A World Without Time



My summer reading series kicked off with Palle Yourgrau's "A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein" which I had happened upon in a bookstore in DC in March.

I'd imagine that this kind of book is difficult to write, trying at once to be accessible enough to the general public by focusing on the characters and their challenges, while at the same time trying to do justice to their work, the science, and wanting the work's detail & nuance to be the center of the story.

For the most part, Yourgrau succeeds in balancing the two -- painting engaging pictures of Godel and Einstein, illustrating the intersections between their lives & works, all the while taking us through Godel's works both from a general level of abstraction and (when necessary) into the nitty gritty of the logician's general method and it's applications (and implications) across the disciplines. It is only in the end, where he vociferiously defends Godel's reputation as a philosopher, that he betrays the reader's confidence in the narrative. It is also in this last section, where Yourgrau describes the politics of the academe (in this case, the philosophers closing ranks to exclude the outsider Godel) that the story loses it's idyllic/historical bend.

I was very interested in the philsophical questions surrounding Time in my younger days. Inevitably, readings of philosophy turned into readings of physics, astrophysics, and then back around to literature. "A World Without Time" in that sense reminds me that there is often a disconnect between our intuitive understandings of the world and the formalisms of that same world and that the reconciliation of the two is itself often a life's work.

Posted: Mon - July 3, 2006 at 11:17 PM      

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