From Publishers Weekly
What if time is only an illusion, if it doesn't actually exist? Yourgrau, a Brandeis professor of philosophy, explains that Einstein's general theory of relativity may allow for this possibility, first realized by the great logician Kurt Gödel. Gödel is best known for his incompleteness theorem, one of the most important theorems in mathematical logic since Euclid. In a typically brief paper written for a Festschrift to honor his friend and Princeton neighbor Einstein, Gödel theorized the existence of what have come to be called Gödel universes: rotating universes in which time travel is possible. But if one can travel through time, how can time as we know it exist in these other universes, since the past is always present? And if time doesn't exist in other universes, then it may not exist in ours either. Yourgrau (The Disappearance of Time) writes that Gödel's paper was almost universally ignored, and he claims that since the logician's death, philosophers have gone out of their way to try to denigrate his work in fields other than logic. This book will appeal to fans of Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach and to Einstein junkies, and makes a fascinating companion to Rebecca Goldstein's Incompleteness (Forecasts, Dec. 20), but all readers who enjoy a good thought experiment or having basic preconceptions about their world challenged will enjoy this. (Jan.)
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Booklist
*Starred Review* During the half-dozen years before his death, Einstein's best friend was the Austrian logician Kurt Godel. Famous for his incompleteness theorems demonstrating that formal mathematical systems could not fully describe reality, Godel was spurred by Einstein's theories of relativity to discover that, in any universe fully described by those theories, time doesn't exist. He did this by proving the possibility of time travel, the catch being that if a past point in time can be reached, then it cannot have passed, which contradicts intuitive understanding of time. Einstein died before he could respond to Godel's revelation. Since then, except for troopers such as Yourgrau (this is his third and most popularly pitched book on Godel), philosophers have ignored the implications of time not existing in physical reality, which are that time must be an ideal and that philosophically long-discounted Platonism, which asserts the reality of the ideal, needs reconsideration. Such studied ignorance springs, Yourgrau says, from philosophers' disdain for Godel as a mere logician. He was also powerfully, pathetically eccentric--different from but not unlike Einstein in that respect--and Yourgrau relieves and arguably also informs demanding passages on Godel's work by sketching his life and personality as well as his thought. Ray Olson
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Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
