulting space time structure could not reasonably be seen as 

representing intuitive lime. Kin stein had already succeeded, in the theory of relativity, in 

bringing about the geometrization of physics. What Godel did was to construct a limit case 

for the relativistic geometrization of time. He would do this by bringing to the fore various 

properties that anything deserving the name of intuitive time would have to possess, 

including Einstein's requirement that the series of events be asymmetrically ordered, so 

that if A is before B, it cannot also be after B. Godel would then demonstrate 

mathematically that in the world model he had constructed, there were continuous 

timelike world lines connecting any two events, so that even if B were observed occurring 

after A, one could undertake a journeyóin a very fast spaceshipóthat would take one to B 

before one reached A. From this, Godel would conclude that the space-time structure in 

such a world was clearly a space, not a time, and therefore that t, the temporal 

component of space-time, was in fact another spatial dimensionónot time as we 

understand it in ordinary experience.

A journey along the closed, continuous timelike world lines Godel had discovered in (what 

came to be known as) the Godel universe could only be described as time travel. Godel 

had achieved an amazing demonstration that time travel, strictly understood, was 

consistent with the theory of relativity. Enthusiasts of time travel would in due course 

become excited by this discovery, but they would fail to see that the primary result was a 

powerful argument that if time travel is possible, time itself is not. If his results held up 

and his interpretation of them survived scrutiny, Godel would have succeeded in 

demonstrating, mathematically, a result about the reality (or unreality) of time that had 

eluded idealist philosophers for centuries, from Plato to Kant, and he would have done so, 

once again, as a spy, this time in the house of physics. Before Einstein's very eyes, a 

metamorphosis had occurred. The theory he had devised to capture time, to pin it down 

mathematically and render it amenable to human understanding, had been transformed, in 

GodePs hands, into a disappearing hat trick. 

Einstein was impressed. "Kurt GodePs essay," he wrote, "constitutes, in my opinion, an 

important contribution to the general theory of relativity, especially to the analysis of the 

concept of time." But he set the stage for how others would respond when he stated that 

"it will be interesting to weigh whether these [cosmological solutions] are not to be 

excluded on physical grounds." Most thinkers, once they had recovered from the shock of 

GodePs discovery, would restrict their response to enquiring whether the Godel universe 

was sufficiently realistic from a physical standpoint to be taken seriously. 

Einstein himself, however, had a bad track record in acknowledging mathematical 

consequences of general relativity as physically realistic. When Karl Schwarzschild, a 

German colleague, discovered in 1916 that if a star began an extreme gravitational 

collapse into itself, its mass would eventually reach a critical point after which space-time 

would be so severely curved that nothing inside (what is now known as) the "event 

horizon," including light, would be able to escape, Einstein dismissed the "Schwarzschild 

singularity" as a mathematical 

anomaly with no physical significance. He was wrong. We now call these singularities 

"black holes," and astronomers find them at the center of every galaxy. 

Later, in 1917, the Dutch astronomer Wellem de Sitter proposed a cosmological model for 

general relativity in which the universe was not static, as Einstein believed it to be, but 

rather expanding. Still later, in 1922, Aleksandr Friedmann, a Russian mathematician and 

physicist, argued that it was a consequence of general relativity that the universe must be 

either contracting or expanding. Einstein rejected both de Sitter and Friedman as having 

produced unphysical mathematical models of the universe. But since their ideas were 

consistent with general relativity, he proposed a new, ad hoc principle to be added to 

relativity, the "cosmological constant," whose sole purpose was to introduce an 

antigravitational law that would counteract the forces of gravity that de Sitter and 

Friedman had deduced would otherwise cause the universe to spiral inwards or expand 

outwards. Once again, Einstein turned out to be wrong. We now have overwhelming 

empirical evidence that the universe is indeed expanding, and Einstein would eventually 

call the introduction of the cosmological constant "my greatest blunder." Yet here too he 

would be wrong: there now appears to be an antigravitational force that is accelerating 

the universe's expansion.

In all of these cases, Einstein rejected world models for general relativity on the grounds 

that the extreme geometrical conditions they represented were inconsistent not with the 

letter of general relativity, but with his own intuitions about the shape of the universe. 

Each time, however, the real world refused to cooperate with the great physicist's a priori 

demands. It should not, then, be taken as decisive that when Godel proposed a new, 

geometrically extreme world model for general relativity, Einstein was inclined to question 

its physical significance. 

Yet Einstein did take Godel to have made an important discovery about the nature of time. 

The question was what exactly this discovery meant. What had Godel really been up to in 

this beautiful and mysterious work? On this there was a deafening silence. ("Like most 

others," wrote a distinguished philosopher of physics decades after Godel's essay first 

appeared, "I avoid the puzzling issue of what Godel really thought he was showing about 

time and stick to the easier stuff on closed timelike loops.") Unlike Godel's achievements in 

logic, which, after the initial shock wore off, became gradually understood, his 

cosmological results on Einstein's theory of relativity remained an enigma, and all too 

soon, a distant memory. The question, however, cannot be avoided: What really happened 

when Godel became Einstein? How exactly did he achieve his shocking results on time and 

relativity, and what should physicists and philosophers have made of them? After all is said 

and done, can it really be true that we, who look forward to dessert while nibbling on our 

salads, are living in a world without time? 

7 The Scandal of 

Big "T" and Little "t" 

"Scientific people," proceeded the Time Traveler, "... know very well that time is only a 

kind of space. " 

H.G. WELLS, THE TIME MACHINE 

Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, dedicated by P.A. Schilpp to the physicist on the 

occasion of his seventieth birthday, was a great success. It remains the most influential 

volume in the Library of Living Philosophers, not least because of its wonderful debate 

between Kin-stein and Niels Bohr, friends and adversaries, on the future of the 

Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Einstein's walking companion, in turn, 

had worked intensely on his own contribution, writing to his mother that the work left him 

little leisure for correspondence. That summer, he canceled as well his accustomed 

vacation trip to the seashore. When the auspicious volume finally appeared, he cannot 

have failed to be disappointed by the near silence with which his essay was greeted.

To be sure, there was a minor stir among astrophysicists and cos-mologists concerning the 

validity of Godel's construction of new world models for general relativity. The initial 

response, however, was that he had simply made a mistake in his physics. No less a 

physicist than S. Chandrasekhar, who had attended a talk Godel had given on his new 

models at Princeton, published an article with J.P. Wright in the Proceedings of the 

National Academy of Sciences claiming that Godel had 

made an error when he described the possibility of time travel as along a geodesicóthe 

path of inertial motion, or free fallóin the Godel universe. This no doubt contributed to the 

lack of interest in Godel's essay among philosophers. If the physical premise was faulty, 

why bother to examine the philosophy? 

But was Godel really in error? Amazingly, the editors of the Proceedings had not seen fit to 

consult the author himself before publishing a report of his alleged error concerning an 

elementary concept of relativity theory. Might it not have been Chandrasekhar and Wright, 

not Godel, who had made a mistake? This possibility seems not to have occurred to the 

editors, yet it turned out to have been the case, a fact demonstrated not by a physicist but 

by a philosopher, Howard Stein, who showed clearly that time travel in the Godel universe 

could take place only under great acceleration, which could be provided by a spaceship, 

not along the free-fall path of a geodesic. More astonishing yet, however, Stein could not 

get the correction of Chandrasekhar and Wright accepted for publication. Only when Godel 

himself intervened did the fact finally make it into print that his argument for the 

possibility of time travel was relativistically valid. 

What had gone wrong? Clearly, regardless of Godel's reputation as a great logician, the 

astrophysics community saw him as an outsider, and moreover as attempting to swim 

against the intellectual tide. But the scandal of disregard extended to philosophy as well. 

Godel's contribution to the Schilpp volume had almost no impact on the community of 

philosophers. Except for a few highly technical discussions of the physics, with some brief 

though poignant glances at Godel's philosophical goals, his argument that relativity theory, 

correctly understood, provides strong support for the great philosophers throughout history 

who were skeptical of the objective reality of time, went unheeded. Naturally, there was 

some interest in the question of time travel. There always is. It is a topic of perennial 

fascination among thoughtful and imaginative people, and the fact that Godel had derived 

such an exotic conclusion from the respectable equations of relativity inevitably raised a 

few eyebrows. But on the question of whether he had succeeded in showing that 

time is ideal there was a profound silence. If Godel had not been taken seriously as a 

philosopher before his contribution to the Schilpp volume, nothing changed after its 

appearance. 

Quite simply, he had never been a member of the club: he was out of touch and out of 

step with the philosophical establishment, in Princeton as elsewhere, and the reason was 

not hard to fathom. Just as Wittgenstein's language-centered early work, the Tractatus, 

had helped set the philosophical agenda following World War I, not least in Godel's Vienna, 

in the aftermath of the Second World War, Wittgenstein's later, still linguistically oriented 

philosophy came to dominate again, this time in Godel's newly adopted country. To many 

philosophers, it must have seemed as if Godel had slept through not one but two

Wittgenstein revolutions. It added insult to injury that W.V.O. Quine, the dominant figure 

for years in American philosophy and the most analytic of analytical philosophers, was also 

absent from Godel's thinking. Godel himself was acutely aware of this alienation. When the 

time came for his essay on Cantor's continuum problem to be reprinted in a now classic 

collection coedited by his Princeton colleague Paul Benacerraf and Harvard's Hilary 

Putnam, he would not agree to the republication until he had been convinced that the 

editors would not deride his essay. Shameful it may have been that coming out of nowhere 

in every sense his highly compressed, paradoxical-sounding philosophical defense of 

temporal idealism, based on an arcane new cosmological model for an abstruse physical 

theory, failed to arouse more than a murmur. But it was not surprising. Yet why, more 

than half a century after it was proposed and ignored, is Godel's argument still worthy of 

attention? What had Godel really accomplished? 

What Your Parents Never Told You About the Age of the Universe 

The problem Godel inherited from Einstein had been understood for centuries to concern 

the most fundamental aspect of human experience. 

For Kant, space and time are the two essential "forms of human sensibility," with time, as 

the form of both "inner" and "outer sense," being the more basic. Yet time is far more 

elusive than space. Capturing time through mathematicsóa form of thought from which 

philosophers since Plato have taken pains to remove anything remotely temporaló is like 

trying to trap water with a net. With the advent of Einstein's theory of relativity, however, 

the mystery of this form of being was widely taken to have been resolved. Philosophers 

could finally relax. Einstein had taken care of business. 

Appearances, however, can be deceptive. The universe, for example, as everyone knows, 

is very old. Its exact age is a matter for debate, but there is no disagreement that it runs 

to billions of years. We marvel that as frail and isolated a species as we are can have 

achieved such impressive wisdom about the origins of everything that is. In truth, however, 

it is more than marvelous to have discovered the age of the universe. It is impossible. For 

if the universe is n years old, its present state comes n years after the moment when it all 

began. In 1905, however, Einstein had demonstrated in the special theory of relativity that 

there is no such thing as "the present state of the universe," that is, what would be 

revealed by a snapshot of the universe as it exists at this very moment. The relativity of 

simultaneity implies that what is taken to be "now" relative to one inertial frame will differ 

from what is "now" in another frame if the second frame is in motion relative to the first. It 

follows immediately that if the theory of relativity is correct, there simply is no such thing 

as "the present state of the entire universe" of four-dimensional space-time. Einstein 

himself said this quite clearly: "The four-dimensional continuum is now no longer 

resolvable objectively into sections, all of which contain simultaneous events; 'now' loses 

for the spatially extended world its objective meaning." 

None of this was lost on Godel. To him, there was an inconsistency between Einstein's 

theory and the everyday belief that time, unlike space, "passes" or "flows." On this 

question, two assumptions dominated, then as now, in the popular as well as the scientific 

consciousness. Both of them arc faulty. The first is that special relativity is compatible

with the passing of time, as long as it is acknowledged that this flow has only local, as 

opposed to global, significance. The other is that the world according to special relativity 

is a fixed four-dimensional space-time "block," but that this does not conflict with the 

deliverances of ordinary experience. The former fails because whatever the flow of time 

is, it is not a merely geometrical fact and thus cannot enjoy only local existence. A river's 

course, for example, may curve locallyómay be serpentine near us but straight 

elsewhereóbut what would it mean to say that the river flowed only in our neighborhood? 

Concerning the second assumption, one need only recognize the befuddlement that would 

ensue if one were to try to act on the assumption that today's breakfast is no more actual 

than yesterday's or tomorrow's, that the future, like the present, has already arrived. ("The 

future is now," reads the logo of Hudsucker Enterprises in the film The Hudsucker Proxy. 

This makes for an entertaining story but an unconvincing metaphysics of everyday life.) 

Should I still be wondering what to order for breakfast yesterday, as I am for tomorrow, or 

should I cancel both orders because the meals have already arrived? And since the present 

is no more real than the past and I am still lying on the beach as I was last summer, why 

am I identifying only with the "I" that is presently shivering in the cold? Am I simply making 

a mistake? Or are there as many "I's" as there are moments in time, and if so, are they all 

me, or only parts of me? (I have spatial parts, of course: head, hands, feet; do I also have 

"temporal parts"?) The confidence of the popular (and not so popular) mind is misplaced 

when it clings to the belief that all is well, temporally speaking, between the universe and 

Dr. Einstein. All is not well at all. 

But as indicated by its name, special relativity is not the full theory of relativity. Its 

validity is restricted to so-called inertial reference frames, those that are unaccelerated 

and move in straight lines. The final, comprehensive theory, general relativity, has no such 

restrictions. It includes an account of gravity, the first theory of gravity to replace 

Newton's. Since it is gravity that governs the universe as a whole, general relativity is the 

foundation of the modern science of cosmology. If 

special relativity, moreover, introduced the discovery that matter is equivalent to energy, 

the general theory announced the identity of gravity with space-time curvature. Matter in 

motion determines the shape of space-time. The possibility arises that some reference 

frames might be privileged, namely those that follow, as Godel put it, the mean motion of 

matter in the universe. Time relative to those frames of reference bears the designation 

"cosmic time," and this opens up the possibility that time in something like the 

pretheoretical sense might after all be consistent with relativity, in particular with general 

relativity. It is time in this sense that is (or should be) invoked when cosmologists speak of 

the age of the universe. 

The question remains, however, how closely this new concept of time resembles what time 

was thought to be before Einstein. The astrophysicist James Jeans, whom Godel would cite 

by name when he came to discuss these issues, thought the resemblance was very close 

indeed. With the advent of general relativity and cosmic time, "time regained a real 

objective existence, although only on the astronomical scale." Since, moreover, every 

known relativistically possible universe "makes [in this way] a real distinction between 

space and time," Jeans believed, "[we have] every justification for reverting to our old

intuitional belief that past, present, and future have real objective meaning." In short, "we 

are free to believe that time is real." Just this Godel would put to the test. 

What Godel Means by Time 

At issue is the leitmotif of Godel's lifework, the dialectic of the formal and the intuitive, 

here, of formal versus intuitive time, between what remains of time in the theory of 

relativity and the time of everyday life. The difference between these two conceptions is 

crucial. It can be illuminated by considering what the early-twentieth-century philosopher 

J.M.E. McTaggart called the A-series and B-series. The B-series is founded on the 

characterization of dates and times in terms of the 

fixed relationship of "before" and "after." It is a structurally or "geometrically" defined 

series, analogous to a space. It is the temporal series captured by calendars and by history 

books. The year 1865, for example, comesónow and foreveróbefore 1965 and after 1765, 

and these structural, "geometric" facts are fixed and unchangeable. The A-series, in 

contrast, is essentially fluid or dynamic. It contains the "moving now," i.e., the present 

moment, which is always in flux. That your dentist appointment is at 3 p.m. on May 19 is a 

B-series fact that has been marked on your calendar for months. It will remain a fact after 

the appointment is long forgotten. That now, however, is the very date and time of the 

appointment is a scary A-series fact that has not obtained until this very moment, and will 

happily no longer obtain tomorrow. (It is no accident that a famous philosophical essay on 

the A-series is entitled "Thank Goodness That's Over.") 

Though the A-series represents, intuitively, the most fundamental aspect of timeóindeed, 

what distinguishes time from spaceóit is marked by several concomitants, each one 

difficult to capture in the formal language of mathematics. First is the fact that one timeó 

nowóis privileged over all others. This privilege passes from time to time. What is now will 

soon be then. Second, according to this conception, time passes, or flows, or lapses, and in 

a certain "direction": what is future becomes present, then past. Third, unlike both space 

and the B-series, "position" in the A-series is not ontologically neutral. Whereas to exist in 

New Jersey is to exist no less than in New York (protests by New Yorkers notwithstanding), 

to "exist in the past" is no longer to exist at all. Socrates had his time on stage, but it 

passed, he died, and his name has been removed from the rolls. (It follows that there is 

nothing subjective or mind-bound about the A-series, i.e., about what is happening now. If 

there is such a thing as "inner rime"óthe subject, it would appear, of Husserl's 

investigationsóthen this must be distinguished from the A-series.) Fourth, while the past 

has passed and is now forever fixed and determinate, the future remains, as of now, open. 

Simultaneity, finally, since it determines what 

really exists at the same time as other things exist, is absolute and non-relative. We 

cannot, merely by choosing a frame of reference, determine what really exists at this 

moment. Either my friend in Paris is speaking on the phone at very same time at which I 

am writing this, or she isn't, regardless of how I try to determine, via synchronized clocks, 

whether her speaking is occurring at the same moment as my writing.

Intuitively, time is characterized by both the A- and the B-series. If time as we experience 

it in everyday life, however, is to be identified with formal timeótime as it is studied in 

physicsóa problem arises. What we call "t," the temporal component of relativistic spacetime, 

can be consistently interpreted as representing the B-series. The problem lies with 

the A-series. Since, as Einstein put it, in special relativity "'now' loses for the spatially 

extended world its objective meaning"ó that is, there is no objective, worldwide "now"óit 

appears that "t" cannot represent the A-series, in which there is a single worldwide "now" 

whose "flux" constitutes the change in what exists that characterizes temporal, but not 

spatial, reality. This should come as no surprise. One of the most striking characteristics of 

relativistic space-time is that space and time are no longer to be considered independent 

beings but rather two inextricably intertwined components of a single new kind of being, 

not space or time but rather space-time. 

The A-series cannot be made to resemble space. What keeps this seemingly obvious fact 

hidden from many formal thinkers, whether physicists or logicians, is that in special 

relativity, "t" is formally distinguished from the three spatial dimensions. In the definition, 

for example, of the space-time "interval"óthe unique relationship between any two spacetime 

events that is frame-invariant, hence agreed upon by all observers, no matter their 

state of motionóthe temporal variable, "t," is distinguished from the three spatial variables 

by being preceded by a negative sign. All this demonstrates, however, is that time in 

special relativity has a different "geometry" from the spatial dimensions, not that it is a 

qualitatively different kind of being, namely something that "flows." To be blind to this 

fact is to confuse the formal with the intuitive. 

It is not for nothing that with the theory of relativity Einstein is said to have accomplished 

the geometrization of physics (an achievement for which, as we have seen, he owed a 

great debt to the mathematician Minkowski, his long-suffering teacher at the Technical 

Institute in Zurich, who took the bold step of re-creating special relativity in a fourdimensional 

geometric framework). It is not just that Einstein reconceived the geometry of 

the universe. Rather, in special relativity, he made the defining characteristic of time not 

its qualitative distinction from space, as Kant and Newton had done, but rather its 

contribution to the geometry of four-dimensional space-time. Similarly, in general 

relativity, he not only provided a new geometry for the laws of gravity, he defined gravity 

itself geometrically, as space-time curvature. One of Einstein's claims to fame, after all, is 

his uncanny ability not only to provide new descriptions of old phenomena but new 

definitions as well. In this, as in many other aspects of his discoveries, he is as much 

philosopher as physicist. The coup de grace came when he replaced Newton's intuitively 

evident Euclidean mathematics with unintuitive non-Euclidean geometry. 

Time as it appears in relativity theory, then, was ripe for consideration in the "Godel 

program" of assessing the extent to which intuitive ideas can be captured by formal 

concepts. This is what Godel had in mind when he titled his contribution to the Schilpp 

volume, "A Remark About the Relationship Between Relativity Theory and Idealistic 

Philosophy." The "idealistic philosophers" he was referring to were thinkers like 

Parmenides, Plato and Kant, who questioned whether our subjective experience of the 

flow of time has an objective correlative. To such thinkers, time was always an ontological 

suspect. As before, when he examined the relationship of intuitive arithmetic truth, or big 

"T," to its representation as formal mathematical proof in Russell's Principia Mathematical, 

Godel would begin by clarifying the distinction between intuitive time and little "t," its 

formal representation in Einstein's theory of relativity as the temporal component of four-

dimensional Einstein-Minkowski space-time. Drawing from his contribution to the Schilpp 

volume as well as the longer versions of this 

essay that have now been published, we can say that Godel characterized intuitive 

timeó"what everyone understood by time before relativity theory"óas "Kantian," or 

"prerelativistic." Time in this intuitive sense, he said, is "a one-dimensional manifold that 

provides a complete linear ordering of all events in nature." This "objective lapse of time" 

is "directly experienced" and "involves a change in the existing [i.e., in what actually 

exists]." Time in the intuitive sense, for Godel, is something "whose essence is that only 

the present really exists." In particular, it "means (or is equivalent to the fact) that reality 

consists of an infinity of layers of 'now' which come into existence successively." These 

features Godel took to be essential properties of time in the intuitive sense, since 

"something without these properties can hardly be called time." Clearly, time so 

characterized is reflected in the A-series, and indeed Godel refers to McTaggart by name 

in his essay. The question that remains is whether this intuitive concept can be captured 

by the formal methods of relativity. 

Godel's Dialectical Dance with Time 

As he had previously done in his incompleteness theorem, Godel demonstrated that those 

who fail to grasp the distinction between the intuitive and the formal concept are not in a 

position to make a proper assessment of their relationship. Having made that distinction 

with remarkable clarity, he was able to establish, by an ingenious and entirely unsuspected 

formal argumentówhich in itself, as Einstein pointed out, was a major contribution to 

relativity theoryóthe inability of the formal representation to capture the intuitive 

concept. Godel's dialectical dance with intuitive and formal time in the theory of relativity 

contained an intricate series of steps. We begin with a large-scale view of the structure of 

Godel's argument, then move on to a closer examination. First the forest, then the trees. 

