8 ms·
What were Einstein and Gödel talking about? (2005)
- noir-york 10y agoThanks for posting this. A beautifully written article.
- necessity 10y agoI just can't read these articles that try to be a little book narrating a cute little story. Just get to the point.
- ceilingscorpion 10y agoThen avoid The New Yorker
- solipsism 10y agoAlthough i don't agree that the article shouldn't be written the way it is.... Can someone tell me the point? Not sure if i should read it.
- mtreis86 10y agoI think the point of the article is summed up in one of the last paragraphs, "If time travel is possible, he submitted, then time itself is impossible. A past that can be revisited has not really passed. And the fact that the actual universe is expanding, rather than rotating, is irrelevant. Time, like God, is either necessary or nothing; if it disappears in one possible universe, it is undermined in every possible universe, including our own."
- ievahanordah 10y agoThe meaning of the words time and pasts are that you can't travel into the past or it would no longer be the past. Or, to call something the past in the first place means it can't be "travelled" to. If there is some phenomena that lets you do something like "time travel". Find a new word for it. Your not talking about time, travel, or past.
- gumby 10y agoIt's just a discussion of Gödel and Einstein written for the layperson. It has a little biographical detail and context of both, pretty reasonable brief explanations of their respective theories (incompleteness, photoelectric effect, brownian motion, special and general relativity) and then Gödel's contribution to General. A nice article In typical New Yorker fashion it assumes you have never heard of platonism, formal logic or 20th century physics but assumes you remember the future conjugations of regular latin verbs.
- bwanab 10y ago=== In typical New Yorker fashion it assumes you have never heard of platonism, formal logic or 20th century physics but assumes you remember the future conjugations of regular latin verbs.=== So true and so well put - And I love the New Yorker. If I use this phrase in the future should I attribute it to you (although "according to gumby" might not fly so well with my other New Yorker aficionados).
- gumby 10y agoThose callous sophisticates[+] should be more tolerant of names of others from different cultures (even if their name is funny in US English). [+] The referenced Kliban cartoon seems quintessentially New Yorker Magazine material but as far as I know he never appeared in it.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- max_ 10y agoWhy do some comments like this one turn grey?
- sharmajai 10y agoDownvoting.
- gumby 10y agoIt was downvoted.
- cgvgffyv 10y agoThe person who wrote it is deemed to be an idiot, according to the hivemind.
- sctb 10y agoWe don't need such inflammatory and obviously unfair comments like this on Hacker News.
- swiley 10y agoI really like what Scott Adams says: it's something like "People aren't idiots, they just experience bouts of idiocy (some more often than others)."
- ebcode 10y agoYeah, I get your point about the hivemind, but I think it's less damaging to see downvoting as being about the comment, not the person. iow, don't take it personally.
- labrador 10y agoPull up a chair and let me tell you a story about life before the internet, when people had far fewer reading choices and but time to savor the good ones... oh, wait, you don't want to hear a story. tl;dr Gödel came up with an alternate model of the Universe but Einstein didn't like it. Gödel starved himself to death after Einstein died.
- soggypopsicle 10y agounless I'm missing something large chunks were taken straight from Mathematical Apocrypha Redux : https://books.google.ca/books?id=8mBdvAjk_gQC&pg=PA155&lpg=PA155&dq=Every+chaos+is+a+wrong+appearance&source=bl&ots=2teQHq3kcO&sig=bLhjrRRQWSaCrtXdj6QRyCOZvhQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQwOSm_tfPAhVDHx4KHYGRBAcQ6AEIJzAC#v=onepage&q=Every%20chaos%20is%20a%20wrong%20appearance&f=false https://books.google.ca/books?id=8mBdvAjk_gQC&pg=PA155&lpg=P...
- patorjk 10y agoWow, you're not kidding: [Article] > He believed in ghosts; he had a morbid dread of being poisoned by refrigerator gases; he refused to go out when certain distinguished mathematicians were in town, apparently out of concern that they might try to kill him. “Every chaos is a wrong appearance,” he insisted—the paranoiac’s first axiom. vs [Book] > Gödel believed in ghosts; he had a morbid dread of being poisoned by refrigerator gases; he refused to go out when certain distinguished mathematicians were in town, apparently because he feared that they would try to kill him. Gödel said, "Every chaos is a wrong appearance." This is kind of a bummer too, because the article was a wonderful read, and it actually flows a lot better than the text in the book. However, it does appear that a lot of the article is a re-wording of what's in the book, just weaved together into a better flow. EDIT: Based on the other replies, I may have things reversed. It may be that the book is ripping off the article.
