[b]Jim Holt
Gödel’s taste ran in another direction: his favorite movie was Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and when his wife put a pink flamingo in their front yard, he pronounced it furchtbar herzig—“awfully charming.”[/b]
I know: what to make of this?
She goes on to recount how she once found the philosopher Richard Rorty standing in a bit of a daze in Davidson’s food market. He told me in hushed tones that he’d just seen Gödel in the frozen food aisle.
I know: what to make of this?
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
Let’s be the exceptions.
Suppose there were nothing. Then there would be no laws; for laws, after all, are something. If there were no laws, then everything would be permitted. If everything were permitted, then nothing would be forbidden. So if there were nothing, nothing would be forbidden. Thus nothing is self-forbidding. Therefore, there must be something. QED.
QED my ass.
Bertrand Russell recounts in his autobiography that as an unhappy adolescent he frequently contemplated suicide. But he did not go through with it, he tells us, “because I wished to know more of mathematics.”
Of course with us it was philosophy.
If Einstein had upended our everyday notions about the physical world with his theory of relativity, the younger man, Kurt Gödel, had had a similarly subversive effect on our understanding of the abstract world of mathematics.
And that explains what exactly?