The opening move concerns the more limited special theory of relativity. Given that the A- 

series contains the flux of "now," the absence 

of an objective, worldwide "now" in special relativity rules out its existence. But absent 

the A-series there is no intuitive time. What remains, formal time as represented by the 

little "t" of Einstein-Minkowski space-time, cannot be identified with the intuitive time of 

everyday experience. The conclusion, for Godel, is inescapable: if relativity theory is valid, 

intuitive time disappears. 

Step two takes place when Godel reminds us that special relativity is "special" in that it 

recognizes only inertial frames in constant velocity relative to each other. It does not 

include an account of gravity. Einstein's general theory of relativity, in contrast, of which 

the special is a special case, does. In general relativity, as we have seen, gravity itself is 

defined as space-time curvature, determined, in turn, by the distribution of matter in 

motion. It follows that whereas in special relativity no frames of reference or systems in 

motion are privileged, in the general theory some are distinguished, namely those that, in 

Godel's words, "follow the mean motion of matter" in the universe. In the actual world, it

turns out, these privileged frames of reference can be coordinated so that they determine 

an objective remnant of time: the "cosmic time" we encountered earlier. In general 

relativity, then, time (of a sort) reappears. 

But no sooner has time reentered the scene than Godel proceeds to step three, where he 

exploits the fact that Einstein has fully geometrized space-time. The equations of general 

relativity permit alternative solutions, each of which determines a possible universe, a 

relativistically possible world. Solutions to these complex equations are rare, but in no 

time at all Godel discovers a relativistically possible universe (actually, a set of them)ónow 

known as the Godel universeó in which the geometry of the world is so extreme that it 

contains space-time paths unthinkable in more familiar universes like our own. In one such 

Godel universe, it is provable that there exist closed timelike curves such that if you travel 

fast enough, you can, though always heading toward your local future, arrive in the past. 

These closed loops or circular paths have a more familiar name: time travel. But if it is 

possible in such worlds, Godel argues, to return to one's 

past, then what was past never passed at all. But a time that never truly passes cannot 

pass for real, intuitive time. The reality of time travel in the Godel universe signals the 

unreality of time. Once again, time disappears. 

But the dance is not over. For the Godel universe, after all, is not the actual world, only a 

possible one. Can we really infer the nonexistence of time in this world from its absence 

from a merely possible universe? In a word, yes. Or so Godel argues. Here he makes his 

final, his most subtle and elusive step, the one from the possible to the actual. This is a 

mode of reasoning close to Godel's heart. His mathematical Platonism, which committed 

him to the existence of a realm of objects that are not accidental like you and meówho 

exist, but might not haveóbut necessary, implied immediately that if a mathematical 

object is so much as possible, it is necessary, hence actual. This is so because what 

necessarily exists cannot exist at all unless it exists in all possible worlds. 

This same mode of reasoning, from the possible to the actual, occurs in the "ontological 

argument" for the existence of God employed by Saint Anselm, Descartes and Leibniz. 

According to this argument, one cannot consider God to be an accidental beingóone that 

merely happens to existóbut rather a necessary one that, if it exists at all, exists in every 

possible world. It follows that if God is so much as possible, He is actual. This means that 

one cannot be an atheist unless one is a "superatheist," i.e., someone who denies not just 

that God exists but that He is possible. Experience teaches us that ordinary, garden-variety 

atheists are not always willing to go further and embrace su-peratheism. Following in the 

footsteps of Leibniz, Godel, too, constructed an ontological argument for God. Then, 

concerned that he would be taken for a theist in an atheistic age, he never allowed it to 

be published. 

In arguing from the mere possibility of the Godel universe, in which time disappears, to the 

nonexistence of time in the actual world, Godel was employing a mode of reasoning in 

which he had more confidence than most of his philosophical colleagues. In the case of the

Godel universe, he reasoned that since this possible world is governed by the same physical 

laws that obtain in the actual worldódiffering from our world only in the large-scale 

distribution of matter and motionóit cannot be that whereas time fails to exist in that 

possible world, it is present in our own. To deny this, Godel reasoned, would be to assert 

that "whether or not an objective lapse of time exists (i.e., whether or not a time in the 

ordinary sense exists) depends on the particular way in which matter and its motion are 

arranged in this world." Even though this would not lead to an outright contradiction, he 

argued, "nevertheless, a philosophical view leading to such consequences can hardly be 

considered as satisfactory." But it is provable that time fails to exist in the Godel universe. 

It cannot, therefore, exist in our own. The final step is taken; the curtain comes down: 

time really does disappear. 

Into the Forest 

Such, in broad outlines, is the structure of Godel's argument. Even from this brief sketch, 

it should be apparent how complex and subtle was the case Godel made for the ideality of 

time, a far cry from the amateurish philosophical fumblings with which he is frequently 

credited. To appreciate the full force of his reasoning, however, it is necessary to look 

more closely at the details of his argument, to get close to the trees in the forest. His very 

first step, from little "t" and special relativity to temporal idealism, went unappreciated, 

in part because, as he remarked about his incompleteness theorem and big "T," 

mathematical truth, there was a widespread failure to appreciate the distinction between 

the formal and the intuitive. There still is. Even today, one can find distinguished 

proponents of the view that special relativity implies only that the flow of time must be 

tied to a frame of reference, and that the relativity of simultaneityócombined with the 

fact that the progress of "now" represents the flux of realityósimply means that reality 

itself must be relativized to a frame of reference. 

The question not asked is this: does this conclusion make any sense? Fifty years ago Godel 

had the answer: "the concept of existence . . . cannot be relativized without destroying its 

meaning completely." 

How does Godel know this? Perhaps relativity has revised what we mean by existence? This 

Godel considered nonsense. Science, he maintained in his discussions with Hao Wang, does 

not analyze concepts, as does philosophy. It applies them. "The notion of existence," in 

particular, "is one of the primitive concepts with which we must begin as given. It is the 

clearest concept we have." To appreciate the force of Godel's re-ductio ad absurdum, 

then, it is first necessary to recognize the absur-dum. Not everything can be relativized. 

You can relativize velocity to a frame of reference. You can recognize that what's on my 

left is on your right and that what is here for me is there for you, that is, that when I say it 

is raining here, you agree that it is raining there. But reality as such is absolute. One 

cannot speak coherently of "my reality" or "your reality," "reality here" versus "reality 

there." When people say things like "my reality is a world in which people care for each 

other," they meanó or should meanóthat this is their subjective view of the world, how it is 

or should be. But there is still only one objective reality, which includes the fact that this 

is your view of the world. If a doctrine implies the opposite, it is that doctrine that has to 

go. We can have a world in which there is time or a world in which there is existence, but 

not both. Godel made the only rational choice: a world without time.

Since there is no single objective worldwide "now" in special relativity, and since there 

cannot be multiple rivers of time each of which determines the advance of reality, it 

follows that there simply is no such thing as the universal, worldwide flux of "now" or lapse 

of time consistent with relativity. As Godel put it, "each observer has his own set of 'nows,' 

and none of these various systems of layers can claim the prerogative of representing the 

objective lapse of time." Special relativity, then, is not simply "incomplete" with respect to 

intuitive time. Einstein's theory is inconsistent with the existence of the A-series, with the 

reality of time in the intuitive sense. There is simply no way around it: if time as it is 

experienced in ordinary life is to be not ideal but fully 

real, Einstein must be wrong. And so he is. Or rather, the special theory of relativity is to 

be replaced by the general theory, which contains a universal theory of motion, including 

acceleration due to gravity. Hope remains. But this hope too Godel will quash, beginning 

with the second step of his argument. 

No Time for Time Travel 

In general relativity, as we have seen, one can define, if not time itself, at least a kind of 

simulacrum of the real thing, namely, "cosmic time," determined by those frames of 

reference whose motion follows the mean motion of matter in the universe. This was a 

possibility opened up by Einstein's geometrization of space and time. The only constraints 

placed on this geometrization are those determined by the laws of general relativity. Any 

possible universe that obeys these rules must be, by the letter of relativity, physically 

possible. What Godel discoveredóby the judicious use of ingenious new geometrical 

methods that themselves constituted an important advance in relativistic 

mathematicsówas that there are solutions to the equations of general relativity that 

provide world models in which all matter is rotating. Yet absent Newton's absolute space, 

with respect to what is the universe supposed to be rotating? "As a substitute for absolute 

space," said Godel, "we have a certain inertial field which determines the motion of bodies 

upon which no forces act.... This inertial field determines the behavior of the axis of a 

completely free gyroscope." This is what Godel used to define universal rotation: "It is with 

respect to the spatial directions defined in this way (by a free gyroscope ...) that matter 

will have to rotate." (Gyroscopes, it will be recalled, entered Einstein's thought elsewhere, 

when he helped improve their design for use on U-boats during WWI.) In these rotating or 

"Godel universes," Godel proved, no single objective cosmic time can be defined. The last 

remnant of something even approximating intuitive time cannot be introduced into these 

Godel universes, on pain of contradiction. 

If one stake in the heart is good, two are better. Godel discovered that in a subclass of the 

rotating universes, those that are not expanding, the large-scale geometry of the world is 

so warped that there exist space-time curves that bend back on themselves so far that 

they close; that is, they return to their starting point. A highly accelerated spaceship 

journey along such a closed path, or world line, could only be described as time travel. 

And it would be some spaceship. Godel worked out the length and time for the journey, as 

well as the exact speed and fuel requirements. The top speed would be a significant 

fraction of the velocity ot light, and the fuel requirements, too, would be enormous. (One 

theorist has calculated that even with a perfectly efficient rocket engine, the spaceship

would require 1012 grams of fuel for every 2 grams of payload.) Paradoxically, however, 

the very fact that this inconceivably fast spaceship would return its passengers to the past 

demonstrated, by Godel's lights, that time itselfóhence speed and motionóis but an 

illusion. For if we can revisit the past, it still exists. How else could it be revisited? You 

can't revisit New Jersey if New Jersey is no longer there, and you can't return to time t if t 

has departed from the realm of existence. Thus temporal distanceópast and futureóturns 

out to be as onto-logically neutral as the measure of space. This is something that even the 

"friends of Godel," who in recent years have stepped forward to defend his account of time 

travel as logically and physically coherent, have failed to note. For Godel, if there is time 

travel, there isn't time. The goal of the great logician was not to make room in physics for 

one's favorite episode of Star Trek, but rather to demonstrate that if one follows the logic 

of relativity further even than its father was willing to venture, the results will not just 

illuminate but eliminate the reality of time. 

Protecting Time from Godel 

Such, in essence, was the argument put forward by Godel in "A Remark About the 

Relationship Between Relativity Theory and Idealistic 

Philosophy," a gift for his friend Albert Einstein in the Schilpp volume dedicated to the 

great physicist on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Six pages was all Godel needed 

to defeat time. Over fifty years later, however, what Godel really accomplished in this 

brief compass remains hidden. He had once again constructed a surprising "limit case," a 

formal structure whose "geometry" or "syntax" limited the possible interpretations it could 

be invested with. In the case of big "T," arithmetic truth, he was able to prove in his 

incompleteness theorem that the logical system he had constructed could successfully 

capture the concept of formal proof but could not, on pain of contradiction, represent 

truth. Before the incompleteness theorem, it was possible to mistake proof for truth. 

Afterward, with Godel's introduction of the "syntactically extreme" conditions of his formal 

systemóthe conceptual analogue of an atom smasheróno reasonable person could fail ro 

see the distinction. In his contribution to relativity theory, Godel, once again, constructed 

a limit case, this time for the relativistic geo-metrization of time. That is, he had 

demonstrated that in the mathematical construction of the Godel universe, little "t," the 

variable that represents the temporal component of four-dimensional space-time, cannot 

bear the standard interpretation of time in the intuitive sense. Indeed, he proved that it 

cannot even be interpreted as "cosmic time," itself at most a simulacrum of the real thing. 

Once again, he had been able to make a discovery because he had used his philosophical 

eye to isolate the essential properties that distinguish the intuitive from the formal 

concept, in this case, the properties that make intuitive time time, and was thus in a 

positionóas those who look little "t" to be an analysis of intuitive time were notóto prove 

that these features were excluded by the very geometrical structure of the Godel 

universe. Whereas in our world, it was possibleóif you didn't look too closelyóto confuse 

formal, relativistic time with time as ordinarily conceived, this identification became 

patently unacceptable in the extreme geometrical environment represented by the Godel 

universe. What once was hidden was now revealed.

The similarities continue. Just as David Hilbert tried at first to avoid the consequences of 

the incompleteness theorem by inventing a new rule of logical inference out of whole 

cloth, so too the relativistic establishment, in the person of Stephen Hawking, tried to get 

around the embarrassing consequences introduced by the Godel universe. If the annoying 

Godel universe was consistent with the laws of general relativity, why not change the laws? 

Hawking thus introduced what he called the "chronology protection conjecture" (though a 

better name would have been the "anti-Godel amendment"), which proposed a 

modification of general relativity whose primary goal was to rule out the possibility of 

world models like GodePs, with their awkward chronologies permitting closed temporal 

loops and causal chains with no beginning. Despite having, as Russell noted in a different 

context, all the advantages of theft over honest toil, Hawking's chronology protection 

conjecture has won few adherents, its ad hoc character betraying itself. 

Rarely Have So Many Understood So Little About So Much 

If it is shocking that such a profound insight into the philosophical implications of the 

theory of relativity has had little impact on physicists, it is dismaying that Godel's ideas 

have failed to catch the attention of philosophers. In this atmosphere of neglect, it is 

hardly surprising that the striking dissimilarity between GodePs two great contributions to 

the dialectic of the formal and the intuitive has also gone unnoticed. Godel was at once a 

mathematical realist and a temporal idealist. He concluded from the incompleteness of 

Hilbert's proof-theoretic system for arithmetic that the Platonic realm of numbers cannot 

be fully captured by the formal structures of logic. For Godel, the devices of formal proof 

are too weak to capture all that is true in the world ot numbers, not to say in mathematics 

as a whole. When it came to relativistic cosmology, however, he took the opposite tack. 

The conse 

quence of his discoveries for Einstein's realm was not that relativity was too weak to 

encompass all that is true about time, but rather that relativity is just fine, whereas time 

in the intuitive sense is an illusion. Relativity, by Godel's lights, does not capture the 

essence of intuitive time, because when it comes to time, our intuitions betray us. "As we 

present time to ourselves," he said, "it simply does not agree with fact. To call time 

subjective is just a euphemism." This, for Godel, was the point of intersection between 

Kant's idealism and the temporal idealism implicit in Einstein's physics. 

Having failed to notice the asymmetry between the two incompletenesses Godel 

discovered, his colleagues in the relativistic and philosophical establishments were of 

course in no position to comprehend it. It remains one of the most important unanswered 

questions in our understanding of Godel's philosophy. A promising line might proceed as 

follows. In the case of his incompleteness theorem, Godel could compare the welldetermined 

set of theorems of formal arithmetic with the equally well founded 

deliverances of intuitive, i.e., unformalized, arithmetic, accumulated over millennia by 

the world's great mathematicians, from which no contradictions have been derived. Even 

the concept of set, as employed "naively" by mathematicians, has not led to paradoxes. 

"This concept of set," Godel pointed out, "according to which a set is anything obtainable 

from the integers (or some other well-defined objects) by iterated application of the 

operation of 'set of,' and not something obtained by dividing the totality of all existing 

things into two categories, has never led to any antinomy whatsoever." Russell's Paradox, 

in contrast, arose precisely from attempts like Frege's to formalize Cantor's intuitive theory

of sets by "dividing the totality of all existing things into two categories," those that fall 

under a given concept and those that don't. "These contradictions," Godel reminded us, 

"did not appear within mathematics but near its outermost boundary toward philosophy." It 

is formalisms like Hilbert's and Russell's that are problematic; everyday mathematical 

practice is not founded on a mistake. 

Things stand otherwise with time. Whereas special and general relativity are coherent, 

well-formulated, well-understood physical theories that have enjoyed extensive empirical 

confirmation, our ordinary, pretheoretical, conceptions of time, i.e., of the A-series, 

cannot be trusted. The proof of this comes from the fact that our own experience of time 

in the actual world as something that lapses might well be indistinguishable from how one 

would perceive "time" in the Godel universe, in which intuitive time, which lapses, is 

provably absent. If a form of experience is compatible with both a thesis and its antithesis, 

it cannot be taken as reliable testimony for either. The fact, then, that the theory of 

relativity fails to account for the deliverances of our everyday experience of time 

suggested to Godel not that Einstein's theory is incomplete, but rather that our sense of 

intuitive time is founded on a misunderstanding or misapprehension. In the clash between 

Einstein and everyday experience, it is experience that has to yield. 

Such an answer to the fundamental question of Godel's asymmetrical responses to his two 

incompletenesses has not heretofore been proposed, for the very simple reason that the 

question itself has never been raised. The failure of his contemporariesóand oursóto 

appreciate what Godel has accomplished with his Einsteinian inheritance is a sad tale 

indeed. Rarely have so many understood so little about so much. Godel's "detour" into 

relativity has been dismissed as a bit of intellectual dabbling by someone outside his field 

and out of his depth. No one has seen this work for what it was: a continued development 

of Godel's program of probing the limits of formal methods in capturing intuitive concepts, 

a move from the big "T" of mathematical truth to the little "t" of relativistic time. As a 

consequence of this failure, no one asked why Godel's responses to his incompleteness 

results in the two cases were diametrically opposed. 

The details of Godel's conclusions about little "t" were also neglected. Cosmologists 

questioned whether the possibility of time travel in the nonexpanding Godel universe was 

consistent with relativity, but made little note of the primary purpose for which he had 

constructed 

these world models, which was to show that since time travel was possible, time was not. 

And when it became clear that his new world models were indeed relativistically 

consistent, attention was diverted once more from the essential to the inessential: now 

cosmologists asked whether the actual world is an expanding Godel universe. The 

foundation of Godel's case for temporal idealism, his modal argument from the possibility 

of the Godel universe to the nonexistence of time in the actual world, disappeared from 

sight. 

Who's Kurt Godel?

Though misunderstood and underappreciated, Godel's birthday present for Einstein did 

attract some immediate attention, if not from philosophers then at least from the 

guardians of relativity. Of the two great theories of modern physics, general relativity is 

clearly the philosophical cousin, leading naturally to speculation on the origin, shape and 

fate of the universeóa highly theoretical, not to say metaphysical, preoccupation of 

philosophers from time immemorialówhereas quantum mechanics has immediate 

implications for technology and practice, from lasers and microchips to the whole panoply 

of information-theoretic hardware. Within the confines of general relativity itself, 

moreover, the question of time represents an especially elusive philosophical corner. What 

to do with time in special relativity is easy (if you know what to look for); what to do with 

it in general relativity is something else entirely. Since Godel's discoveries concerned an 

even more isolated niche of this already remote cornerónamely, speculations about 

geometrically extreme cosmologies with bizarre chronological consequences, not to 

mention Godel's even more arcane philosophical reflections based on these monstrous 

modelsóit was to be expected that the small ripple raised by his rarefied achievements 

would soon fade away. 

Into this quiet pond, one spring day decades later, stepped the physicist John Wheeler, a 

colleague of Godel's at Princeton. He was 

with his friends and fellow physicists Kip Thorne and Charles Misner, with whom he was 

completing what would become one of the great texts in general relativity, called simply 

Gravitation. The sunshine beckoned and the three betook themselves across campus to the 

grassy knolls of the institute, there to meet "Wheeler's friend Kurt Godel. The warmth of 

the day notwithstanding, the old logician was found wrapped in his overcoat, the electric 

heater in his office turned on. Wheeler and friends had a question. Could Godel shed light 

on the relationship between his incompleteness theorem and Heisenberg's uncertainty 

principle? No. For Godel, it was bad taste even to pose such a question. Heisenberg's 

principle was the finest flower of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, 

itself the blue-eyed boy of positivism. It represented the high-water mark of indeterminism 

in physicsóin effect, a rejection of Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason, so beloved of 

Godelóand the acme of irrealism in physical science. As such, it was the very thorn on the 

rose for both Einstein and Godel. As Godel put it, "in physics . . . the possibility of 

knowledge of objec-tivizable states of affairs is denied, and it is asserted that we must be 

content to predict the results of observations. This is really the end of all theoretical 

science in the usual sense." The incompleteness theorem, in contrast, was a definitive 

refutation of positivism. Its methods and formal conclusions, though positivistically 

acceptable, were of a piece with classical mathematics. Moreover, the proof itself, by 

Godel's lights, constituted strong evidence in favor of realism in mathematics. To have 

suggested a connection or correlation between Heisenberg and Godel was a major faux 

pas. 

Godel notwithstanding, however, Wheeler and his friends were not far off the mark. It 

cannot be denied that there are striking parallels between Godel's incompleteness and 

Heisenberg's uncertainty (though tact should have counseled against pointing this out to 

Godel). For one thing, both thinkers were at pains to use methods that would be 

epistemologically acceptable to the most hard-headed positivist: formal systems in the 

case of Godel's theorem, direct cm pirical observations in the case of Heisenberg's 

principle. Further

more, each theorist drew ontological conclusions from epistemologi-cal premises, 

conclusions that established the intrinsic limitations of the epistemologically acceptable 

methods they had employed. This form of argument is the very hallmark of positivism. It is 

also characterizes Einstein's special theory of relativity, a fact with which Heisenberg tried 

(unsuccessfully) to impress Einstein. That the conclusions Godel drew pointed to 

mathematical realism, while Heisenberg made the case for physical irrealism, does not 

alter the fact that both thinkers blazed an ontological trail through the thickets of 

epistemology, and that each inaugurated thereby an intellectual revolution whose full 

implications are yet to be realized. Not for nothing did Godel's colleague at the institute, 

Freeman Dyson, remark that "the two great conceptual revolutions of twentieth century 

science [are] the overturning of classical physics by Heisenberg and the overturning of the 

foundations of mathematics by Godel." 

Now Godel himself had a question. Would there be a discussion in their new text of the 

rotating universes he had discovered in relativity? No. Godel was disappointed. He was still 

seeking to discover whether the actual world is a (expanding) rotating Godel universe. The 

evidence for universal rotation, should it exist, would be found in the axes of rotation of 

the surrounding galaxies. Wheeler was taken aback by the practical astronomical 

preoccupations of the great logician. Godel, he noted, "had taken down the great Hubble 

photographic atlas of the galaxies, lined up a ruler on each galactic image to estimate the 

galaxy's axis of rotation, and compiled statistics of the orientation." The results, however, 

were negative. 