- hypertexthero 10y ago> Our mental powers, it is argued, must outstrip those of any computer, since a computer is just a logical system running on hardware, and our minds can arrive at truths that are beyond the reach of a logical system.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- acchow 10y agoThis argument has a name. I've seen it presented before and it is rather good. A gross simplification: a computer could never "see" the truth of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, but we humans can; therefore, we cannot be computers.
- akkartik 10y agoIt's by Roger Penrose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Mind
- GigaMos 10y agoActually Penrose has the idea/argument from Lucas, which has been written in 1959 and published in 1961 : https://www.jstor.org/stable/3749270 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3749270
- harshreality 10y agoIt's not a good argument at all. It's circular, or a tautology depending on how you define things. You're using different words, but what you start with is the same as what you end up with. You assert that humans are different from computers: computers can't "see" something that humans can. And you use that to "prove" that humans cannot be computers. Of course. If you start by asserting humans are computers plus some magic, then of course humans cannot be mere computers. You could write a computer program to generate random propositions, and test those logically against known truths. After enough testing, the program could assert that propositions not disproven are true. Voila! You have a computer program that has "arrived" at truths outside of a logical system. Some of those truths will be wrong, and some will be right, much like humans and their "truths" that are not based on logical reasoning. If you've never encountered a human claim to "see" the truth of something that turns out to be false, well, it happens... a lot.
- munificent 10y agoI will second the author's remark about "Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel". It's a magnificent book.
- ccvannorman 10y agoTIL: - Einstein and Godel were good friends - Einstein coined the term 'photon' - Einstein "failed to earn a master's in physics" - Godel was quite paranoid and weirder than I realized - Godel refused to argue (maths) unless he had an airtight proof of his correctness - Godel discovered a loophole in the constitution that would allow a dictator to rise (timely for 2016!) - Godel is the one who showed Einstein that backwards time travel was permitted according to relativity - Godel's precise cause of death was starvation brought on by paranoia of being poisoned
- ars 10y ago> was starvation brought on by paranoia of being poisoned After his wife couldn't make his food anymore, because he trusted only her. Somehow I find that both sweet and tragic at the same time. That a man can be that paranoid and yet trust someone so completely.
- behnamoh 10y agoJohn Nash (RIP) was paranoid too. It seems like this ordinary world is not enough for the genius, so their brains make new worlds and new scenarios (like "you get poisoned if you eat other people's food.")
- behnamoh 10y agoI think they're super creative, and not just in science. In fact, they can come up with super intelligent methods for killing people, including themselves. That's why they're always paranoid, cause they think other people can come up with the same things to kill them.
- jrs235 10y agoA little discussion on the constitutional flaw from 7+ years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=447852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=447852
- selimthegrim 10y agoWhen they say doctorate here they actually mean in the old German system Habilitation.
- drewrv 10y ago> “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.” Sounds to me like Einstein suffered from a bit of imposter syndrome.
- powertower 10y agoMost of his work was the product of other physicists work being brought together and slightly modified.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago> Gödel believed that mathematical abstractions were every bit as real as tables and chairs, a view that philosophers had come to regard as laughably naïve. It's not nearly as clear-cut. It's not the trendy theory du jour, of course, but it's an idea that perennially re-emerges in Physics circles. For a famous modern proponent (whose view is arguably even more radical), see Max Tegmark.
- merraksh 10y agoThen, as a sort of encore, he published a three-page note in September containing the most famous equation of all time: E = mc2. I can't believe the New Yorker can't typeset superscripts. The equation might be the most famous of all, but sometimes it's also the most misinterpreted and mistyped.
- getoj 10y agoThe original magazine text has it superscript - it's probably an OCR error.
- glinia 10y agoThe descriptions of Einstein and Gödel's feelings remind me of http://paulgraham.com/hamming.html http://paulgraham.com/hamming.html > When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. > The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.
- ievahanordah 10y agoI think the act that I can say something is right but also say something is wrong in a simple yet really abstract way says that none of you are right or wrong because your all just mentally jerking each other off unless your theorem s or whatever actually do something like create energy or make a new weapon or something. The physical world has a way of proving things that nerdy philosophers can't. Prove your theurums in the physical world with matter. Symbols on paper written ink doesn't prove shit. Neither do pixels on a computer.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- stirner 10y ago> [Gödel] believed in ghosts; he had a morbid dread of being poisoned by refrigerator gases I wonder how this relates to the refrigerator design Einstein worked on, "motivated by contemporary newspaper reports of a Berlin family who had been killed when a seal in their refrigerator failed and leaked toxic fumes into their home": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator#Histor...