That Godel had made discoveries about rotating universes in general relativity had been 

known to Wheeler for many years. He was present in 1949 when Godel lectured on the 

subject at Einstein's seventieth birthday celebration. Yet he too, despite his impressive 

credentials, seems to have misunderstood what Godel was saying. "In a universe with an 

overall rotation," he wrote, attempting to summarize Godel's lecture, ". . . there could 

exist world lines (space-time histories) that closed up in loops. In such a universe, one 

could, in principle, live one's life over 

and over again." Wheeler, unfortunately, has conflated a temporal circle with a cycle, 

precisely missing the force of Godel's conclusion that the possibility of closed, futuredirected, 

timelike curves, i.e., time travel, proves that space-time is a space, not a time 

in the intuitive sense. Whereas a circle is a figure in space, a cycle is a journey undertaken 

along a circular path, one that can be repeated, in Wheeler's words, "over and over again." 

Exactly how many times, one wants to ask Wheeler, is the journey supposed to be 

repeated? The question clearly cannot be answered, since the time traveler's journey is not 

over time, along the closed timelike curve: it is the curve itself. Just as one cannot ask of 

a circle how many times the points that constitute that figure have gone around, one 

cannot sensibly ask how often the time traveler in the Godel universe has made his or her 

trip. 

Wheeler should have known better. As he himself pointed out, an "unsettling consequence 

of Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity is that time is relative." And not just relative, 

but "static," for "the other thing that special relativity did for time is join it with space into 

the four-dimensional entity space-time . .. [and] a consequence of this new space-time 

view is that motion through time, or motion of time ... is replaced by static time." But, as 

Godel showed, a time that is relative or static is no time at all. Wheeler seems reluctant to

call a spade a spade. Yet he does entitle his chapter "The End of Time," so perhaps he 

does, after all, recognize this. Not at all. What Wheeler means by "the end of time" is not 

that it disappears in Einstein's theory as a consequence of being relative and static, but 

rather that, as he sees it, when the "Big Crunch" comes, after the "Big Bang," time will 

come to an end. "There was no 'before' the Big Bang," he writes, "and there will be no 

'after' after the Big Crunch." Moreover, "every black hole brings an end to time and space 

... as surely as the Big Crunch will bring an end to the universe as a whole." What Godel 

has seen, it seems, Wheeler has not. 

A year after he introduced Misner and Thorne to Godel, Wheeler found himself in the 

office of a colleague, the cosmologist James Peebles. In walked Peebles' student Dan 

Hawley, announcing that he had 

just completed his dissertation on the question of a preferred rotation among the galaxies. 

Godel, Wheeler commented, would be pleased. "Who's Godel?" asked Hawley. "The greatest 

logician since Aristotle," Wheeler replied. And much more. A phone call to Godel allowed 

Wheeler to apprise the greatest logician since Aristotle of the new work being done in 

Princeton on the rotation of the galaxies. Godel's queries, however, were soon too 

demanding for the physicist, so Wheeler handed him over to the student of cosmology. The 

questions quickly exhausted him, too, so the phone was passed yet again, this rime to 

Peebles. When the conversation finally concluded, there was just one thing Peebles had to 

say: "My, I wish we had talked to him before we started this work." 

Though the world at large had not yet taken note of what Godel had accomplished in 

Einstein's backyard, there were rumblings among the cosmologists that something new was 

brewing. Just what this was, however, would remain hidden for years to come. That a 

noted cos-mologist was moved as recently as the 1990s to protect chronology from the 

Godel universe suggests that the world is still not ready for Godel. Yet the mere fact that 

as distinguished a theorist as Stephen Hawking believed protection was needed, combined 

with the fact that his chronology protection conjecture has so far failed to attract a 

significant number of adherents, suggests that readiness may be near. The Zeitgeist, as 

Godel noted, has its own time and agenda. 

8 Twilight of the Gods 

We live in a world in which ninety-nine per cent of all beautiful things are destroyed in the 

hud. 

KURT GODEL 

It all began with geometry. "Those ignorant of geometry shall not enter," Plato had 

inscribed over the entrance to his academy. In a passage admired by Godel, he says in 

Book 6 of The Republic that when students of geometry "make use of the visible forms [of 

geometric figures] and reason about them, they are in fact thinking not of these but of the

ideals [i.e., "ideas" or forms] they resemble." Thus was the path cleared for Euclid, who 

succeededónot perfectly, as Kant thought, but to a considerable extentóin capturing those 

geometric forms in a system of axioms that remains the paradigm of theoretical 

knowledge, in mathematics and logic no less than in physics. 

Einstein, who had the courage to employ an alternative to Euclid's system to describe the 

actual world, was one of the first to grasp the difference between geometry as a formal 

science of deduction and geometry as an empirical account of physical space, a distinction 

he elaborated with gusto in his essay "Geometry and Experience." He had begun to follow 

in the footsteps of the Greek philosophers early in life, when his youthful imagination was 

captured by his "holy geometry booklet." Geometry, too, was the secret password for 

entrance to the Godel universe, a password Einstein himself was hesitant to invoke, yet it 

was also the key Einstein himself would employ 

to unlock the secrets to his unified field theory, a key no one but he cared to turn. 

"Einstein's now abandoned dream of a geometrical unification of the forces of nature" is 

how John Wheeler described it decades later, in 1980. 

Everything Is Something Else 

Turning to geometry one more time for the solution to his final problem was for Einstein a 

case of going home with the girl he had brought to the dance. In creating relativity theory, 

he had inaugurated the geometriza-tion of physics. The mysterious limit velocity of light 

was to be accounted for not by ad hoc mechanical devices like the strange shrinking 

behavior of measuring apparatuses, but rather by the geometrical structure of space-time 

itself, a structure that has the limiting velocity of electromagnetic signals built into its 

very definition. Similarly, the force of gravity was explained not, as with Newton, as a 

mysterious instantaneous action at a distance that moves through an even more mysterious 

world-filling yet invisible substance known as ether, but rather by the geometrical device 

of the curvature of space-time. Time itself had been tamedóor so it seemedóby its 

transformation into space, into the temporal component of four-dimensional space-time. 

In his way, Einstein turned out to be no less an ironist than Godel. Everything is really 

something else: time is really space, gravity is really geometrical curvature, energy is 

really mass. How can one not love such a thinker? 

That Einstein and Godel would meet on the field of geometry was altogether fitting. The 

parallel lines of their careers converged on the Godel universe, at once Godel's birthday 

present for his best friend and his entrance into Einstein's arena of battle. Godel had 

carried Einstein's geometrization of time to a surprising conclusion, forcing us to ques tion 

not just the truth but the very meaning of the Einsteinian starting point. The two walking 

companions had marched so far ahead of the rest of us that no one could tell whether it 

was they or we who were 

147

lost. Godel's writings on Einstein did, however, provide cover for the attempt by Godel's 

friends to cheer the great logician, whose health, shortly after he completed his 

contribution to the Schilpp volume, became imperiled by a bleeding duodenal ulcer. 

Promotion to full professor would not come until later, when the objections of some of his 

colleagues could be overcome. ("One crazy man [himself] on the faculty" is enough, said 

the mathematician C.L. Siegel.) A solution was found when institute director 

Oppenheimer, who was on the selection committee for the first Einstein Awardóto be 

presented every three years, on the physicist's birthdayósuggested that it would be fitting 

to divide the honor between Godel and Julian Schwinger, the physicist from Harvard who 

would soon earn a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics. Thus on March 14, 

1951, Einstein's birthday, after Von Neumann had delivered a brief speech in which he 

described Godel's work as "a landmark which will remain visible far in space and time," the 

aging physicist was able to return the favor of Godel's birthday gift of 1949 by personally 

handing his good friend the first Einstein Award. ("You deserve it," he said to Schwinger; 

"you don't need it," he remarked to Godel, who needed it most of all.) 

This was the first formal academic honor Godel had ever received. In due course he would 

get others, including honorary degrees from Yale and Harvard (though not from Princeton; 

the invitation came too late) and the National Medal of Science, but he had already begun 

to withdraw from academic and social life. When he delivered the prestigious Gibbs 

Lecture that same year, 1951, before the American Mathematical Society, the only logician 

ever to do so, it was the last talk he would ever deliver to a mathematical audience, and 

one of the last he would even attend. He had never, in any case, found much profit in 

attending formal talks. "I never go to lectures," he said, "because I have difficulty in 

following them, even if I am well acquainted with the subject matter." For the remainder 

of his life, he would publish no new essays, nor even the Gibbs Lecture, which appeared 

only posthumously. His sun rose and set at the same moment. 

The Need for Roots 

For Einstein, the darkness had long since descended. After presenting his award to Godel, 

he had few years left to live. No new conquests graced his final decades. His last grand 

geometrical move, like Godel's, had been followed by no one. He became preoccupied with 

the attempt to mitigate the very forces he had helped set into motion: the positivism, 

inspired by Mach, that had set the stage for special relativity; the bold decision to take 

Planck's quantum as a genuine aspect of reality rather than a mere calculating device; the 

courageous proposal, following Boltzmann, that probability be taken seriously in physics; 

the seminal work in forging a new quantum mechanics. Politically, he provided bookends 

to the sudden intrusion of physics into global politics. On one side was his recommendation 

to FDR that nuclear power, in the form of a bomb, be exploited to defeat his former 

homeland. On the otheróhis final act on the public stageówas his signature on a manifesto 

written by Bertrand Russell demanding worldwide nuclear disarmament. His white whale, 

however, remained his never-ending, never-succeeding search for a unified field theory, 

together with his attempt to find a philosophical flaw in the Copenhagen interpretation of 

quantum mechanics. Like Ahab, he took the hunt personally and was fully prepared to go 

down with the ship. 

Increasingly, he withdrew from the physics establishment to pursue the great beast in 

isolation. After he arrived at the institute, he never visited Europe again. He never drove a

car and never flew. His circle of friends diminished, with Godel the brightest star in his 

shrinking firmament. Never again would he enjoy the intellectual camaraderie that had 

formed a cloak against all the ugliness that beset his years in Berlin. Toward the end of his 

life he confessed that his strongest personal ties, including those to his wife and children, 

had all been failures. When his wife Elsa's daughter from a previous mar-riage, Useówhom 

he had once thought of marryingólay dying of cancer in Paris in 1934 at the tender age of 

thirty-seven, he declined to accompany his wife ro attend to her. His first wife, Mileva 

Marie 

Einstein, died alone in Zurich, desperately unhappy, unreconciled with the man who had 

left her. His daughter with her, Lieserl, born out of wedlock, disappeared into the mists of 

time. His gifted first son, Eduard, became schizophrenic and was deposited in a psychiatric 

clinic, where he remained for the rest of his life, unvisited by his father. His second son, 

Hans Albert, always distant, remained so after he too emigrated to America. And the 

second marriage, finally, of Einstein, like the first, was no success, though it did at least 

provide a slender root in an otherwise rootless existence. Its removal in 1936, yet another 

deracination, deeply affected him, surprising Elsa. "I never thought he loved me so much," 

she told her friend Antonina Vallentin, "and that comforts me." Sad words, indeed, from a 

dying spouse. With Elsa's death his personal universe collapsed in on itself. 

For the remaining years of his life his most visceral human connection was to what he 

called his "tribe," his fellow Jews, the deepest root of this rootless man (though he 

somehow never managed to plant himself in the land of Zion). "My relationship to the 

Jewish people," he wrote, "has become my strongest human bond." Why he chose this for 

his fundamental human tie remains to be explained. One suspects that the French 

philosopher Simone Weil's dark study, The Need for Roots, contains greater hints than are 

found in the standard literature, which has difficulty acknowledging the degree of discord 

between Einstein's self-confessed "tribalism" and his lifelong commitment to rationality and 

internationalism. 

When the end finally came at the age of seventy-six, Einstein could not help feeling 

embarrassed at the larger-than-life icon he had become. In March 1955, a month before he 

took his final voyage, he confided to his long-time friend, Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, that 

"the exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel 

compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler." The day before he died, he 

requested his latest version of unification theory and proceeded to make some 

calculations. He did not put up a light to remain living. "It is tasteless to prolong life 

artificially," he told Helen Dukas; "I have done my share, it is time to go." 

The Absence of the Muses 

According to the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, Godel too, toward the end of his life, 

nurtured fears that his contribution had been overestimated. Godel, Ulam said, had "a 

gnawing uncertainty that maybe all he had discovered was another paradox a la Burali- 

Forte or Russell." Godel himself, however, denied this. "Ulam wrote a book . . . [in which 

he] says that perhaps I was never sure whether I had merely detected another paradox like 

Burali-Forte's. This is absolutely false. Ulam doesn't understand my result." Since Ulam is 

not here to defend himself, we cannot determine whether it is his memory or Godel's that

is at fault. Others confirm, however, that Godel, like other distinguished thinkers who 

joined the institute, occasionally wondered whether he had done enough to justify his 

appointment. 

Like Einstein, Godel had led a life of increasing isolation and reclu-siveness since coming to 

the institute, a tendency that only increased after he received the Einstein Award and 

delivered the Gibbs Lecture. He too spent his final years in a lost cause, part formal and 

part philosophical, searching for new axioms to decide the continuum hypothesis (and thus 

settle the question of whether there is an infinity between the number of points on a line 

and the cardinality of the natural numbers), and seeking a definitive refutation of the 

thesisóbolstered by Cohen's independence result for the continuum hypothesisóthat the 

results of mathematics are in some sense only the reflection of human convention. This 

was a theme he pursued in his Gibbs Lectureóin which he invoked his own incompleteness 

theorem as evidence for his Platonismóas well as in his contribution to yet another Schilpp 

volume, devoted this time to Rudolf Carnap, his old friend and foe from the Vienna Circle. 

But he was never satisfied with this essay and did not allow it to be published. 

Godel and Einstein, two great thinkers each of whose earlier years had been marked by a 

string of successes that left their contemporaries breathless, spent their final decades in a 

doomed commitment to lost 

causes. What happened? Why were the muses absent during the twilight of the gods? 

No one, of course, has ever divined the secret of the muse (else we would all become 

Mozart), but we can nevertheless note certain salient factors in the striking lack of success 

Einstein and Godel enjoyed in their final years. What does it take to make a great 

scientific discovery? Two elements are crucial. One must have an insight into which 

problems are ripe for resolution, and one must then have the craftóor invent itóto solve 

the problem one has had the audacity to recognize as solvable. Both elements, clearly, 

were present in Einstein's success with relativity theory and his early work in quantum 

mechanics. With regard to the first element, his biographer has pointed out that "in 1905, 

work on spectral lines could not have gone beyond an attempt at a phenomenological 

interpretation, even for Einstein. The fact that he did not attempt it show[ed] him to be a 

master of the art of the soluble." Both were prominent in his discovery of general 

relativity. No less a figure than Planck himself warned Einstein that it was hubris to 

attempt to rethink gravity after three hundred years of Newton. And the technique 

required to forge the new theory turned out, unlike special relativity, to require highly 

nontrivial mathematics that strained Einstein's formal capacities almost to the breaking 

point. 

For Godel, too, each element had been present. In the incompleteness theorem, he 

understood that it was possible to test the limitations of formal systems, undermining the 

confidence in purely deductive methods, inaugurated by Euclid, that had held sway for 

more than two thousand years. Finding, or rather creating, the methods needed to resolve 

this now solvable problemóincluding Godel numbering and the arithmetization of 

metamathematicsówas perhaps GodePs chief boast. The continuum hypothesis, too, which 

had defeated its inventor, Cantor, yielded (at least in part) to Godel's realization that its

consistency with the axioms of set theory could now be settled, if one had the ingenuity to 

employ the new set-theoretical techniques Godel had managed to cook up. 

For other distinguished scientists, too, the same pattern for scientific discovery holds. The 

secret to James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA (leaving aside 

the small matter of Rosalind Franklin's desk drawer) was as much their realizationóalmost 

unique at the timeóthat the problem was now solvable, as it was their technical 

competence in fitting together all the pieces that lay scattered about, unconnected, in 

various workshops. In their case, the first step was probably the crucial one. They were not 

the only scientists equipped to solve the riddle once it was understood to be solvable; the 

great Linus Pauling was pursuing the problem with equal fervor but, unfortunately for him, 

the wrong idea. This partly explains Watson and Crick's frantic anxiety to find a solution at 

breakneck speed and their obliviousness to the niceties of professional ethics. 

More recently still, Andrew Wiles's dramatic solution to the problem of Fermat's last 

theorem also conforms to the pattern. Wiles himself has written of the moment he 

realized that the theorem could now be proved, that we could really get there from here, 

and that apart from the usual cranks, he was alone in knowing this. Secreting himself away 

in his attic for years, he was able finally to bring forth the second element, the virtuoso 

technical methods with which all the pieces of the puzzle uncovered by his great 

predecessors could finally be sewn together. (Even Wiles, however, it turned out, could 

not put all the pieces together without help, after his initial proof turned out to contain a 

flaw.) 

In the case of Godel and Einstein, there is no indication that their ability to cook up the 

second half of the recipe for scientific success had dwindled. Both men remained 

mathematically nimble to the very end. It was with the first element that problems arose. 

They had simply bitten off more than they, or anyone else, could chew. To this day, half a 

century after Einstein's failed efforts, we still do not have a clear path to the unification of 

the very small with the very large, quantum mechanics with relativity. If, as some suspect, 

the most promising avenue lies in string theory, with its exotic mathematics of ten 

dimensions, then Einstein clearly never bad a chance. There is simply no 

way even Einstein in his day could have dreamed up string theory. As for quantum 

mechanics, while Einstein's philosophical objections retain their power to haunt 

physicistsó"I cannot define the real problem," said Feynman in 1982, about the EPR 

paradox, "therefore I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real 

problem"óthe final philosophical account of the nature of quantum reality for unreality) 

has yet to be written. Not only are we not there yet; no one seems to know where we're 

going or how we will know when we get there. 

Godel's lost causeófinding new axioms that will settle, in a convincing, non ad hoc, 

manner, the continuum hypothesisóhas likewise seen little progress, either to suggest 

wherein the answer lies or even to indicate whether there will ever be a definitive answer. 

Godel had finally tackled a problem that was anything but ripe for resolution. Nor has 

there been any breakthrough on settling the companion philosophical problem of the 

extent to which mathematics represents a reality independent of human convention. The 

appearance, posthumously and in different versions, of Godel's contribution to the Schilpp

volume on Carnap, entitled "Is Mathematics Syntax of Language?", has revealed the 

intricacies of Godel's attempts to settle accounts with his old friend from Vienna, but it 

has not adduced arguments that command universal assent. The essay represents a 

struggle more than a consummation. 

Sowing without Reaping 

Godel had received the invitation to contribute to the Carnap volume in 1953, just two 

years after he delivered his Gibbs Lecture, "Some Basic Theorems on the Foundations of 

Mathematics, and Their Implications." The common theme was to find a convincing 

argument in favor of Platonism and against conventionalism or formalism, using his 

incompleteness theorem as a powerful new weapon in the war. But Godel soon found that 

not even his superweapon could blast a shortcut 

through the tangled thickets of mathematical ontology, an insight Wittgensteinómuch as 

his aims diverged from Godel'sóhad reached on his own years earlier, in his attempt to 

remove the spell that Godel's theorem had cast over philosophers. One might caricature 

Wittgenstein's conclusion in this way: whereas (parts of) mathematics possess a beguiling 

symmetry, philosophy will always be to some extent messy and ugly. In his youth, he had 

gushed over the beauty of Russell's Prin-cipia Mathematica, comparing it to music. In his 

later years, he took the other side, drawing attention to what he called the "motley" of 

mathematics. Godel, in contrast, kept faith that the beauty of mathematics could be 

matched by philosophy. His contribution to the philosophy of time gave support for this 

belief, but he was well aware that his drafts of the Carnap paper, with their never-ending 

revisions, were anything but pretty. None, in his estimation, was worthy of publication. "In 

view of widely held prejudices," he finally wrote to Schilpp in 1959, "it may do more harm 

than good to publish half done work." 

The ontological project contra Carnap was never finished. Nor was his attempt to complete 

the other half of the philosophical coin, epistemology. Unlike other mathematical 

Platonists such as Frege and Church, Godel understood the need to supply his 

mathematical ontology with a convincing epistemology. Here he turned for help to Frege's 

contemporary and fellow philosopher, Edmund Husserl. He became a profound (if unhappy) 

student of Husserl's recalcitrant texts, a project that consumed ever-greater amounts of 

his time and energy. He counseled his surprised colleagues to do likewise, with what 

success, one can imagine. But here too, by life's end, though he had made considerable 

progress, nothing definitive emerged. 

Nor, for the remainder of his life, was Godel able to convince the physics or philosophy 

community that he had achieved a breakthrough on relativity theory's philosophical 

consequences regarding the existence of time. His contribution to the Schilpp volume on 

Einstein may have provided cover for him to be offered the Einstein Award, but it had 

signally failed to establish his bona fides as a 

philosopher, and it did nothing to turn philosophers' attention to the burning question of 

the reality of time.

Suspicions of Piety 

Godel's attempt to discover the truth about the abstract universe of sets and numbers had 

stalled, as had his assault on the starry heavens. Undeterred, he aimed still higher. He 

tried to pin down God Himself, developing his own version of the Anselm-Descartes-Leibniz 

"ontolog-ical argument" for the existence of God, a being, by hypothesis, so perfect, if His 

existence is possible at all, He must exist not just in the actual but in every possible world. 

The step from God's possibility to His actuality was relatively straightforward, given a 

suitable choice of axioms for one's "modal logic" (i.e., the logic of the modes of possibility 

and actuality). The hard part, Godel realizedóas had his hero Leibniz before himówas 

proving that a divine being was so much as possible. This Godel attempted to do via a 

highly compressed formal argument, which, once again, he declined to publish. He feared, 

he told his friends, that its publication might suggest to his skeptical philosophical 

colleagues that he actually believed in God, whereas (he claimed) in fact it was a mere 

formal exercise. 

His assessment of the religious inclinations of the philosophical community was probably 

accurate: "Ninety per cent of contemporary philosophers," he wrote to his mother in 1961, 

"see their principal task to be that of beating religion out of men's heads." Charles Parsons, 

a philosopher and logician at Harvard, tells a story that speaks to Godel's concerns. During 

an interview in 1955 for membership in the prestigious Society of Fellows at Harvard, 

where he was a first-year graduate student, he let it slip that he had done readings in 

theology and found Pascal interesting. Even though, he insists, "I was not then and never 

have been a Christian," he had forgotten that one of his examiners, the dean of American 

philosophers, W.V.O. Quine, "was a 

firm opponent of religion." Legend has it that when the meeting concluded, Quine was 

heard to say, "Good grief, Parsons is pious." Needless to say, he was not elected. (He was, 

however, invited to reapply.) 

Godel was no more successful in preventing himself from being considered pious. Word 

leaked out about his proof, and no one, then or now, was fooled into thinking it was a 

mere "formal exercise." When the proof itself finally materialized, posthumously, problems 

were found in the details. Whether repair is possible is an open question, as is the problem 

of whether an amended proof, with its revised premises, would be convincing. What is 

beyond dispute, however, is that the appearance of Godel's version of the ontological 

argument has had little effect on the confidence of philosophers that a formal 

demonstration of God's existence is impossible. Knocking religion out of people's heads 

continues to be a favorite philosophical pastime. 

Preoccupied with not appearing eccentric or out of fashion to his colleagues, Godel was 

nevertheless universally perceived as both. What the logician Solomon Feferman has 

characterized as Godel's "special caution" had one especially unfortunate effect: it kept 

him from contributing to important branches of logic and mathematics that he himself had 

been instrumental in inaugurating. As Feferman points out, Godelóperhaps exaggerating 

the continued influence of the Hilbert school and the dominance of positivismóhaving

demonstrated the indefinability of arithmetic truth within formal arithmetic, declined to 

go on to provide a formal account of the concept of truth itself. That notable task was left 

to his colleague Alfred Tarski, with whose name the subject is now identified. Similarly, 

having laid the groundwork for much of the theory of effective computability in his seminal 

discussions of recursive functions in his incompleteness theorem, Godel declined to provide 

a definitive account of effective computability, a central concept of today's theoretical 

computer science. That task was accomplished by Alan Turing, with contributions from 

Church, Stephen S. Kleene and J. Barkley Rosser. "One may wonder," says Feferman, "how 

logic might have been different had Godel been 

bolder in bringing his philosophical views into play in relation to his logical work." 

"The World Tends to Deteriorate" 

Godel's paranoia, then, undoubtedly deprived the world of his contributions to important 

areas of modern thought. In time it would deprive him of life itself. Though he recuperated 

well enough from the bleeding ulcer he suffered in 1951, cheered by the Einstein Award 

and by the invitation to deliver the Gibbs Lecture, his mental and physical state would 

soon enter a downward journey from which he would never recover. In the coming decade 

the colleagues who had been closest to him, who had shepherded him since he first arrived 

in Princeton, would all die: Einstein in 1955, Von Neumann in 1957, Veblen in 1960. 

Einstein had kept it secret that he had a life-threatening heart conditionóan aneurysm, a 

weakening in the abdominal aorta, diagnosed in 1948óthat could take him at any moment, 

and when that moment finally arrived, Godel was stunned. His thoughts, always gloomy, 

took on a darker hue. "We live in a world," he-wrote, "in which ninety-nine per cent of all 

beautiful things are destroyed in the bud." 

He had studied Hegel and developed his own philosophy of history, according to which the 

world is subject to large-scale "noncausal" laws: "There are structural laws in the world 

which can't be explained causally." These did not, in his view, justify the post- 

Enlightenment, Christian belief in human progress. "The world tends to deteriorate," he 

wrote. "Good things appear from time to time in single persons and events . . . but the 

general development tends to be negative." Christianity, with which he was generally 

sympathetic, was no exception. It "was best at the beginning. Saints slow down the 

downward movement." As Simone Weil put it, although "since [Christ's] day there have 

been no very noticeable changes in men's behavior," "drops of purity" 

appear from time to time. Philosophy suffered a similar fate: "Philosophy tends to go 

down." Indeed, "it is, at best, at the point where Babylonian mathematics was." 

Unsurprisingly, Godel had few interactions with the Babylonian philosophical establishment 

in Princeton or elsewhere. With most of his closest friends dead and Adele suffering from 

increasingly debilitating ailments (variously characterized as hypertension, arthritis, 

bursitis and gall bladder disease), he turned in his final decade to his old acquaintance 

Oskar Morgenstern, who was granted the dubious privilege of witnessing Godel's gradual

descent into full-blown paranoia and hypochondria. Where once Adele had been there to 

tend to his needs, it was left henceforth to Godel to care for his wife. 

By 1968, Morgenstern had grown alarmed at how gaunt his friend had become. It became 

nearly impossible to persuade him to eat, with predictable consequences. Hypochondria 

joined forces with paranoia, and soon Godel was claiming that his doctors were lying to 

him, their medications misidentified, their textbooks ill-written. His distrust of doctors 

was combined with an all too realistic fear that they would commit him to a psychiatric 

hospital. Soon he failed even to recognize them, and Morgenstern in turn could barely 

recognize his friend, who was now hallucinating and looked like a "living corpse." 

Princeton too, according to Godel, was against him, and Morgenstern, who had thrice 

failed to get the university to award his friend an honorary degree, had a hard time 

convincing him otherwise. When he tried to calm Godel by assuring him that at least he 

was a true friend, Godel replied, sadly, that a real friend would have brought him cyanide. 

(Alan Turing, it should be recalled, succeeded in doing away with himself by this means, 

using a syringe to squirt the poison into an apple, imitating Godel's favorite fairy tale.) The 

hallucinations continued, as did the appeal for assistance in committing suicide. 

The imaginary health problems were made worse by real ones. In 1974, Godel's enlarged 

prostate blocked his urinary tract, a serious problem exacerbated by bis refusal to seek 

treatment. Only when the pain became unbearable did he finally check into a hospital, 

where he 

was catheterized. But although surgery was recommended, he refused, rejecting the 

diagnosis. He removed the catheter himself, which had to be forcibly reinserted. He never 

did relinquish his opposition to surgery, and in the end remained permanently 

catheterized, leaving him in a condition of constant discomfort that could only intensify his 

depression. Into this fragile, pain-suffused body, Godel proceeded to insert a whole 

cabinet of medications, which Morgenstern was amazed his friend could survive. Godel 

ingested milk of magnesia, Metamucil, Keflex, Mandelamine, Macrodantin, Gantanol, 

Achromycin, Ter-ramycin, Lanoxin, Quinidine, Imbricol, and Pericolase. The only thing he 

was reluctant to admit into his starved body was food. 

Despite bouts of hallucinations and a constant fear of people, he had moments of great 

lucidity and even charm, and managed a few extended human contacts, the most 

important being his association with the logician Hao Wang. Fortunately for posterity, 

Wang took it on himself to coax out of Godel his unwritten philosophy. From 1971 to 1972, 

the two met at Godel's office every other Wednesday for two hours. If they could not meet 

in person, the discussion was carried out by phone. The accounts of these exchanges and 

Wang's observations on them, published after GodePs death, are valuable documents, 

though it is unclear to what extent Godel was trying out ideas, or musings, sufficiently farfetched 

that he would have been reluctant to own up to them in print. What the 

philosopher Richard Rorty has aptly said of Plato also applies to Godel: we are still 

struggling to separate out the straight lines from the jokes.

When none of his remaining friends could persuade Godel to eat, his demise was 

guaranteed. In late December 1977, weighing sixty-five pounds, he was finally admitted to 

Princeton Hospital. He died on January 11, 1978, from what was diagnosed as "malnutrition 

and inanition" due to "personality disturbance." They buried him in Princeton Gemetery. 

Adele, whose capacity to save her husband from himself had long since been exhausted, 

lived on until 1981. 

A friend for life, Einstein did not lie beside him in death. Fearing that his grave would 

become "a place of pilgrimage, where pilgrims 

would come to view the bones of a saint," he had asked to be cremated, his ashes 

scattered. Godel had no such fears. There was a memorial service at the institute, where 

Wang paid tribute to his colleague, as did the mathematician Andre Weil, brother of 

Simone Weil, whose dark assessment of human history so strongly resembled Godel's. His 

passing, unlike Einstein's, attracted little attention. The disappearance of this giant planet 

disturbed no other orbit. To philosophers, then as now, he was a simply a logician trying to 

pass as a philosopher. 

9 In What Sense Is Godel 

(or Anyone Else) a Philosopher? 

Engaging in philosophy is salutary, even when no positive results emerge. . . . The color is 

brighter, that is, reality appears more clearly as such. 

KURT GODEL 

It is difficult to protect our interests while we are alive. Much more so when we're dead. 

Godel, throughout his academic life, was exceptionally anxious to avoid being considered a 

philosophical dilettante or crank, and a "pious" one at that. In this, he failed completely. 

His "special caution" (as Feferman described it) succeeded only in keeping him from 

contributing to important fields of research. His refusal to publish his ontological argument 

for the existence of God fooled no one. He could not hide the fact that he was a kind of 

believer and that his argument, like Leibniz's before him, was anything but a mere 

intellectual exercise. What Russell called Godel's "unadulterated Platonism" marked him 

for some as an intellectual throwback to "precritical" times, before Kant launched his 

"critique" of pure reason, a police operation by which Kant intended to curb the 

pretensions to theoretical knowledge of most, if not all, philosophers who preceded him. 

Even Godel's writings on Einstein succeeded only in convincing cosmologists that strange 

things happen when a logician pays too much attention to the equations of relativity, while 

forgetting their physical meaning. His absence, in turn,

from the Wittgenstein revolutionówhich turned philosophy toward the human construction 

of language and the "games" people play with itócombined with his refusal to pay homage 

to the preeminent figure in contemporary analytical philosophy, W.V.O. Quine, marked 

him as a philosophical castaway. 

After GodePs death, his colleague and amanuensis Hao Wang published excerpts of their 

philosophical discussions, in an attempt to give a more rounded and positive cast to Godel's 

image as a thinker. He too failed. Too many philosophers had already argued to the 

contrary. The full extent of the damage became clear during a symposium held nearly two 

decades after Godel's death to celebrate his contributions to philosophy. The celebration 

resembled a wake. 

Who Buried Kurt Godel? 

On a cold February day in 1995, a distinguished group of philosophers, mathematicians and 

logicians assembled to honor Godel in a symposium hosted by Boston University entitled 

"Godel's General Philosophical Significance." The speakers included those who had been 

assigned the task of guarding Godel's legacy by gathering his published and unpublished 

essays, with editorial introductions, in a definitive edition of the Collected Works. Plato's 

question from The Republic, however, hung in the air: "Who will guard the guardians?" It 

was clear from the start that the speakers had come not to praise Godel but to bury him. 

John Dawson, however, one of the guardians, was different. He alluded to the neglect of 

Godel as a philosopher of time, but drew attention to the fact that there were exceptions. 

As he put it in his soon to be published biography of Godel, "To date, only a single volume 

(Yourgrau 1991) [The Disappearance of Time] has examined in any detail . . . the 

ramifications of [GodePs] cosmological work for the philosophy of time." Yet neither he nor 

any other speaker attempted to remedy the lack of attention that had been paid to Godel's 

writings devoted to the subject. 

Some recounted personal anecdotes about their encounters with Godel, while others spoke 

briefly about his Platonism. Two speakers, however, stood out. Warren Goldfarb, from 

Harvard, another guardian, addressed the question of what Godel had succeeded in 

accomplishing in philosophy. The answer, according to Goldfarb, was nothing. The 

audience, which included Hao Wang as well as the author of the only book devoted to the 

ramifications of Godel's cosmological work for the philosophy of time (myself), was 

stunned. A hand was raised during the question period. "Do I understand you correctly, 

Professor Goldfarb, that in your judgment Godel, though a great logician, was a 

philosophical fool?" A polite smile was Goldfarb's only answer. 

But another scheduled speaker, Burton Dreben, also from Harvard, could not restrain 

himself: "Wait until you hear my talk!" And in due course, Dreben delivered. He made 

explicit in his presentation (entitled, simply, "Godel") what had been implicit in his 

colleague's talk, that Godel was a logician trying to pass as a philosopher. For Dreben, it 

seemed, this was a kind of scandal. He was moved to deliver a sermon on the harm that is 

done when people who are good at purely formal thinking get the idea that they are also 

qualified to contribute to philosophy. That Dreben's own position in the philosophical world 

owed much to his reputation in formal logic was an irony that seemed lost on him. Being 

good at one task, he stressed, says nothing of your ability to succeed at the other. Fascists,

he said, were sometimes good at science, but that doesn't mean we should take them 

seriously when they try their hand at philosophy. 

Godel, by Dreben's lights, was a throwback to a benighted, pre-Kantian era of philosophy, 

a vagabond in the modern vineyards painstakingly planted by the likes of Kant, 

Wittgenstein and Quine. To Dreben, these thinkers represented the future. Godel was the 

past. What especially irked him was that Godel had the audacity "in this day and age" to 

engage in rational theology, a reference, no doubt, to Godel's recasting of the ontological 

argument. He seemed almost driven to despair by what Godel had done. If Goldfarb had 

quietly begun the delicate task of burial, Dreben was in haste to get the body 

into the ground. But would the ground receive the man being celebrated? By what right 

had Godel, the logician, ventured to teach philosophers about their own discipline? What 

kind of discipline is philosophy, anyway? 

The Philosopher on the Train 

If you meet a philosopher on a train and ask him his profession, he is likely to lie. It is not 

that philosophers are especially prone to lying, but rather that philosophy is a peculiar 

profession. To tell your fellow passenger that you are a philosopher opens up an awkward 

line of questioning. To begin with, describing yourself as a philosopher is like calling 

yourself a sage, a seeker of wisdom. We all seek wisdom, after all, but that won't feed the 

bulldog. A safer response is to account oneself a philosophy professor. This is fine, unless 

you happen to be an actual philosopher, in which case it is just another lie. As the 

philosopher Leo Strauss once said, you are as likely to find a real philosopher in a 

philosophy department as you are to discover a Picasso in the department of fine arts. 

(Wittgenstein, though he taught for years at Cambridge University, is correctly described 

as a philosopher, not a professor.) If you take the plunge, however, and accept the label of 

philosopher, you must be prepared for the disappointment when your listener hears that 

you don't live in a hut on a mountaintop, haven't uncovered the secret of life, and cannot 

explain why the world exists. If you are foolish enough to go further and attempt to 

describe your lifelong attempt to reconcile the epistemology of mathematics with its 

ontology, be prepared to encounter a look in which boredom and horror are blended 

equally. Best, therefore, to say simply that you are an architect, and leave it at that. 

Godel, one can be certain, was well aware of how the world regards those who dare to call 

themselves philosophers; he would have been reluctant to describe himself that way to his 

fellow traveler. Being officially a logician gave him adequate cover. Though Dreben and a 

host of others took him to he a logician trying to pass as a philosopher, he is more 

accurately described as a philosopher posing as a logician. More than most academic 

philosophers, he engaged in philosophy in a manner of which Parmenides and Plato would 

have been proud: asking fundamental questions about the nature of time, being, death, 

God and the world of transcendent forms, or "ideas."

He shared, too, Socrates' and Wittgenstein's mistrust of philosophy as just another paid 

profession. "To do philosophy is a special vocation," he wrote. "We do see the truth, yet 

error would reign." The special vocation carried with it duties and dangers. "Philosophy," 

he said, "is a persecuted science." He was not thinking of the danger of not acquiring 

tenure, but rather of the risk you take if you question the ruling paradigm. Whereas "moral 

relativity," for example, is a widespread catchphrase that encourages us to attribute the 

lack of progress in ethics to the fact that philosophers have a constitutional predilection to 

objectify what is merely subjective, Godel made a different, shrewder assessment: 

"Actually, it would be easy to get a strict ethicsóat least no harder than other basic 

scientific problems. Only the result would be unpleasant, and one does not want to see it 

and avoids facing itó to some extent even consciously." 

The more pressing question is whether Godel the philosopher deserved the respect 

accorded full-fledged members of the academy. The answer, one feels, ought to be clear, 

yet academic philosophy is a most peculiar discipline. Despite tracing its lineage to such 

thinkers as Parmenides, Heraclitus, Socrates and Plato, philosophy's right to exist is 

constantly called into question, not least by its leading practitioners, from Kant to Carnap, 

from Wittgenstein to Quine. For philosophy as such pretends to a kind of knowledge 

greater than anything mere mortals seem equipped to discover. Kant put it thus in a 

beautiful passage in the Critique of Pure Reason: 

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine 

that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of 

the senses, as 

setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of 

the Ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding. 

Sweeping aside traditional metaphysics from Plato to Leibniz as insufficiently grounded in 

the bedrock of sense experience, Kant offered a comprehensive account of what man can 

and cannot know. His critique changed the course of modern philosophy, but unfortunately 

it was never clear whether his account of the nature of things violated his own precepts. 

Can sensory experience, for example, on its own teach us what sensory experience can and 

cannot accomplish? 

This problem seems endemic to the enterprise of constructing a philosophical system. All 

too often, a philosopher finds himself painted into an epistemic corner of his own making. 

The famous motto of the Vienna Circle, for example, that the meaning of a proposition is 

its method of verification, was demolished by one of their own, an astute philosopher who 

had once belonged to the circle. In a classic essay, Carl Hempel pointed out that since the 

"verifiability [or empiricistl criterion of meaning" cannot itself be verified by experience, 

by its own account it lacks cognitive significance. In itself, it is neither true nor false. The 

circle's criterion for meaning turned out to be meaningless. 

A still more dramatic example comes from the first (and only) book Wittgenstein published 

during his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Pbilosopbicus, in which, like Kant before him, he

attempted to set limits to what can be known, or rather, to what can be said, thus helping 

to inaugurate the famous "linguistic turn" in philosophy. For Wittgenstein, nothing that was 

of genuine valueósuch as the beautiful, the good or the meaning of lifeócould actually be 

stated (as opposed to "shown"), and everything that could be said, which amounted to the 

substance of physical science, was absent of value. Displaying a greater sense of irony than 

had Kant, he acknowledged that the book itself attempted to say what could not be said. 

Strictly speaking, he admitted (or boasted), it was all nonsense. But deep non- 

sense. One must, he added poetically, "throw away the ladder after |one| has climbed up 

it." F.P. Ramsey, a brilliant young mathematician who wrote an astute review of the 

Tractatus at the tender age of twenty, was unimpressed. Though he would go on to 

become a close associate of Wittgenstein's, he never forgot or forgave the nonsense of the 

Tractatus. "Philosophy must be of some use," he wrote, "and we must take it seriously." If, 

however, he added, "the chief proposition of philosophy is that philosophy is nonsense," 

then we must take this seriously "and not pretend, as Wittgenstein does, that it is 

important nonsense." More succinctly: "What we can't say we can't say, and we can't 

whistle it either." 

Wittgenstein would in time renounce much of the Tractatus, but he never recanted his 

skepticism about the existence of philosophy as a kind of "superscience," first among 

equals. The temptation to engage in deep philosophical pronouncements, he said, 

amounted to a kind of psychological disorder or mental cramp. The jobóindeed the dutyóof 

a genuine philosopher was to enlighten the patient by showing him that the illusion of 

depth was the result merely of his skating on the thin ice of confused linguistic practice. 

The tantalizing figures that appeared to linger deep within the ice were only reflections of 

the subject looking at himself. Upon awakening from his philosophical slumbers, the 

patient, like one of Freud's subjects, would arise from the couch, shake off his dream, and 

return to the sober dreariness of everyday life. Language would, in his memorable phrase, 

no longer be on holiday. It was hardly surprising, then, that when Wittgenstein's fellow 

Austrian Karl Popper addressed the Cambridge Metaphysical Society on the topic, "Are 

There Philosophical Problems?", his positive response roused considerable ire. Sparks flew, 

a poker was grabbed by Wittgenstein from a smoldering fireplace, and material was 

provided for a lively book eventually to be written about the incident. 

Skepticism about the existence of philosophy, however, did not keep Wittgenstein away 

from the university. He fled once, only to return and take up residence at his old haunt. 

Trinity College at Cambridge University, and become for decades the dominant figure in 

the 

academic philosophical world. Unlike Socrates, Plato, Frege and Russell, but like Marx and 

Freud (and Jesus), he surrounded himself with a group of disciples who spread the gospel 

far and wide. It is an irony that precisely those philosophers who have called into question 

the existence of philosophy in the traditional sense have been, and continue to be, the 

most influential in the halls of academe. Kant the protopos-itivist, Carnap the actual 

positivist, Wittgenstein the patron saint of positivism, Quine the preeminent opponent of 

"first philosophy," these are the movers and shakers of modern academic philosophy in the 

Anglo-American world. Godel, a disciple of none, had sealed his fate. How could he hope 

to be taken seriously by an academy whose founding fathers he refused to embrace?

"Precritical" 

Goldfarb and Dreben, in contrast, did embrace them. And they were far from alone. "After 

the devastating attacks by Wittgenstein and Quine," wrote the philosopher Paul Horwich in 

1990, "it is now widely believed that the sciences exhaust what can be known and that the 

promise of metaphysics was an intellectually dangerous illusion." At the Boston University 

conference, when Goldfarb rose to deliver his assessment, he did so as a colleague of 

Quine and a follower of Wittgenstein who clearly knew his duty regarding this 

"intellectually dangerous illusion." Though Goldfarb is a logician of distinction and an 

important commentator on Wittgenstein, the soundness of his philosophical judgment 

seems inversely proportional to his proximity to Godel. Here too he is not alone. 

Since Godel is not here to defend himself, the task falls to others, but to assess the text of 

Goldfarb's presentation, entitled "On Godel's General Philosophical Outlook," is difficult, 

since although some speakers submitted their talks for publication, Goldfarb and Dreben 

did not. Fortunately, however, a transcript does exist of a closely related presen- 

ration, entitled "Godel's Philosophy," which he gave in July 1990 before a meeting of the 

Association for Symbolic Logic in Helsinki. Opening this talk with Godel's view that 

metaphysics should ideally be presented by a small set of primitive axioms, Goldfarb 

commented that for Godel, "all the important content of the primitive concepts can by 

exhibited in precise axiomatic relations to other concepts." Though this description is not 

as clear as it should be, it puts one in mind of the doctrine of "implicit definition" adopted 

by Hilbert, for whom the meanings of the primitive concepts in an axiomatic system are 

exhausted by their relationships to the other concepts. In geometry, for example, there is 

no more to being a line than its relationship to points and planes. Godel, however, 

explicitly rejected this doctrine, as did his predecessor Frege. That is why he insisted that 

to know the primitive concepts, one must not only understand their relationships to the 

other primitives but must grasp them on their own, by a kind of "intuition." 

Goldfarb continued: "There is no hint" in what Godel wrote, he said, "that the truths of 

metaphysics are problematic in any special way, or pose special problems of our access to 

them." Thus Godel's view, according to Goldfarb, is "precritical, in Kant's sense of 'critical.'" 

In fact, however, Godel rejected Kant's critical assessment of the possibilities for 

systematic metaphysics, a rejection founded not on ignorance but rather on a deep 

understanding of Kant. Yet Goldfarb chose to describe Godel not as "post-Kantian" but 

"precritical," i.e., as a philosophical naif, not up to speed on Kant, rather than as someone 

steeped in Kant who nevertheless rejected much (though not all) of Kant's "critique." 

Indeed, the longer, original drafts of Godel's contribution to the Schilpp volume on 

Einstein, entitled "Some Observations about the Relationship of Theory of Relativity to 

Kantian Philosophy," leave no room for doubt that Godel had a profound understanding of 

Kant, which enabled him to demonstrate a striking and previously unsuspected connection 

between Kantian idealism and Ein-steinian relativity. This newly published essay makes 

clear that Godel, though he accepted certain elements of Kant's philosophy, systematically

ejected its main thrust, which assimilated knowledge to the knower, not the known, and 

thus gave Kant's philosophy a subjectivist cast. To characterize the author of this essay as 

"precritical" is perverse. 

Also off the mark was Goldfarb's assessment that Godel, in his naivete, failed somehow to 

appreciate the difficulty of finding the right concepts and axioms for metaphysics. Nothing 

could be further from the truth. Time, for example, in relation to being, Godel considered 

one of the basic concepts, but he believed that the attempt to discover what is 

fundamental about our thinking about time can receive no assistance from physics, which, 

he argued, combines concepts without analyzing them. Instead, we must reconstruct the 

original nature of our thinking, a project fraught with difficulty. For assistance he turned 

not to Einstein but to Husserl and phenomenology, but he acknowledged that "the problem 

of time is important and difficult. For twenty-five years Husserl worked on just this one 

problem: the concept of time." The situation in mathematics was no different. "The way . . 

. we form mathematical objects," he said, "from what is givenóthe question of 

constitutionórequires a phenomenological analysis. But the constitution of time and of 

mathematical objects is difficult." 

Since the fundamental concepts are primitive and their meaning is not exhausted by their 

relationships to other concepts, how can we manage to gain some insight into them? What 

is required, said Godel, is "a clarification of meaning that does not consist in defining." His 

fellow Platonists, Plato and Frege, had little to say on how to accomplish this. Husserl, 

however, who early in his career had debated Frege on the foundations of arithmetic, 

devoted himself to just this task, and Godel, in turn, devoted himself to the task of 

discovering what Husserl had found. Husserl called his new way "phenomenology," which 

Godel described as a method by which we can "focus more sharply on the concepts 

concerned by directing our attention in a certain way, namely, onto our own acts in the 

use of these concepts." If we are successful, said Godel, we achieve "a new state of 

consciousness in which we describe in detail the basic concepts we use in our thought." 

Exactly what this new method came down to is not easy to fathom. Godel struggled for 

years to pierce the veil of Husserl's re-barbative prose, to follow him on his long, winding 

way. "I don't particularly like Husserl's way," he told Wang, "long and difficult." Indeed, "I 

love everything brief," he wrote to his mother, "and find that in general the longer a work 

is, the less there is in it." Yet Goldfarb appeared to have no difficulty understanding 

Husserl, and no qualms about dismissing out of hand what Godel hoped to find by studying 

his writings. According to Goldfarb, Godel gives phenomenology "a highly subjectivist cast" 

and "provides no evidence that observation of one's stream of consciousness" will give 

insight into the concepts one is employing. The "passing show," Goldfarb assured his 

audience, will never assist us in grasping concepts or finding new axioms. The great Frege 

had demonstrated this. "The muddled results of bare phenomenological examination," said 

Goldfarb, "were pointedly and effectively criticized by Frege in his review of Husserl's 

Philosopbie der Arithmetik." 

Neither Husserl nor Godel, however, thought of phenomenology as merely taking note of 

one's stream of consciousness or gazing at the "passing show." That is the method of an 

empiricist like Hume, not a rationalist like Husserl. Godel saw phenomenology as an 

attempt to reconstruct our original use of basic ideas, to focus not on ways to employ or 

combine concepts, as we do in science or everyday life, but rather on recovering what we

meant in the first place by our most fundamental acts of thought. This is a difficult, 

painful process that involves a redirection of our thinking toward self-reflection. Since 

both Godel and Husserl (in his later period) were conceptual realists, the self-reflection at 

issue concerns understanding how we grasp real, objective concepts; so the subjectivism 

Goldfarb feared was an illusion. Subjectivism, as Goldfarb employed this term, is in 

opposition to objectivism. What Godel found valuable in Husserl, however, was a turn to 

the thinking subject, the source of cognition, which was meant not as an alternative to 

objectivism, but rather as an account of how what is objective is given to us. Indeed, "in 

the last analysis," wrote Godel, 

"the Kantian philosophy rests on the idea of phenomenology, albeit in a not entirely clear 

way." And it is phenomenology, according to Godel, which "entirely as intended by Kant, 

avoids both the death-defying leaps of idealism into a new metaphysics as well as the 

positivis-tic rejection of all metaphysics." 

From Frege to Godel 

Goldfarb's invocation of Frege was especially misplaced. To begin with, the review by 

Frege he cited concerned Husserl's early, non-Platonist, psychologistic account of 

arithmetic, whereas the phenomenology that caught Godel's eye was an attempt by Husserl 

late in his career to reconcile mathematical Platonism and conceptual realism with the 

capacities of the human intellect. Frege's early critique does not speak to this project. 

Indeed, one can ask how exactly Frege came up with his own analysis of the concept of 

number in his path-breaking study The Foundations of Arithmetic. A natural number, Frege 

begins, is what answers the question "How many?" ("How much?" is answered by a real 

number.) But how many what} First we must determine what it is that is really numbered. 

His answer: not the nine planets themselves (each by itself is one, and the group as such is 

also one), but rather the concept is a planet. To assign a number to a concept, then, is to 

determine how many instances it has. The number nine numbers the planets because the 

concept is a planet has nine instances. Such are the opening moves in Frege's deep and 

beautiful analysis of the concept of number, at the conclusion of which he offers an 

explicit definition: the number assigned to the concept F is the extension of the concept 

equinumerous with F. (Concepts are equinumerous when there is a one-to-one correlation 

between their extensions, i.e., to the set of objects falling under each. In effect, then, for 

Frege, the number three is the set of all trios, i.e., of all things that arc three in number.) 

Nothing 

like this had ever been proposed before. As Frege himself put it, his discussion raised the 

subject to an entirely new level. 

But where did this profound analysis come from? Was it just a lucky guess? Was it the result 

of an empirical survey Frege had conducted among the citizens of Jena? Or perhaps the 

great logician was simply grinding out theorems from some preexisting set of axioms? None 

of these "explanations," of course, holds water, nor was Frege simply sitting back and 

regarding the "passing show." He had turned his attention, as no one had before him, to

what we are really doing when we employ the concept of number, when we use numbers, 

that is, both to count things and to do arithmetic. But this redirection of attention is just 

what Godel, following Husserl, called phenomenology. And Wittgenstein, too, it would 

appear. At one point in his notebooks, he remarked that one could with justice call his 

method of investigation of the correct use of words, phenomenology. Where Wittgenstein 

speaks of words, Godel refers to concepts. "'Trying to see (i.e., understand) a concept 

more clearly,'" says Godel, "is the correct way of expressing the phenomenon vaguely 

described as 'examining what we mean by a word.'" 

The goal of this method is to enable us to discern the concept itself, free from the 

encrustations of historical practice and psychological necessity. This was as much Frege's 

goal as it was Godel's. As Frege put it, "Often it is only after immense intellectual effort, 

which may have been continued over centuries, that humanity at last succeeds in 

achieving knowledge of a concept in its pure form, in stripping off the irrelevant accretions 

which veil it from the eyes of the mind." But concepts, of course, aren't physical objects. 

We can't literally see them. Rather, says Godel, "we perceive objects and understand 

concepts. Understanding is a different kind of perception." He adopted the Kantian term 

"intuition" for the quasi-perceptive grasping by the mind's eye of concepts and other "ideal 

objects." Goldfarb, once again, is offended: "Kantian 'intuition' is a matter of the 

presentation of objects (in sensibility) in space and time; none of this is in 

Godel's notion." Why then did Godel continue to employ this term for his own purposes? 

Goldfarb makes no effort to resolve this question. Why not? For the question does have an 

answer, which lies in the fact that for a Pla-tonist or conceptual realist, the mind 

encounters an ideal entity in a manner parallel to the way the eye tracks a physical 

object. In both cases, we are confronted with something real that we have not ourselves 

created. We grasp it, therefore, only partially and in stages, gaining new insights as we 

shift our perspective. "We begin with vague perceptions of a concept," says Godel, "as we 

see an animal from far away or take two stars for one before using the telescope." Since 

the entity is not a child of our own imagination, we will never exhaust the information to 

be gained by different ways of approaching it, but we may reach a limit after which we no 

longer find ourselves bumping up against surprises or running into mysteries. If that 

threshold is achievedóas Godel thought it was by Turing's analysis of the concept of 

effective computabilityówe are satisfied that our perception, or quasi-perception, is now 

adequate to our purpose and that we have an acceptable (though not perfect) intuition of 

the concept or object. This explains why Godel rejected Kant's more limited conception of 

intuition, as well as why he chose to retain the Kantian term while giving it a more 

generous interpretation. 

Goldfarb's attempt to enlist Frege in his critique of Godel was worse than misguided. It 

kept him from noting the deep philosophical affinities between these two giants of modern 

logic. They swam in a sea of ultraempiricism, but managed somehow not to get wet. Their 

philosophy was an uncompromising Platonism, reminiscent of Plato himself. "In arithmetic," 

wrote Frege, "we are not concerned with objects which we come to know as something 

alien from without through the medium of the senses, but with objects given directly to 

our reason, and, as its nearest kin, utterly transparent to it." Plato could not have put it 

better. As he wrote in the Phaedo, "When the soul investigates by itself it passes into the 

realm of what is pure, ever existing . . . and unchanging . . . [and is] akin to it."

Frege and Godel were "logicists" who believed that mathematics, with the exception of 

geometry, could be derived from logic, which they took to include set theory, together 

with the correct definitions of the fundamental concepts. Neither believed, as did the 

positivists, that the derivability from definitions, or analyticity, of arithmetic meant that 

its formulas lacked cognitive content. Godel made it clear that what is analytic is true in 

virtue of the meanings of the concepts involved. Each held that geometrical knowledge 

was different, founded on a kind of a priori physical intuition, as intimated by Kant, a 

philosopher both had studied deeply, though they rejected large parts of his thinking. Each 

believed that the fundamental logical and metaphysical relationship is that of 

predicationóthe theory of which, predicate logic, Frege had invented from whole 

clothówhose metaphysical correlative is falling under a concept (the central idea, not 

accidentally, of Frege's philosophy of arithmetic). Both held that the only means of 

escaping from the personal, solipsistic world of the ideas in your head was to grasp 

abstract concepts, which exist not in our minds but rather in an objectively real "concept 

space," and that by this means we are granted access both to the physical world (by 

employing the concept of physical object) and to what Frege called the "third realm" of 

ideal entities. "Concepts are there," wrote Godel, "but not in any definite place. They . . . 

form the 'conceptual space,'" while for Frege, "in the external world, in the whole of space 

and all that therein is, there are no concepts ... no numbers." 

One place where Godel went beyond Frege was in attempting to forge a systematic 

epistemology that would account for our ability to make contact with "conceptual space" 

or the "third realm." Here Godel turned to Husserl, whom he saw as improving on the 

Kantian philosophy, which is strong in epistemology but weak in ontology (weak, that is, 

for realists like Godel, Frege and Husserl). Yet perversely, it is just here, where a serious 

Platonist has finally decided to settle his epistemological accounts, that Goldfarb chooses 

to take Godel to taskóattempting to enlist Frege against Godel just when Godel was 

engaged in repairing a hole in Frege's philosophyóby citing 

Frege's irrelevant critique of Husserl's earlier, non-Platonist work. And this from a fellow 

logician, indeed, one of the guardians of Godel's legacy, an editor and contributor to the 

definitive Collected Works of Kurt Godel. How is this to be explained? 

Goldfarb and Dreben's performances at the Boston University conference (and in Goldfarb's 

case, also at Helsinki) were no aberration. In their steadfast refusal to find anything of 

value in Godel's contributions to philosophy and their unembarrassed display of 

condescension, they were simply carrying on a great and noble tradition among 

professional philosophers. Long before the two spoke in Boston, for example, Charles 

Chihara, a philosopher of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, had 

written a series of essays in which he took pains not just to criticize but to ridicule Godel's 

mathematical episte-mology. He continued this project in a book published in 1990, Constructibility 

and Mathematical Existence, which proved too much for at least one reviewer. 

"Unfortunately," wrote E.P. James, "Chihara's account of Godelian Platonism follows the 

common line of regarding Godel as a logician par excellence but a philosophical fool." 

James went on to demonstrate that Chihara had simply gotten Godel wrong, concluding 

that "having failed to appreciate the complexity of Godel's beliefs about physical 

perception, it is easy for Chihara to argue against a caricature of his analogous beliefs 

about mathematical 'perception.'" Once again, Godel's invocation of mathematical intuition 

had succeeded in arousing the ire of a professional philosopher. "At present," Godel wrote,

"mathematicians are prejudiced against intuition." Philosophers, too. For Godel's 

philosophy of time, on this point as on others, has been accorded a similarly cold 

reception. 

"The correct response to Godel" 

In his 1987 book Asymmetries in Time, Paul Horwich, then at MIT, offered fresh 

reexaminations of such staples of the space-time literature as the "direction of time" and 

the difference between past and fu- 

ture. One aspect that was new was his decision to revisit Godel's argument for the 

possibility of time travel, and newer still was the conclusion he reached, that the 

argument was actually valid. What was not new was his neglect of the philosophical 

motiveóthe demonstration of the ideality of timeóbehind Godel's development of his new 

world models. In contrast, Milic Capek, another philosopher of science, had argued 

decades before Horwich against Godel's case for time travel precisely on the grounds that 

if it held water, it followed that time was not real, a conclusion he found unacceptable. 

(Karl Popper had argued similarly.) Thus, an ironic situation: Capek (but not Horwich) 

agreed with Godel that the possibility of time travel signaled the ideality of time, while 

Horwich (but not Capek) took sides with Godel on the genuine possibility of time travel. 

Neither sided with Godel in maintaining both that time travel is possible and that therefore 

time is merely ideal. 

Attention, however, was paid to this dual aspect of Godel's reasoning in a small book of 

mine published in 1991, The Disappearance of Time: Kurt Godel and the Idealistic Tradition 

in Philosophy. When an expanded edition appeared in 1999, some notice was taken, and a 

small but growing cottage industry developed of attempts to assess what Godel was really 

up to in his writings on Einstein. The Zeitgeist, however, is not so easily deflected. On the 

question of whether Godel really had something important to contribute to the philosophy 

of time, as well as to the philosophy of mathematics and the ontological argument for God, 

an impolite skepticism remains dominant. 

That the spirit of the time is still unmoved became most apparent in 1995, the year of the 

Godel conference in Boston, when a distinguished philosopher of space and time, John 

Earman, responded to me and others by devoting an appendix of his book Bangs, Crunches, 

Whimpers, and Shrieks to Godel's argument for the ideality of time. He began auspiciously 

by noting "the relative neglect of the philosophical moral Godel himself wanted to draw 

from his solutions to EFE [Einstein's Held equations!." He continued in like manner by 

observing, with becoming piety, that "a deeply held conviction of someone 

of Godel's stature deserves serious consideration." At long last, it appeared, the space-time 

establishment was giving Godel his due. But the appearance, like time itself, was an 

illusion. Earman's assessment of what Godel had to teach us was entirely negative. He 

couldn't resist adding, moreover, that the neglect of Godel's philosophical moral had after 

all been "benign." Then, just in case his message wasn't sufficiently clear, he concluded by 

observing that Einstein, in his reply to Godel in the Schilpp volume, had "brushed aside"

Godel's discussion of idealism, adding that "this seems to me to be the correct response to 

Godel." So much for the attention due someone of Godel's stature. 

That Earman took issue with Godel is not the point. The point is that once again a noted 

philosopher felt no embarrassment in dismissing Godel with maximum condescension. 

Moreover, just as Goldfarb had attempted to enlist someone Godel admired, namely Frege, 

to attack him, Earman employed Einstein to back up his claim that Godel's attempt at 

philosophy should be "brushed aside." Once again, however, the enlistment was premature. 

It is true that Einstein, in his response to Godel, sidestepped the issue of idealism, but he 

was speaking as a physicist whose interest was in the implications of Godel's important new 

discovery (as Einstein described it) for the theory of relativity. He was not, like Goldfarb, 

participating in a conference devoted to Godel's contributions to philosophy, nor, like 

Earman, discoursing on the philosophy of time for an audience of philosophers. On his own, 

Einstein shared Godel's appreciation of Kant, and also his reservations, and he too had 

occasionally speculated on the relationship between relativity theory and our everyday 

experience of time. Unlike Godel, however, he had no intention of engaging directly with 

the philosophical literature, and had no plans to follow up his philosophical speculations in 

any depth. He was not, in short, an appropriate ally in a campaign to put Godel in his 

philosophical place. 

Einstein aside, Earman made it clear that nothing in Godel's argument impressed him. He 

looked askance at everything, even something as straightforward as Godel's clear 

appreciation that if time flows, this flux represents the coming into existence of new 

states of affairs, and 

that the relativity of simultaneity could not sensibly be taken to imply the relativity of 

existence. Without disturbing himself to dispute GodePs conclusion, Earman commented 

only that "this is a pretty piece of ordinary language philosophizing . . . but like most of its 

ilk, it leaves one up in the air . . . one can wonder how such intuitions can support such 

weighty philosophical morals." Once again GodePs invocation of intuition had gotten him 

into trouble. But Earman had added a new twist. Somehow, Godel, with his distrust of 

"ordinary language philosophizing" exemplified by Wittgenstein and his school, had been 

lumped together with this movement. The intuitions Godel had in mind, however, were the 

result of the highly rational exercise of turning one's attention to the nature of the 

concepts themselves, not of tuning one's ear to the marketplace of "ordinary language" and 

everyday conversation. Language as such, for Godel, had nothing to do with it. The crux of 

Earman's critique concerned the relevance of time travel in a merely possible Godel 

universeówhere one might grant that time is an illusionóto the existence of time in our 

own world. Since the extreme geometry of the Godel universe, which allows for the 

possibility of closed, future-directed, timelike curves, is not a feature of the actual world, 

Earman argued, Godel had failed to show time's absence in the world in which we live. Yet 

Earman did not deny that the experience of the lapse of time does not decide the issue, 

since it is by hypothesis something we might well have in common with the denizens of the 

Godel universe. That the geometry of our world, moreover, does not in itself exclude the 

possibility of the flow of time is also not decisive, since that shows at most that the 

conditions necessary for the existence of time are present in our world. But necessary 

conditions are not the same as sufficient conditions, and absent the testimony of the 

experience of time (which cuts both ways), and of the laws of nature (which are the same 

in both worlds), it is hard to see that anything at all could decide in favor of the existence 

of time in the actual world. In short, our world would appear, by Godel's lights, to be in 

principle indistinguishable from a universe in which time is demonstrably absent.

How could one miss the force of this argument? In company with other philosophers of 

physics, Earman verges on conflating the geometrical prerequisites for the lapse of time 

with the actual lapse itself. Indeed, the latter is something Earman clearly has trouble 

taking seriously. But if we don't acknowledge the flow of time, one can hear Godel saying, 

then the game is already over: there simply is no such thing as time in the intuitive sense, 

and an argument for the ideality of time is not needed. In fact, Godel actually did say just 

this: "One may take the standpoint," he wrote in the Schilpp volume on Einstein, "that the 

idea of an objective lapse of time (whose essence is that only the present really exists) is 

meaningless. But this is no way out of the dilemma; for by this very opinion one would take 

the idealistic viewpoint." 

One can, of course, in good conscience, disagree with Godel's conclusions. He did not 

suffer from the illusion that he had said the last word on the reality of time, which, as we 

saw earlier, he described to Hao Wang as perhaps the philosophical question. But it is 

difficult to understand how one can disagree with the judgment that, whether he is 

ultimately right or wrong, Godel has made a profound contribution to philosophy. In 

addressing the question of time's existence, a question that has haunted philosophers from 

Parmenides and Plato to Kant, he brought to bear the most powerful, most fully developed 

formal account of time ever constructed, the theory of relativity, and proceeded to 

distinguish, with great precision, the formal from the intuitive concept, rel-ativistic from 

intuitive time. He then demonstrated, simply and elegantly, that the existence of intuitive 

time, which lapses, is inconsistent with the truth of special relativity, in particular, with 

the relativity of simultaneity and the equivalence of all inertial frames. He proceeded, 

next, to remind us that in general relativity certain reference frames can be seen as 

privileged, and thatóif the distribution of matter and motion is accommodatingówe can 

construct a simulacrum of intuitive time, namely cosmic time. He then made a deep and 

surprising contribution to relativistic physics by discovering new world models in which, 

due to the unhappy distribution of matter and motion, even cosmic time 

cannot be constructed. In addition, he proved that in some of these new world models, or 

Godel universes, time travel is possible, which once again proves that in such worlds there 

is no such thing as cosmic or intuitive time. To clinch the deal, he brought to bear a modal 

argument, from possibility to actuality, making the case that if time was ideal in the Godel 

universe, which contains the same physical laws as ours, and whose inhabitants might well 

experience time in the same way we do, then it cannot be that the mere difference in the 

distribution of matter and motion in the two worlds accounts for the fact that in one time 

exists, whereas in the other it does not. Finally, in a deep and original interpretation of 

Kant, who is usually taken to have been refuted by Einstein, he argued that, correctly 

understood, Kant's doctrine of the ideality of time bears striking affinities with the 

temporal idealism implicit in the theory of relativity. If this is not the right way to do 

philosophy, what is? 

Godel as Philosopher 

The case for Godel as philosopher is unassailable. Though he published few essays that 

could be considered explicit contributions to philosophy, they suffice to establish him as an 

important philosopher of mathematics and of space and time. The posthumous publication

of several more of his philosophical studies, including the Gibbs Lecture, his contribution 

to the Schilpp volume on Carnap, and the longer version of his contribution to the Schilpp 

volume on Einstein, confirm this assessment. The essay he wrote for the Schilpp volume on 

Russell, which contained new and insightful discussions of Frege as well as Russell on the 

question of meaning, including an illuminating and prescient comparison of Russell on 

"denoting" with Frege on "sense and reference," leaves little room for doubt that in the 

philosophy of language, too, his abilities were striking. He had clearly mastered the 

writings of most of the seminal figures in twentieth-century analytical philosophy, 

including Frege, Russell and Carnap. 

He knew Wittgenstein's Tractatus, too, though it is not known how well, and was a student 

of the writings of the founding father of continental philosophy, Husserl. The split between 

the analytical and continental schools, which, sadly, holds sway to this day, did not 

intimidate him. Here as elsewhere he proved himself free from the philosophical 

prejudices around him. He attended seriously, as well, to the history of philosophy, 

devoting endless hours to the study of Leibniz and acquiring a profound understanding of 

Kant. His grasp of Hegel astonished the logician and philosopher Georg Kreisel, a man not 

easy to impress. Looking over the set of quotations from Hegel that Godel had assembled, 

Kreisel remarked that "the publication of such an anthology is likely to produce a minor 

revolution in philosophy." He also studied Plato and Aristotle, as well as the medieval 

philosophers, but we do not know the extent of his familiarity with these figures. We do 

know that he put his grasp of the history of philosophy to creative use, enlisting his 

knowledge of Kant to help him comprehend the philosophical significance of the theory of 

relativity, and turning to Husserl's phenomenology for assistance in developing an 

epistemology adequate to the Platonist ontology he espoused for mathematics. He 

believed that the history of philosophy could help free us from prejudice. "Even science," 

he said, "is very heavily prejudiced in one direction. Knowledge in everyday life is also 

prejudiced. Two methods to transcend such prejudices are: (1) phenomenology; (2) going 

back to other ages." 

Overarching much of his research in philosophy and logic was the "Godel program," the 

investigation of the limits of formal methods in capturing intuitive concepts. This was 

clearly a philosophical enterprise, though he carried it out using both formal and 

philosophical tools. If the leitmotif of the twentieth century was formalism, in the most 

general sense, his incompleteness theorem was unquestionably the single most important 

contribution to this subject. As it had been for Plato, mathematics was for him a deep 

source of philosophical inspiration, in itself, in its relationship to logic, and in its ability to 

describe the physical world. A lifelong opponent of positivism, both in 

the narrow, technical sense of the program embraced by the Vienna Circle and in the 

broader sense of a philosophical tendency endemic to every age, he attempted to 

reappropriate mathematics and logic for the other side. "One bad effect of logical 

positivism," he said in his conversations with Wang, "is its claim of being intimately 

associated with mathematical logic. . . . Mathematical logic should be used more by 

nonpositivistic philosophers. The positivists have a tendency to represent their philosophy 

as a consequence of logic, to give it scientific dignity." 

If in his published writings he aimed for maximum precision and minimum controversy, 

stripping down his contributions until only the bones were leftóthat is, until all that

emained was what was most amenable to rigorous demonstration and unavoidable 

philosophical interpretationóin his notebooks and in his conversations with Wang, he felt 

free to engage in the most wide-ranging, fundamental speculations, flying through thin air 

as high as pure thought could take him, with no fear of crashing since he had no intention 

of landing. There is a fair amount of rough coal in these extravagant musings, but there 

are also diamonds, sparks of insight into noncausal "laws" of historical development, the 

limitations of mechanical biology, a concept of "absolute" proof, and the possibility of an 

afterlife. If Einstein accepted his end with equanimity, understanding that he had long 

since fired off his best shots, it is understandable that Godel resented his. In many ways, 

he had just begun to fight. 

An Ugly Body in Beautiful Clothing 

Even on his deathbed, Einstein had been engaged in a desperate effort to find a unified 

field theory. When his eyes finally closed, it fell to Bruria Kaufman, his last collaborator, 

and his friend Godel to attend to the papers that remained in the great physicist's office. 

Together, they found a blackboard filled with sad equations that led nowhere. The fruits of 

Einstein's earlier endeavors, however, remain the jewels in 

the crown of physics in the twentieth century. His theories uncovered the mathematical 

symmetries hidden in the noise and confusion of the physical world. 

This fact deeply impressed Godel. Mathematics itself, which he had encountered more 

directly than Einstein had, was for him a source of wonder and admiration. "It is given to 

us in its entirety and does not change," he said, "unlike the Milky Way. That part of it of 

which we have a perfect view seems beautiful, suggesting harmony." More than this, 

however, he recognized that these symmetries are not exclusive to the separate world of 

pure, transcendent "forms." "Mathematics is applied to the real world," he wrote, "and has 

proved fruitful. This suggests that the mathematical and empirical parts are in harmony 

and that the real world is also beautiful." Like Plato in the Timaeus, he believed that 

however the "real" world had come about, it was based on a divine model. "Otherwise," he 

said, "mathematics would be just an ornament and the real world would be like an ugly 

body in beautiful clothing." 

On his departure from this world, he left boxes of papers at the institute, begging for 

discovery. The first to do so, his biographer John Dawson, found two bound notebooks 

containing calculations that had nothing to do with logic or pure mathematics. It turned 

out they were Godel's recordings of the angular orientations of galaxies. The purist of pure 

logicians had never ceased trying to discover whether the actual world we inhabit is a 

Godel universe. His efforts, however, were unnecessary. In a deep sense, it is clear enough 

that we all do live in Godel's universe. 

Notes

Chapter 1 

2 key to his trunk: See Peter Suber, 1992, "Fifty Years Later, the Questions Remain: 

Kurt Godel at Blue Hill," Ellsworth American, August 27. 2 

Folsing, 1998, Albert Einstein, trans. Ewald Osers 

"From a distance": Albrecht 

(New York: Penguin Books), 689. 

2 "just to have the privilege": Oskar Morgenstern, in a letter to the Austrian 

government in 1965, cited in Hao Wang, 1996, A Logical journey: From Godel to Philosophy 

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), 57. 

3 "the most significant": W.V. Quine, 1952, text of citation for Godel's honorary 

doctorate from Harvard University, June, cited in Wang 1996, 2. 

4 "Here you see that portion": Folsing 1998, 283. 

4 "When I objected": Werner Heisenberg, 1983, Encounters with Einstein and Other Essays 

on People, Places, and Particles (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 114. 

4 "on equal terms with Einstein": Freeman Dyson, 1993, From Eros to Gaia (New York: 

Penguin Books), 161. 

5 "Only fables": Godel, letter to his mother, April 21, 1965, cited in Wang 1996, 45. 

5 "You know, once you start calculating": Folsing 1998, 311. 

6 "Every boy in the streets": Constance Reid, 1986, Hilbert-Courant (New York: 

Springer-Verlag), 142. 

7 Time, "that mysterious...": Kurt Godel, "A Remark About the Relationship Between 

Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy," in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., 1949, Albert 

Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (LaSalle, 111.: Open Court), 557.

8 "chronology protection conjecture": Stephen Hawking, 1992, "Chronology Protection 

Conjecture," Physical Review D46, no. 2 (July 15). 

Chapter 2 

9 The German man of science: Arthur Miller, 1986, Imagery in Scientific Thought 


9 It is a remarkable fact: Kurt Godel, 1946-1949, "Some Observations About the 

Relationship Between Theory of Relativity and Kantian Philosophy," in Solomon 

Feferman et al., eds., 1995, Kurt Godel: Collected Works, vol. 3, Unpublished Essays and 

Lectures (New York: Oxford University Press), 230. 

10 "I have firmly resolved": Folsing 1998, 333. 

10 "Of course he has no children": Suber 1992. 

10 "There is no doubt": Paul Weingartner and Leopold Schmetterer, 1987, eds., Godel 

Remembered (Naples: Bibliopolis), 32. 

10 "Albert himself": Dennis Overbye, 1999, "Einstein, Confused in Love and, Sometimes, 

Physics," New York Times, August 31. 

11 Finding himself trapped: Paul Halmos, 1988, / Want to Be a Mathematician: An 

Automatkography in Three Parts (Washington, D.C., Mathematical Association of America). 

11 "to make the serious things in the world tolerable": Philipp Frank, 1989, Einstein: His 

Life and Times (New York, Da Capo Press), 281-282. 

12 Einstein "was an experienced sight reader": Gerald Holton and Yehuda Elkana, 1982, 

eds., Albert Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover), 410. 

12 Begriffsscbrift: Gottlob Frege, 1967, Begriffsschrift, A Formula Language, Modeled upon 

That of Arithmetic, for Pure Thought," in Jean van Heijenoort, ed., From Frege to Godel: A 

Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931, 182 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University 

Press).

12 "deeply religious unbeliever": Gerald Holton, 1998, "Einstein and the Cultural Roots 

of Modern Science," Daedalus, Winter, 16. 

13 Godel was not a pantheist: Hao Wang, 1987, Reflections on Kurt Godel (Cambridge, 

Mass.: MIT Press), 18. 

13 Spinoza's God: Wang 1996, 152. 13 Whereas "ninety per cent of philosophers": 

Ibid., 107. 

13 "All three of the others": Bertrand Russell, 2000, Autobiography (London: Routledge), 

466. 13 "I am not a Jew": Wang 1996, 112. 

13 "Kurt had a friendly attitude": Weingartner and Schmetterer 1987, 33. 

14 "I frequently held an opinion": John Dawson, 1997, Logical Dilemmas (Wellesley, 

Mass.: A.K. Peters). 

15 "You became a mathematician": Wang 1996, 87. 

15 "You have a vicarious": Karl Menger, 1994, Reminiscences of the Vienna Circle and the 

Mathematical Colloquium (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers), 222. 

15 "Who ever became more intelligent": Ibid., 223 

15 "If you had a particular problem": Weingartner and Schmetterer 1987, 33. 

16 "Kant is a sort of highway": Ibid., 74. 

16 "At the Institute in Princeton": Holton 1998, 18. 

18 "holy geometry booklet": Albert Einstein, "Autobiographical Notes," in Schilpp

1949, 11. 18 "Time," Kant himself said: Norman Kemp Smith, 1965, trans., Critique of 

Pure 

Reason, by Immanuel Kant (New York: St. Martin's Press), B 50. 18 "We cannot obtain for 

ourselves": Ibid., B 156. 18 "the primary object of Einstein's": G.J. Whitrow, 1980, The 

Natural Philosophy 

nf Time (Oxford- ('l:ircn

27 by constructing "far-fetched grounds for jealousy": Ibid, 154. 

28 Tractatus: Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1961, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. 

Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge £>C Kegan Paul). 

28 "what we cannot speak about": Wittgenstein 1961, 7 

28 "Today we . . . out-Wittgensteined these Wittgensteinians": Menger 1994, 210. 

30 "I. .. believe myself to have found": Wittgenstein 1961, 5. 

30 "I can testify to this": Weingartner and Schmetterer 1987, 40. 

32 "I put my faith in organization": Holton 1998, 16. 

32 "Despite their remoteness": Kurt Godel, 1964, "What Is Cantor's Continuum Problem?" 

(1964 supplement), in Feferman et al. 1990, 11/268. 

33 "Mach's way": Holton 1998, 9. 

34 "since the mathematicians pounced on the relativity theory": Folsing 1998, 245. 

35 "The antipathy of these scholars": Albert Einstein, "Autobiographical Notes," in 

Schilpp 1949, 49. 

35 "We really experience only": Gottlob Frege, "Thought," in Michael Beaney, ed., 

1997, The Frege Reader (Oxford: Blackwell), 339. 35 Lenin's critique of Mach: V.I. Lenin, 

1950, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 

trans. A. Fineberg (London: Lawrence & Wisehart). 37 

David Lindley, 2001, Boltzmann's Atom (New 

"I don't believe that atoms exist!": 

York: Free Press), vii, xi.

37 Einstein's Annalen derPhysik publications: Albert Einstein, 1905a, "On the 

Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," Annalen der Physik 17:891-921; Albert Einstein, 1905b, 

"On the Movement of Particles Suspended in Fluids at Rest, as Postulated by the Molecular 

Theory of Heat," Annalen der Physik 17:549-60. 

38 "the scientist must appear": Schilpp 1949, 684. 

38 Wittgenstein's view of "logical space": Wittgenstein 1961, 1.13 and 2.11. 

39 His most influential work: Moritz, Schlick, 1918, Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (IWrliii: 

Spritigrr Verlag). 

I'1 

"Sad, Inn true": Mcncci ll>'M, Sh. 

40 "Now you damned bastard": See David Edmonds and John Eidinow, 2001, 

Wittgenstein's Poker (New York: HarperCollins), 142-148. 

41 "It is to be hoped": Ibid., 146. 

41 Nelbock after the Anschluss: Ibid., 147. 

47 "Dear Colleague": Bertrand Russell, 1902, "Letter to Frege," in van Heijenoort 1967, 

124. 

48 "The sole possible foundations of arithmetic": Frege, 1902, "Letter to Russell," in van 

Heijenoort 1967, 128. 

48 "The development of philosophy since the Renaissance": Kurt Godel, 1961, "The 

Modern Development of the Foundations of Mathematics in the Light of Philosophy," in 

Feferman et al. 1995, III/375-376. 

49 "Thus came into being": Ibid., 379. 49 in Godel's words: Ibid. 

49 "an a priorism with the sign reversed": Ibid., 383.

49 "[A] system of truths": Warren Goldfarb, "The Philosophy of Mathematics in Early 

Positivism," in R.N. Giere, ed., 1996, Origins of Logical Empiricism, Minnesota Studies in 

the Philosophy of Science, vol. 16, 213-230 (University of Minnesota Press), 214. 

49 "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics": Eugene Wigner, 1979, "The 

Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," in Symmetries and 

Reflections: Scientific Essays, 222-237 (Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow Press). 

50 "It is not true, as Kant urged": Hans Hahn, "The Crisis in Intuition," in Brian 

McGuinness, ed., 1980, Empiricism, Logic, and Mathematics: Philosophical Papers, 731-02 

(Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel), 101. 

50 "The essence of this view": Kurt Godel, 1951, "Some Basic Theorems on the 

Foundations of Mathematics and Their Implications" (Gibbs Lecture, 1951), in Feferman et 

al. 1995, III/319. 

Chapter 4 

51 Every spy's life: Anais Nin, 1974, A Spy in the House of Love, (Athens, Ohio: Swallow 

Press), 73. 

51 "[Russell] brought to light": Kurt Godel, 1944, "Russell's Mathematical Logic," in 

Feferman et al. 1990, 11/124. 

52 "Where else would reliability and truth be found": David Hilbert, 1925, "On the 

Infinite," in van Heijenoort 1967, 375. 

52 "The definitive clarification": Ibid. 370-371. 

52 "As concerns the world": John Dawson, 1985, "Discussion on the Foundations of 

Mathematics," History and Philosophy of Logic 5:116. 

52 "A very simple fact now seems": Ibid. 

53 Who pays any attention: e. e. cummings, "since feeling is first," 1926, in Complete' 

Poems: 1904-1962 (New York: Liveright, 1994).

54 "I can begin to hear the sound of machinery": Ray Monk, 1990, Ludivig Witlgeii stein: 

The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press), 13. 

55 Frege's rejection of implicit definition: Gottlob Krege, 1980, The foundations of 

Arithmetic: A I .ogico- Arithmetic Enquiry into the Concept of Number, trans. J.I,. Austin 

(Evanston. III.: Northwestern University I'ress). 68. 

57 "Continued appeals to mathematical intuition": Kurt Godel, "What Is Cantor's 

Continuum Problem?" (1964 supplement), in Feferman et al. 1990, 11/269. 

58 "I would be very much interested": Dawson 1997, 70. 

58 "Von Neumann, from the beginning": Dawson 1984, 122. 

58 Von Neumann's striking prescience: S.M. Ulam, 1976, Adventures of a Mathematician 

(Berkeley: University of California). 

62 "I was rather depressed": Benjamin Yandell, 2002, The Honors Class: Hilbert's Problems 

and Their Solvers (Natick, Mass.: A.K. Peters), 75. 

68 Similarly, as a direct consequence: William F. Dowling, 1989, "There are no safe 

virus tests," American Mathematical Monthly 96, 835-836. 

69 God's mercy preserves mathematics: Simone Weil, 1987, "The Pythagorean Doctrine," 

in Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks (London: Ark Paperbacks), 165. 

71 Hilbert and Grommer: Yandell 2002, 18. 

72 Hilbert and Max Born: Reid 1986, 105. 

72 "Formalists considered": Kurt Godel, letter to Hao Wang, 1968, in Feferman et al. 

2003, V/404. 

73 Godel and Zermelo at Bad Elster: Dawson 1997, 76. 73 Russell's comments: Ibid., 

77.

73 "Russell evidently misinterprets my result": Kurt Godel, 1973, letter to Abraham 

Robinson, in Feferman et al. 2003, V/201. 

74 Post noted: Emil Post, "Absolutely Unsolvable Problems ami Relatively llndeud able 

Propositions: Account of an Anticipation," in Martin Davis, cd., I9(, S, ih

84 Einstein in Berlin: See Thomas levenson, 2003, FJnstein in Berlin (New York: Bantam 

Hooks). 

84 "li is not entirely clear": Folsiiu; 1998, 330. 

87 "I am told in all steamship bureau*": Dawson 1997, 149. 

88 "das Reich der Zwei": Kurt Vonnegut, 1999, Mother Night (New York: Delta Books). 

Chapter 6 

89 When pygmies cast such long shadows: Gian-Carlo Rota, 1997, Indiscrete Thoughts 

(Boston: Birkhaiiser), 257. 

89 "as like Oxford as monkeys can make it": Ronald W. Clark, 1976, The Life of 

Bertrand Russell, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 233. 89 "Princeton is a wonderful piece of 

earth": Folsing 1998, 679. 89 "ten times more congenial": Dawson 1997, 168. 

91 "there is any danger": Ibid., 158. 

92 "Is his [mental] illness": Yandell 2002, 52. 

93 "in today's terms, Einstein": Peter Bucky, 1992, The Private Albert Einstein (Kansas 

City: Andrews and McMeel), 102. 

93 Feynman's "physiognomy and manner": James Gleick, 1992, Genius: The Life and 

Science of Richard Feynman (New York: Pantheon Books), 84. 

94 "during my sickness Einstein": Hao Wang, 1987, Reflections on Kurt Godel 


94 Godel wrote to his mother: Wang 1996, 39.

94 "I know of one occasion": Wang 1987, 32. 

95 "That begins only": Wang 1996, 56. 

95 Einstein . . . "was in many respects a pessimist": Wang 1987, 39-40. 

95 "Godel," however: Ibid., 32. 

95 "museum pieces": Holton 1998, 4. 

96 "Einstein is completely cuckoo": Folsing 1998, 693. 96 "firing at birds in the dark": 

Ibid., 709. 

98 "Did I really say that?": Ibid., 716. 

98 "Cervantes' text": Jorge Luis Borges, 1964, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," in 

Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other 'Writings (New York: New Directions), 42. 

99 "Do you think a dictatorship": Dawson 1997, 180. 

100 "You know that I disagree": Mark van Atten and Juliette Kennedy, 2003, "Godel's 

Philosophical Development," The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, vol. 9, no. 4, December, 

425^476, 470. 

100 In 1935, Einstein: Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, 1935, "Can 

Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?" Physical 

Review 47 (May 15), 777-780. 

101 "The heuristics of Einstein and Bohr": Wang 1996, 175. 

101 His own philosophical manifesto: Feferman 1990, 11/176-187. 

101 "I don't see any reason": "What Is Cantor's Continuum Problem?" (1964 supplement), 

in Feferman 1990, 11/254-270, 268.

102 a previous essay: Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., 1944, The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell 

(La Salle, 111.: Open Court). 

102 "in talking the matter over": Charles Parson, 1944, "Introductory Note to [Godel] 1944," 

in Feferman 1990, 11/102. 

102 Russell's comment: Ibid., 102. 

103 "It is not an altogether pleasant experience": IWrtratuI Russell, 1 c>Sl>, My I'hiln- 

Sti/ihli til l)fl'flt)l>Hlfll\ (I .union 

(III will l'.l|iclli.n !

110 Almost all accounts: Paul Benacerraf, "Mathematical Truth," in Paul Benacerraf and 

Hilary Putnam, eds., 1983, Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press), 403-420, 403. 

111 "I do not believe": Hilary Putnam, 1967, "Time and Physical Geometry," journal of 

Philosophy 64, reprinted in Hilary Putnam 1979, Mathematics, Matter, and Method: 

Philosophical Papers, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 198-205, 205. 

Ill time is "that mysterious": Kurt Godel, A Remark About the Relationship between 

Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy," in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., 1949, Al bert 

Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (LaSalle, 111.: Open Court), 557. 

111 "continental" philosophers: Martin Heidegger, 1962, Being and 'lime, transl. J. 

Macquarrie and E. Robinson, (New York: Harper & Row); F.dmund 1 lusserl, 1990, On the 

Phenomenology of the Consciousness of internal lime, trans. J. 11. Brough (Dordrecht, 

Netherlands: Kluwer). 

112 "now he has preceded me a little": Folsing 1998, 741. 

112 "the now means something special": Rudolf Carnap, "Intellectual Autobiography," in 

P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (La Salle, 111.: Open Court), 1963: 37- 

63, 37-38. 

113 "Is what remains of temporal connection": Albert Einstein, "Reply to Criticisms," in 

Schilpp 1949, 687. 

116 "Kurt Godel's essay": Ibid., 687. 117-18 "Like most others": Lawrence Sklar, quoted in 

Palle Yourgrau, 1999, Godel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Godel Universe (Chicago: 

Open Court), xiii, note 14. 

Chapter 7 

120 Only when Godel himself intervened: Dawson 1997, 184-185. 122 "The fourdimensional 

continuum is now": Albert Einstein,1961, Relativity: The Special and General 

Theory (New York: Corn Publishers), 149. 

124 "time regained a real objective existence": James Jeans, "Man and the Universe," Sir 

I lalley Stewart Lecture, 1936, in James Jeans et al., eds., 1936, Scientific Progress, 

(London: Allen & Unwin), I 1-38, 22-23.

125 a famous philosophical essay on the A-series: A.N. Prior, 1959, "Thank Goodness I 

hat's Over," Philosophy ª4, 12-17. 

131 "Whether or not an objective lapse": Kurt Godel, "A Remark about the Relationship 

Between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy," in Schilpp 1949, 562. 

132 "The concept of existence": Ibid., 558, note 5. 

132 "The notion of existence": Wang 1996, 150. 

00 : Kurt Godel, "A Remark about the Relationship Between Relativity Theory and Idealistic 

Philosophy," in Schilpp 1949, 558. 

133 "As a substitute for absolute space": Kurt Godel, 1949, "Lecture on Rotating 

Universes," in Feferman et al. 1995, III/271. 

136 "chronology protection conjecture": Hawking 1992. 

137 "As we present time to ourselves": Wang 1996, 320. 137 "This concept of set": 

Godel 1964, 258-259. 

137 "These contradictions": Godel 1961, 377. 

140 one of the great texts in general relativity: Charles Misner, Kip Thorne, John Wheeler, 

Gravitation (New York: Worth), 1973. 

140 "In physics ... the possibility of knowledge": Godel 1961, 377. 

141 "the two great conceptual revolutions": Dyson 1993, 263. 

141 "Godel, he noted, "had taken down": J.A. Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum 

Foam: A Life in Physics (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.), 1998, 309-310.

141 "In a universe with an overall rotation": Wheeler 1998, 310. 

142 an "unsettling consequence": Ibid., 344. 

142 "the other thing that special relativity did": Ibid., 345. 

142 Moreover, "every black hole": Ibid., 350. 

143 "My, I wish we had talked to him": Ibid., 310. 

Chapter 8 

145 We live in a world in which ninety-nine per cent: Dawson 1997, 208. 145 Plato 

says: Wang 1996, 300. 

145 "Geometry and Experience": Albert Einstein, 1921 "Geometry and Experience," in 

Albert Einstein, 1954, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Crown), 232-246. 

146 "Einstein's now abandoned dream": John Wheeler, 1980, "Beyond the Black Hole," in 

Harry Woolf, ed., Some Strangeness in the Proportion (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley), 

344. 

147 "One crazy man on the faculty": Dawson 1997, 194. 147 "You don't need it": Ibid., 

195. 

147 "I never go to lectures": Ibid., 203, note 5. 

149 "I never thought he loved me so much": Levenson 2003, 430. 

149 "My relationship to the Jewish people": Ibid., 428. 

149 Simone Weil's dark study: Simone Weil, 1987, transl. A.F. Wills, The Need for 

Roots (London: Ark Paperbacks), 1987. 

',

149 "the exaggerated esteem": Levenson 2003, 431. 

149 "It is tasteless": Ibid., 432. 

150 "Godel's gnawing uncertainty": Ulam 1976, 80-81. 

150 "Ulam doesn't understand my result": Wang 1996, 84. 

151 "in 1905, work on spectral lines": Fcilsing 1998, 224. 153 "I cannot define (he real 

problem": Regis 1987, 33. 

153 Godel's contribution (o the Schilpp volume: Godel l''53/9. III & V, in Feferman Vol. Ill, 

)'>1>S; \.H-\h2. 

15} "Some Basic Theorems on the Foundations of Mathematics, and Their Implications": 

Godel, 1951, in Feferman et al. 1995, 111/304-323. 

154 "In view of widely held prejudices": Warren Goldfarb, "Introductory Note" to 1953/9, 

in Feferman et al. 1995, III/324. 

155 "Ninety per cent of contemporary philosophers": Kurt Godel, letter to Marianne 

Godel, in Feferman et al. 2003, IV/437. 

156 Willard V. Quine: Charles Parsons, 2002, "W.V. Quine: A Student's Eye View," 

Harvard Review of Philosophy, Spring, 2002, X:6-10, 8. 

156-57 "One may wonder": Solomon Feferman, 1984, "Kurt Godel: Conviction and Caution," 

Philosophia Naturalis 21, 1984: 546-562, 560. 

157 "There are structural laws": Wang 1996, 151-152. 157 Christianity "best at the 

beginning": Ibid., 150. 

157 "Since [Christ's] day there": John Hellman, 1982, Simone Weil: An Introduction to 

Her Thought (Wilfrid Laurier University Press), 60, 65.

158 "Philosophy tends to go down": Wang 1996, 150. 

158 "Babylonian mathematics": Dawson 1997, 241, note 6. 

158 "living corpse": Ibid., 234. 

159 association with the logician Hao Wang: Wang 1996. 

160 Einstein's ashes: Levenson 2003, 431. 

Chapter 9 

161 Engaging in philosophy is salutary: Wang 1996, 119. 

162 "To date, only a single volume": Dawson 1997, 269. 

165 "To do philosophy is a special vocation": Wang 1996, 308. 

165 "Philosophy," he said: Ibid., 166. 

165 "Actually, it would be easy": Ibid., 307. 

165 The light dove: Kant 1965, A5,B9. 

166 In a classic essay: Carl Hempel, "The Empiricist Criterion of Meaning," in A.J. Ayer, 

ed., 1959, Logical Positivism (New York: The Free Press), 108-129. 

166 the first (and only) book: Wittgenstein, 1961. 

167 "Philosophy must be of some use": F.P. Ramsey, 1931, ed. R.B. Braithwaite, The 

Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace), 

1931,263.

167 "What we can't say we can't say": Ibid, 238. 

167 material was provided for a lively book: David Edmonds and John Eidinow 2001, 

Wittgenstein's Poker, HarperCollins. 

168 "After the devastating attacks": Paul Horwich, 1990, "The Growth of Now," Review of 

J.R. Lucas, The Future, Times Literary Supplement, June 22-28, 672. 

168 entitled "Godel's Philosophy": Warren Goldfarb, 1990, "On Godel's Philosophy," 

address to the Association of Symbolic Logic, Helsinki, July 20, typescript. 

169 entitled "Some Observations": Godel 1946/49, B2, CI. 

170 "the problem of time is important and difficult": Wang 1996, 319. 170 "The way... 

we form mathematical objects: Ibid., 301. 

170 "a clarification of meaning": Godel 1961, 383. 

170 "focus more sharply on the concepts": Ibid. 

170 "a new state ol consciousness": Ibid. 

171 "1 don't piuticuhirly like HiisseiTs way": Wau|; I'Wf,, 168. 

171 "I love everything brief": Ibid., 43. 

172 "entirely as intended by Kant": Ibid., 387. 

172 in his path-breaking study The Foundations of Arithmetic: Frege 1980. 

173 "Trying to see (i.e., understand) a concept": Wang 1996, 233.

173 "Often it is only after immense intellectual effort": Frege 1980, Introduction, vii. 

173 "we perceive objects and understand concepts": Wang 1996, 235. 

174 "We begin with vague perceptions": Ibid., 235. 174 "In arithmetic," wrote Frege: 

Frege 1980, 115. 

174 "When the soul investigates by itself": Plato, 1981, transl. G.M.A. Grube, Five 

Dialogues (Indianapolis:, Hackett Publishing Company), Phaedo, 79d. 

175 Both held that the only means of escaping: Palle Yourgrau, 1989, review essay, 

Reflections on Kurt Godel, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research L, no. 2, 391^108, 

402-403. 

175 "Concepts are there," wrote Godel: Wang 1996, 149. 

175 "in the external world, in the whole of space": Frege 1980, 99. 

176 Constructibility and Mathematical Existence: Charles Chihara, 1990, Con-structibility 

and Mathematical Existence (Oxford: Clarendon Press). 

176 "Chihara's account of Godelian Platonism": E.P. James, 1992, "The Problem of 

Mathematical Existence," Philosophical Books XXXIII, no. 3, July, 129-138. 176 

"mathematicians are prejudiced against intuition": Wang 1996, 169. 

176 Asymmetries in Time: Paul Horwich, 1987, Asymmetries in Time: Problems in the 

Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press). 

177 Milic Capek, another distinguished philosopher of science: Milic Capek, 1966, "The 

Inclusion of Becoming in the Physical World," in Milic Capek, ed., 1976, The Concepts of 

Space and Time (Dordrecht: Reidel). 

177 Karl Popper had argued similarly: Karl Popper, 1982, The Open Universe: An Argument 

for Indeterminism (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefied), 2-3, note 2.

177 The Disappearance of Time: Palle Yourgrau, 1991, The Disappearance of Time: Kurt 

Godel and the Idealistic Tradition in Philosophy (New York Cambridge University Press). 

177 When an expanded edition appeared: Palle Yourgrau, 1999, Godel Meets Einstein: Time 

Travel in the Godel Universe (Chicago: Open Court). 

177 Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers, and Shrieks: John Earman, 1995, Bangs, Crunches, 

Whimpers, and Shrieks (New York: Oxford University Press). 

177 "the relative neglect of the philosophical moral": Ibid., 194-195. 

177 "a deeply held conviction": Ibid, 195. 

178 "this seems to me to be the correct response to Godel": Ibid., 200. 

179 "this is a pretty piece of ordinary language philosophizing": Ibid., 195. 

180 "One may take the standpoint": in Schilpp 1949, 558, note 4. 182 "the publication 

of such an anthology": Wang 1987, 254. 

182 "Even science," he said, "is very heavily prejudiced": Wang 1987, 254. 

183 "One bad effect of logical positivism": Wang 1987, 308. 

184 "It is given to us in its entirety": Wang 1996, 151. 184 "Mathematics is applied to 

the real world": Ibid., 151. 

184 "Otherwise," he said, "mathematics would be just an ornament": Ibid. 

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---------. 1999. In Palle Yourgrau Godel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Godel Universe 

(Chicago: Open Court, 1999) XIII, no. 14. 

Suber, Peter. 1992. "50 Years Later, The Questions Remain: Kurt Godel at Blue Hill." 

Ellsworth American (August 27).

Wang, Hao. 1995. "Time in Philosophy and in Physics." Synthese 102: 215-34. 

Wheeler, John. 1980. "Beyond the Black Hole." In Harry Woolf, ed., Some Strangeness in 

the Proportion (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1980). 

Wigner, Eugene, 1979. "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural 

Sciences." In Symmetries and Reflections: Scientific Essays (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow 

Press): 222-37. 

Yourgrau, Palle. 1989. "Review Essay: Reflections on Kurt Godel" Philosophy and Phenomenological 

Research L, no. 2: 391-408. 

Index 

Absolute space, 42, 133 Berlin, 84-85 

Aleph null, 45 Berlin Philharmonic, 82 

American Mathematical Monthly, 101 Bernays, Paul, 71 

American Mathematical Society, 147 Besso, Michele, 112 

Analytic geometry, Cartesian coordinates Black holes, 117 

and, 62 Bohr, Niels, 3, 17, 43, 96, 100, 101 

Annalen der Physik, 37 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 21, 32, 35-37, 148; 

Anselm, Saint, 130, 155 suicide, 38 

Anti-Semitism, 41. See also Jews Born, Max, 72 

"Are There Philosophical Problems?" Borowicka, Sylvia, 40 

(Popper), 167 Boston University, 162, 176

Aristotle, 182 Brahms, Johannes, 54 

Arithmetic: formal (FA), 57, 60-67, 69; Brno, 21 

intuitive (IA), 60-67; Peano Brouwer, I.. E. [., 24 

postulates and, 56-57; philosophy Brownian motion, 37-38 

and, 174; unprovability of Browns, Bobbie and George, 90 

consistency and, 58 

Logic, 169 

Bucky, Peter, 93 Association for Symbolic 

Asymmetries in Time (Horwich), 176 Calculation: infinitesimal calculus, 47; Atom 

bomb, 96, 99 recursive function and, 75 

Atomic theory, 34-35, 37-38, 106 Cambridge University, 167 

Austria-Hungary, 80 

"Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of 

Physical Be Considered Complete?" BadElster, 73 

(Podolsky/Rosen), 100 

Bahcall, John, 15 Cantor, Georg, 1, 51, 72, 121, 137, 151; 

Bamburger, Louis, 77 continuum hypothesis and, 96-97, 

Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers, and Shrieks 100, 101; set theory and, 44-47 

(Earman), 177 Capek, Milic, 177 

Befreiung, 81 Carnap, Rudolf, 25, 26, 27, 29, 86, 154, 

Begriffssckrift (Frege), 24 

168, 181; incompleteness theorem

Being and Time (Heidegger), 111 and, 70 

Benacerraf, Paul, 121 

Cartesian coordinates, Godel numbering 

Bcrgson, 1 Icnri, 1 I I and, 62 

Cezanne, Paul, 54 

motion and, 37-38; calculates 

Chandrasekhar, S., 119-20 

explosive potentialities of torpedoes 

Chihara, Charles, 176 

for U.S. Navy, 97; as colleague of 

Chomsky, Noam, 55 

Godel, 4, 14; common sense vs. 

Christianity, Godel and, 157 

mathematics, 15-16; early residence 

Chronology protection conjecture, 8, 143 in Berlin, 84-85; Earman and, 178; 

Church, Alonzo, 68-69, 75, 76, 79, 156 

eccentricities, 92-93; EPR paradox, 

Cohen, Paul, 61-62, 97, 100 100, 153; family and, 148-49; 

Collected Works (Godel omnibus), 176 friendship with Godel, 88, 94-95; 

Computers: arithmetic and, 57; Godel and, 

geometry and, 17-18, 145-46; Godel 

99; Hilbert and, 54; incompleteness and Leibniz, 109-10; intuition and, 

theorem and, 68 

32; invited to work at the Princeton 

Concept: formal vs. intuitive and special Institute for Advanced Study, 78; 

relativity, 128-29; implicit definitions Kant and, 108-09; Mach and, 33-34;

and, 55, 169; metaphysics and, 169; mathematics and, 5, 34, 53; 

natural numbers and, 172; perception 

Minkowski and, 34; music and, 

and, 174; predication and, 175. See 11-12; philosophy and, 101, 104, 

also Perception 107, 111-12; pipe and, 9-10, 93; 

Conceptual space, predication and, 175 

positivism and, 105-06, 107; unified 

"Confession to the Fuhrer" (Schrodinger), 

field theory and, 100; Vienna Circle 

77, 80 and, 39, 40. See also General 

Continuum hypothesis, 1, 96; Godel and, 

relativity theory; Relativity theory; 

97, 100, 101, 110, 150, 151, 153; set Special relativity theory 

theory and, 97, 151 Einstein, Eduard (son of AE), 149 

Cosmic time, 124, 129, 133, 135, 180-81 

Einstein, Elsa (Lowenthal, second wife of 

Cosmology, 8, 139; intuitive time and, AE), 10, 84, 148, 149 

137; physical significance of Einstein, Hans Albert (son of AE), 93, 107, 

mathematical models consequential to 149 

general relativity, 116-17 Einstein, Lieserl (daughter of AE), 149

Critique of Pure Reason, The (Kant), 16, Empiricism, positivism and, 52 

29, 109, 165 Entropy, probability and, 36 

cummings, e. e., 53 

Epistemology: incompleteness theorem 

and, 75; mathematical intuition and, 

Dawson, John, 162, 184 101; ontology and, 3, 106, 107, 

Dedekind, Richard, 62 112-13, 141, 154, 175, 182; 

Definition, 55, 169. See also Properties positivism and, 31; Schlick and, 41 

Descartes, Rene, 62, 65, 130, 155 

EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) paradox, 

Disappearance of Time, The (Yourgrau), 100, 153 

162, 177 Erkenntis, 70, 71 

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), 152 Euclid, 145 

Dreben, Burton, 163, 164, 168, 176 Euclidean geometry, 17-18; vs. Hilbert, 55; 

Dukas, Helen, 94-95 vs. logic, 51-52 

Dyson, Freeman, 1, 4, 141 Existence: accidental vs. necessary, 130; 

meaning and, 132 

Earman, John, 177-80 

Experience: intuitive time and, 138; Kant

Einstein, Albert, 83, 91, 147, 157, 183; and, 166; Mach and, 33, 34; 

atom bomb and, 96, 99; Brownian positivism and, 29-32, 38 

Feferman, Solomon, 156-57 time and, 105; time travel and, 129. 

Feigl, Herbert, 27, 29 

See also Euclidean geometry 

Feynman, Richard, 93, 153 

"Geometry and Experience" (Einstein), 

Flexner, Abraham, 77-78 145 

Ford, Lester, 101 Germany, 80 

Formal arithmetic (FA), 57, 60-67, 69; Gibbs Lecture, 147, 150, 181 

metatheory of (MFA), 61-67. See also God: actuality vs. possibility and, 130; 

Mathematical formalism 

Einstein and, 12, 104; Godel and, 

Formal time, temporal component (t) of 

12-13, 23, 130, 161, 165. See also 

relativity theory, 113-14, 115, 127, 

Religion 

129, 131, 135, 138 Godel, Adele (Porkert, wife of KG), 10, 26, 

Foundations of Arithmetic, The (Frege), 172 

87, 98, 158; death, 159; home and, 

Fraenkel, Abraham, 25, 72 91; new to Princeton, 89-90

Frank, Philipp, 11 

Godel, Kurt 

Frege, Gottlob, 29, 48, 51, 56, 62, 70, 

Career: first formal academic honor, 

137, 181; formal arithmetic and, 60; 147; invitations to work at the 

Goldfarb and, 171, 172, 174-76, 

Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, 

178; Mach and, 35; mathematical 79, 85; Schlick circle and, 27-29; as a 

logic and, 24-25; set theory and, 45, student of number theory, 22-23 

47; symbolic logic and, 23, 24 Incompleteness theorem, 3, 8, 50, 

Friedmann, Aleksandr, 117 

and, 

151, 182; effective calculability 

Fuld, Mrs. Felix, 78 

75, 76; Husserlian phenomenology 

Furtwangler, Philip, 22-23, 82, 92 

and, 107; initial response of the 

Furtwangler, Wilhem, 82-83 mathematical community, 70-71; 

legal code and, 99; mathematical 

General relativity theory, 18, 105, 140, formalism and, 53, 74-76, 105-06; 

151; cosmic time and, 124, 129; the methodology of, 115; vs. positivism, 

expanding universe and, 19; 

140; proof of, 60-69; proof 

geometrization of time and, 115; 

procedures and, 24; proof vs. truth

Godel rotating universes and, and, 135; response of Hilbert to, 71, 

133-34, 141; Godel universes and, 6, 72; response of Russell to, 73; 

116; Godel world models for, unprovability of consistency and, 58 

112-16, 117-18, 135; gravity and, Mathematics, 22, 32; beauty and, 184; 

127, 129; Hawking chronology vs. Carnap, 30; cognitive content and, 

protection conjecture and, 136; 175; continuum hypothesis and, 97, 

intuitive time and, 138; intuitive time 

100, 101, 150, 151; vs. formalism, 

and inertial frames, 180; 52-53, 59; intuition and, 57-58; 

mathematical formalism and, 55; 

Kant and, 175; Peano postulates and, 

physical significance of mathematical 56-57; philosophy and, 112; 

models for, 116-17; response to 

philosophy and set theory, 137; vs. 

Godel's world models for, 119-21; 

positivism, 52, 105-06, 182; Post on, 

time and, 138, 139 74; proof vs. truth and, 136; 

Geometry, 175; analytic, 62; 

58; 

unprovability of consistency and, 

geometrization of time, 115; Godel vs. Wittgenstein, 50

universes and, 135-36, 179; Hilbert Personal like: the arts and, 4-5, 11; 

and, 55; painting and, 54; Plato and, 

becomes citizen of United States, 

I-tS; relativity iluoiy and, 127; sp.uo- l'K 99; ns colleague of I'.instein, 4, 14; 

death, 159; depression, 86; driving arithmetic truth (T) and, 127, 138; 

and, 25; early years in Princeton, intuitive time and, 137, 138, 142; 

89-90; eating disorder, 86, 159; intuitive time vs. temporal component 

eccentricities, 11, 91-92; friendship (t) of relativistic space-time, 114, 115, 

with Einstein, 88, 94-95; 135; McTaggart series and, 124-26, 

hypochondria, 9, 92, 158; leaves 128-29, 132; nonexistence of, 131; 

Austria for America, 87; paranoia, 5, 

ontological investigation of relativity 

9, 15, 92, 158; pessimism, 5; and, 108, 111, 112-13; Plato and, 

purchase of a home, 91; sanatoria 109; and reality of, 111, 113, 120, 

and, 9, 86; women and, 10, 26 130; special relativity and, 122-24, 

Philosophy, 22, 104, 158, 164, 165; 

126-27, 128-29, 131-33, 139; time 

Christianity and, 157; vs. Earman, travel and, 181 

177-80; Einstein and, 108-09, 161; Time travel, 6, 142; cosmic time and,

vs. Goldfarb, 163, 168-72, 173-74, 

181; geometry and, 129; Godel 

175-76; history of philosophy and, universes and, 116, 120, 129-30, 134, 

182; Husserl and, 70, 154, 170-71, 138-39; nonexistence of time and, 

173, 175-76, 182; Kant and, 16, 130; relativity theory and, 116, 120 

108-09, 161, 172, 182; Kantian Godel, Marianne (mother of KG), 25 

intuition and, 17, 18, 173-74; Godel, Rudolf (brother of KG), 21, 25, 27 

mathematics and, 48; methodology, Godel formula, the (G), 65-67 

109-10, 180-81; neglect of the Godel numbering, natural numbers and, 

philosophical community, 162; 62-67 

ontology and, 107, 108, 111, 154, "Godel's Philosophy" (Goldfarb), 168 

161; vs. positivism, 32, 48; as Godel universes, 138-39, 184; vs. the 

precritical to Kant, 169-70; reality of 

actual world, 179; distribution of 

time and, 180; religion and, 12-13, matter and, 6; geometry and, 135-36; 

105, 155-56; response to Godel's Hawking and, 7-8, 143; nonexistence 

general relativity world models, of time and, 131; rotating, 133-34;

119-21; Russell and, 102, 161, 181; time travel and, 116, 120, 129-30, 

self-reflection and, 171; set theory 134, 181 

and, 137 Goebbels, Josef, 83 

Publications: Collected Works Goldfarb, Warren, 163, 168-72, 173-74, 

(posthumous omnibus), 176; "Is 175-76 

Mathematics Syntax of Language?," Gomperz, Heinrich, 22 

153; "My Philosophical Viewpoint," Gould, Glenn, 54-55 

104; "Remark About the Gravitation (Misner/Thorne), 140 

Relationship Between Relativity 

Gravity, 17, 146, 151; cosmological 

Theory and Idealistic Philosophy, A," 

constant and, 117; geometry and, 

127, 134-35; "Theory of Relativity 127; motion and, 123-24; 

and Kant, The," 108; "What is Schwarzchild singularity and, 116; 

Cantor's Continuum Problem?," 101 space-time and, 129 

Time: actual world vs. Godel universes, Graz, 80 

179; general relativity and, 115, 129; Grommer, Jakob, 71-72 

general relativity and rotating

universes, 133-34; general relativity 

llahn, Hans, 25, 27, 29, 52, 77, 86; on 

world models and, 112-16, 117-18, intuition, 50 

135; and geonietri/.ilion ot, I 1 *>; and I lawking, Stephen, 7 K, I \(,, 14 t 

ideality of, 177, ISO, I H I; intuitive 

I l.iwley, Dan, 14.' -It 

Hegel, Georg, 157, 182 

positivism, .32; primitive concepts 

Heidegger, Martin, 11 1 and, 169; of space and time, 17, 

18 

Heisenberg, Werner, 2, 4, 17, 43, 83, 100; 

uncertainty principle and, 3, 140 

Intuitionist mathematics, 75. See also 

Mathematical intuition 

Hempel, Carl, 165 Intuitive arithmetic, 60-67 

Herbrand, Jacques, 64, 68, 75, 86 Intuitive arithmetic truth (T), 127, 131, 

Hilbert, David, 8, 29, 74, 137, 169; 135, 138 

develops metamathematics, 24; Intuitive mathematical truth, 114 

mathematical formalism and, 52, Intuitive time, 137, 138; geometrical 53-57, 59; 

mathematics and, 43-44, 

structure of the Godel universe and, 

46, 50; vs. recursive functions, 68, 135; Godel rotating universes and, 

69; response to incompleteness 133; special relativity and, 128-29, 

theorem, 71, 72 

132, 180; temporal component (t) of

Hitler, Adolf, 22, 83 relativity theory and, 114, 115, 

127, 

Holton, Gerald, 16 129, 135 

Horwich, Paul, 168, 176 

Intuitive time, formal representation (t) in 

Husserl, Edmond, 70, 111, 113, 154, 170, 

Einstein-Minkowski space-time, 

182; Kantian idealism and, 107 113-14, 115, 127, 129, 131, 135, 

138 

Idealism: Husserlian phenomenology and, Irrational numbers, 44, 47, 71-72 

107; knowledge and, 106; Leibniz "Is Mathematics Syntax of Language?" 

and, 109; Mach and, 35; (Godel), 153 

mathematizing of physical theory 

and, 37; relativity theory and, 16; James, E. P., 176 

temporal, 131, 137, 181. See also Jeans, James, 124 

Kant, Immanuel Jews: Einstein as, 12, 85, 93-94; 

Ideality of time, 177, 180, 181 Furtwangler and, 83; Godel and, 13, 

Incompleteness theorem, 3, 8, 50, 151, 

86-87; reclassification as Mischlinge

182; effective calculability and, 75, and, 81-82; Schlick and, 41 

76; Husserlian phenomenology and, 

107; initial response of the Kant, Immanuel, 113, 161, 168, 175, 182; 

mathematical community, 70-71; 

Einstein and, 16, 108-09, 178; vs. 

legal code and, 99; mathematical Hahn, 50; intuition and, 173-74; 

formalism and, 53, 74-76, 105-06; 

phenomenology and, 172; Plato and, 

methodology of, 115; vs. positivism, 

165-66; vs. positivism, 29; reality 

140; proof of, 60-69; proof and idealism of, 106; relativity theory 

procedures and, 24; proof vs. truth and, 16, 108-09, 122, 169-70, 181; 

and, 135; response of Hilbert to, 71, space and, 17, 122; time and, 18, 

72; response of Russell to, 73; 122 

unprovability of consistency and, Karl Franzen University, 80 

58 Kleene, Stephen S., 156 

Infinitesimal numbers, 47 

Knowledge, 140; history of philosophy vs. 

Infinity, 54; continuum hypothesis and, 97, prejudice, 182; idealism and, 106; 

150; set theory and, 44-45, 48 Kant vs. positivism, 29; mathematics 

Introduction to Mathenidtiail Philosophy 

and, 30, 52; realism and, 101; reality

(Russell), 2S 

and, i 

Intuition, 179; I lalin on, SO; Katu mil, KoniKsberg, 70 

17.1ó74; mt-.iiiiiik .ind, S7; vs Krciscl, (icorg, 182 

Lambda calculus, 79 

Language: mathematics as, 30; philosophy 

Mathematics, 6, 50, 51, 122; computers 

and, 54, 57; continuum hypothesis 

and, 167, 179; positivism and, 28; and, 1; Einstein and, 5, 15-16; 

symbolic, 23 Hilbert and, 24, 43-44, 46, 52, 

Leibniz, Gottfried, 15, 130, 140, 155, 182; 53-54; historical crises of, 47-48; 

Einstein and, 109-10; existence of incompleteness theorem and, 3, 8; 

God and, 13; founds infinitesimal logic and, 23-24; positivism and, 30, 

calculus, 47 32, 49-50, 52; reality and, 17, 100; 

Lenin, V. I., 35 

vs. sensory experience in physical 

"Library of Living Philosophers," 102, 

science, 30. See also Arithmetic 

108, 119 Mathematics, Godel, 22, 32, 74; beauty Light, 

speed of, 2; frames of reference and, and, 184; vs. Carnap, 30; cognitive 

42-43 content and, 175; continuum 

Linguistics, structuralism and, 55 hypothesis and, 97, 100, 101, 150,

Logic, 56, 175; vs. Euclidean geometry, 151; vs. formalism, 52-53, 59; 

51-52; Frege and, 23-24, 29, 30; intuition and, 57-58; Kant and, 175; 

incompleteness theorem and, 103; Peano postulates and, 56-57; 

lambda calculus, 79; numbers and, 

philosophy and, 112; philosophy and 

136; positivism and, 29-30, 52, set theory, 137; vs. positivism, 52, 

182-83; realism and, 102 105-06, 182; proof vs. truth and, 

Logical space, physical systems and, 

136; unprovability of consistency 

38-39 and, 58; vs. Wittgenstein, 50. See alsc 

Loos, Adolf, 21-22 

Incompleteness theorem 

Lorentz, Hendrik Antoon, 42, 43, 55 Matter, 133; Godel universes and, 6; Lorentz 

transformations, inertial frames gravity and, 129; motion and, 124 

and, 42 Maxwell, James Clerk, 41-42 

Lowenthal, Ilsa, 148 

McTaggart, J. M. E., Ill 

McTaggart A and B series, 124-26, Mach, Ernst, 21, 32-37, 106, 148 

128-29, 132 

Mahler, Gustav, 16, 21 

Meaning: existence and, 132; intuition 

Marie, Mileva (first wife of AE), 148 and, 57-58 

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (Lenin), Mechanics, probability and, 36

35 Menger, Karl, 15, 21, 26, 27, 29, 39, 77, 86 

Mathematical formalism, 49, 137; Metamathematics, 24 

consistency and, 56, 58; Hilbert and, Metaphysics: Godel and, 169, 170; 

52, 53-57, 59; incompleteness Husserlian phenomenology and 

theorem and, 53, 76, 105-06; proof 

Kantian idealism, 107; positivism 

and, 57, 59-60, 72, 74-75. See also and, 43; primitive concepts and, 169 

Formal arithmetic (FA) Metatheory of formal arithmetic, 61-67 

Mathematical intuition, 57, 101, 176. See Minimalism, 21; positivism and, 28 

also Intuitionist mathematics Minkowski, Hermann, 5, 34 

Mathematical logic, 23; set theory and, Misner, Charles, 140 

24-25 Morgenstern, Oskar, 91, 98, 158, 159 

Mathematical realism, 140-41 Morse, Philip, 93 

Mathematical truth: formalism and, 49, Mother Night (Vonnegut), 88 

57, 72, 75; intuitive time and, 114; Motion, 133; Brownian, 37-38; Godel 

semantics vs. syntax and, 72, 74 

rotating universes, 134; gravity and.

12.1-24, 129; Maxwell vs. Newton, Painting, 21, 54 

41-42; relativity and frames of Parsons, Charles, 155-56 

reference, 43 Pascal, Blaise, 155 

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 11-12 Pauli, Wolfgang, 13, 101, 104 

Music, 21, 54; Berlin Philharmonic and Peano postulates, 56-57, 62 

Jews, 82; Einstein and, 11-12 Peebles, James, 142-43 

Myhill, John, 57 

Perception: intuition and, 32; Kantian 

"My Philosophical Viewpoint" (Godel), 104 

intuition and, 173-74; mathematical 

intuition and, 101, 176. See also 

Nagel, Thomas, 112 

Concept 

Natkin, Marcel, 27 Phaedo (Plato), 174 

Natural numbers, 110; concepts and, 172; Phenomenology: Godel and, 107, 170-71, 

continuum hypothesis and, 150; 173; Kantian idealism and, 107, 172 

definitions and, 55; as ideal forms, Philosophic der Arithmetik (Husserl), 171 

23; incompleteness theorem and, 61, Philosophy, 6; Einstein and, 101, 104, 107, 

62-69; infinity and, 44^46, 47; 111-12; Mach and, 32, 33;

mathematical formalism and, 74; 

positivism and, 29-30, 31; quantum 

Peano postulates and, 56-57 mechanics and, 100-101; 

Natural science, 14-15; mathematics and, Wittgenstein and, 166-68 

48 Philosophy, Godel, 22, 48, 104, 158, 164, 

Nazis, 86; Anschluss of Austria to 

165; Christianity and, 157; vs. 

Germany and, 80-82; vs. 

Earman, 177-80; Einstein and, 

Furtwangler, 83 108-09, 161; vs. Goldfarb, 163, 

Nelbock, Hans, 40 

168-72, 173-74, 175-76; history of 

Nernst, Walther, 84 

70, 

philosophy and, 182; Husserl and, 

Newton, Sir Isaac, 33, 109-10, 133, 146, 

154, 170-71, 173, 175-76, 182; Kant 

151; founds infinitesimal calculus, 47; and, 16, 108-09, 161, 172, 182; 

vs. Maxwell, 41-42; vs. special Kantian intuition and, 17, 18, 

relativity, 19, 31 173-74; methodology, 109-10, 

Nin, Anais, 51 

philosophical 

180-81; neglect of the 

Numbers, formal proof and, 136 community, 162; ontology and, 107,

Number theory: Godel and, 22-23, 56-57, 

108, 111, 154, 161; vs. positivism, 

62; Peano postulates and, 56-57, 62; 32, 48; as precritical to Kant, 169-70; 

symbolic logic and, 23 

reality of time and, 180; religion and, 

12-13, 105, 155-56; response to 

"On Godel's General Philosophical 

Godel's general relativity world 

Outlook" (Goldfarb), 168 models, 119-21; Russell and, 102, 

On the Phenomenology of the 161, 181; self-reflection and, 171; 

set 

Consciousness of Internal Time 

theory and, 137. See also Time, Godel 

(Husserl), 111 

Physical science, 140; mathematizing of 

Ontology: epistemology and, 3, 106, 107, 

physical theory and, 37; positivism 

112-13, 141, 154, 175, 182; and, 29-30; positivism and 

existence of God and, 13, 130, 155, 

mathematical truth, 49; sensory 

156, 161; relativity theory and, 108; experience and, 33; sensory 

temporal distance and, 134 experience vs. mathematics and, 30 

Oppeiilienncr, |. Kobirt, V 1, 96, 147 Physical theory: matheniatizing of, 37;

Oswald, Williclin, \h physical reality and, (4, 101 

Physics, 140; geometrization of, 127; and, 100, 153; positivism and, 43, 

Godel and, 22; mathematics and, 50; 48, 140 

mathematizing of physical theory Quantum physics, positivism and, 3 

and, 37; philosophy and, 112; Quantum reality, EPR paradox and, 153 

probability and, 36; without Quantum theory, Einstein and, 4 

philosophy, 107 Quine, W. V. O., 121, 156, 168 

Planck, Max, 84, 148, 151 

Plato, 23, 162, 174, 182, 184; geometry Rational numbers, 44 

and, 145; Kant on, 165-66; time and, Realism, 38; Husserlian phenomenology 109 

and Kantian idealism, 107; 

Platonism, 44, 50, 101, 130, 174 knowledge and, 101; logic and, 102; 

Podolsky, Boris, 100 vs. positivism, 106, 140-41 

Popper, Karl, 21, 29, 167 Reality: frames of reference and, 131-32; 

Porkert, Ilsa, 10 Godel and, 105; idealism and, 106; 

Positivism: atomic theory and, 35; Einstein knowledge and, 3; Mach and, 34-35, 

and, 105-06, 107, 148; vs. Godel, 37; mathematical truth and, 49;

32, 48, 52, 105-06; Hilbert and, 48, mathematics and, 17, 52, 100; 

49; vs. mathematical realism, 140-41; physical theory and, 34, 101; 

mathematics and, 43^44, 49-50, 52; 

positivism and, 31; relativistic space- 

quantum physics and, 3; reality and, time and, 110; of time, 111, 120, 

31; sensory experience and, 38; 130, 180 

Wittgenstein and, 28, 29, 30 Real numbers, 44, 45^16, 172 

Possibility: existence of God and, 130; Recursive definitions, Godel numbering 

nonexistence of time and, 131 and, 63-64 

Post, Emil, 74 Recursive functions, 63-64, 66, 68-69, 76, 

Princeton, 89; abodes of the Godels, 90-91 99 

Princeton Institute for Advanced Study Reichenbach, Hans, 70 

(IAS), 2, 10, 79, 85; founded, 78; Relativistic time, temporal component (t) Russell 

and, 103-04 of relativity theory, 113-14, 115, 

Principia Mathematica 127, 131, 135, 138 

(Russell/Whitehead), 25, 73, 79, 103, Relativity theory, 2, 118, 137, 182; formal 154 

vs. intuitive concept and, 128-29; 

Probability, 36, 148 geometrization of physics and, 127, 

Proceedings of the National Academy of 

146; idealism and, 16; inertial frames

Sciences, 119 and, 180; Kant and, 18, 108-09, 122, 

Proof, 54; consistency of arithmetic axioms 169-70, 181; Mach and, 33; 

and, 58; implicit definitions and, 55; Minkowski and, 34; reality and, 110; 

incompleteness theorem and, 24, 58, 

speed of light and, 43; temporal 

135; mathematical formalism and, component (t) of relativistic space- 

57, 59-60, 105; vs. truth, 49, 57, 72, time and, 112-15; time and, 5, 7; 

74, 75, 135, 136 time travel and, 116, 120; verification 

Properties: Russell set theory paradox and, 

and, 39-40. See also General relativity 

46-47, 51. See also Definition theory; Special relativity theory 

Putnam, Hilary, 111, 121 

Religion: Einstein and, 12; Godel and, 

Pythagorean theorem, 47 

12-13, 105, 155-56. Sec also God 

"Remark About the Relationship Between 

Quantum mechanics, 3, 83, 100; Einstein 

Relativity Theory and Idealistic 

and, 4, I4S, 152-53; EPR paradox Philosophy, A" (Godel), 127, 134 !S 

Republic; The (Plato), 162 Space-time, 6, 105, 110, 112, 146;

Rockefeller, John D., 32 

124, 

geometry and, 127; gravity and, 

Rosen, Nathan, 100 129; vs. intuitive time, 114, 115; 

Rosser, J. Barkley, 156 mathematical formalism and, 55; 

Rota, Gian-Carlo, 89 space vs. time and, 125-26 

Rotating universes, 6, 7, 133-34, 141, Special relativity theory, 109, 112, 127, 184 

133, 148; epistemology vs. ontology, 

Russell, Bertrand, 13, 24, 25, 39, 148, 113; flow of time and, 122-23; 

154, 161, 181; formal arithmetic and, frames of reference and, 131-32; 

60; incompleteness theorem and, 73, geometrization of time and, 18; 

102-03; positivism and, 29, 30; on intuitive time and, 180; mathematical 

Princeton, 89; response to formalism and, 55; matter and, 124; 

incompleteness theorem, 73; set 

McTaggart series and, 128-29; vs. 

theory paradox and, 46^8, 72, 137 

Newton, 19, 31; philosophy and, 

112; positivism and, 3; 

Schilpp, P. A., 102, 108, 119, 181 

protopositivism of, 105; static time 

Schlick, Moritz, 25, 29, 32, 39, 49, 86; and, 142; time and, 138, 139

murder of, 40-41 

Speed of light, 2; frames of reference and, 

Schlick circle, 27. See also Vienna Circle 42-43 

Schoenberg, Arnold, 21, 54-55 Spinoza, Benedict de, 12-13 

Schrodinger, Erwin, 77, 80-81, 83 Static time, nonexistence of time and, 142 

Schwarzchild, Karl, 116 Stein, Howard, 120 

Schwarzchild singularity, 116 Strauss, Leo, 164 

Schwatz, Boris, 12 Strauss, Richard, 21 

Schwinger, Julian, 147 

String theory, quantum mechanics and, 

Science: authenticity and, 56; positivism 152-53 

and, 31; sensory experience and, 33. 

Symbolic language, number theory and, l.i 

See also Natural science; Physical Syntax: mathematical formalism and, 53, 

science 

55-57; mathematics of language and, 

Scientific discovery, 151-52 30; vs. semantics, 55, 57, 60, 74 

Semantics vs. syntax, 55, 57, 60, 74 

Sensory experience, 54; Kant and, 166; Tarski, Alfred, 156 

Mach and, 33, 34; positivism and, Taussky-Todd, Olga, 10, 13, 26, 30-31 

29-32, 38 Temporal idealism, 121, 131, 137, 138-39,

Set theory, 32, 44, 48, 72, 110, 137, 175; 181 

continuum hypothesis and, 97, 151; Temporality, 122, 123, 146; component (t) Frege 

and, 24-25, 45, 47; Russell in relativity theory and, 112-15, 127, 

paradox and, 46-47, 51 

129, 131, 135, 138; McTaggart A 

Seyss-Inquart, Dr. Arthur, 82 and B series, 124-26, 128-29, 132; 

Siegel, C. L., 147 time travel and, 134 

Sitter, Wellem de, 1 17 

"Theory of Relativity and Kant, The" 

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 4-5 (Godel), 108 

Space: absolute, 42; conceptual, 175; Thermodynamics, probability and, 36 

geometrization of rime and, I 15; Thorne, Kip, 140 

gyroscopic rotation and inertial fields, "Thought" (Frege), 35 

I 13; Jeans and, 124; Kant and, 17, 18, Dimwits (Plato), 184 

111; leal numbers ,\ih\, 44; relativity Time, i; entropy mi^. '6; geometri/.ntion 

theory .mil, 11 vs. time, 125-26 

"I, I II, M; jeans and, 124; Kant 

and, 17, 18, 122; real numbers and, 44; relativity theory and, 5, 7, 18-19, 31; vs. space, 

125-26; special theory of relativity and, 105; static, 142. See also Space-time 

Time, Godel: actual world vs. Godel

universes, 179; general relativity and, 115, 129; general relativity and rotating universes, 

133-34; general relativity world models and, 112-16, 117-18, 135; and geometrization of, 

115; and ideality of, 177, 180, 181; intuitive arithmetic truth (T) and, 127, 138; intuitive 

time and, 137, 138, 142; intuitive time vs. temporal component (t) of relativistic spacetime, 

114, 115, 135; McTaggart series and, 124-26, 128-29, 132; nonexistence of, 131; 

ontological investigation of relativity and, 108, 111, 112-13; Plato and, 109; and reality of, 

111, 113, 120, 130; special relativity and, 122-24, 126-27, 128-29, 131-33, 139; time travel 

and, 181 

Time travel, 6, 142; cosmic time and, 181; geometry and, 129; Godel universes and, 116, 

120, 129-30, 134, 138-39; nonexistence of time and, 130; relativity theory and, 116, 120 

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 

(Wittgenstein), 82, 121, 182; logical space, 38-39; as nonsense, 166-67; positivism and, 28, 

30-31, 32, 50 

Transcendental phenomenology, idealism and, 107 

Transfinite numbers, 46, 51; aleph null, 45 

Trinity College, 167 

Truth: mathematical, 49; vs. proof, 49, 57, 72, 74, 75, 135, 136. See also Mathematical 

truth 

Turing, Alan, 5, 156, 158, 174; computers and, 68 

Ulam, Stanislaw, 150 Uncertainty principle, 3, 140 Unified field theory, 100, 146, 148, 183; 

string theory and, 152-53 

U.S. Constitution, 98-99 

U.S. Navy, 97 

Universal rotation, 6, 7, 133-34, 141,

184 Universe, the: cosmic time and, 129; 

cosmological constant and, 117; 

special relativity and age of, 122-24. 

See also Godel universes University of Vienna, 21 

Veblen, Oswald, 77, 78-79, 91, 157 Vienna, 21-22; Anschluss of Austria and, 

80-82 Vienna Circle, 25, 28-29, 30-31; Einstein 

and, 39, 40 Vonnegut, Kurt, 88 Von Neumann, John, 58, 70, 96, 104, 147, 

157 

Wang, Hao, 27, 105, 159, 160, 163 

Weil, Andre, 160 

Weil, Simone, 69, 157 

Wells, H. GÑ 119 

Weyl, Hermann, 58 

"What is Cantor's Continuum Problem?" (Godel), 101 

Wheeler, John, 96, 139-40, 141-43, 146

Whitehead, Albert North, 25 

Wittgenstein, Helene (sister of LW), 81, 82 

Wittgenstein, Hermine (sister of LW), 81, 82 

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 29, 74, 112, 154, 164, 179, 182; Anschluss of Austria and siblings of, 

81-82; Brahms and, 54; logical space and, 38-39; Loos and, 21-22; mathematics vs. sensory 

experience, 30; philosophy and, 166-68; positivism and, 28; Russell and, 103 

Wittgenstein, Margarete (sister of LW), 81 

Wittgenstein, Paul (brother of LW), 81-82 

"World Structure in the Large and in the Small" (Schrodinger), 80 

Wright, J. P., 119-20 

Zermelo, Ernst, 24, 72-73

Yourgrau P. A world without time.. the forgotten legacy of Goedel and Einstein (Basic Books, 2005)(ISBN 0465092934)(176s)_PPop_

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