What were Einstein and Gödel talking about? (2005) | Hacker News Reader

What were Einstein and Gödel talking about? (2005)

newyorker.com

If I were to pull out a pair of binoculars and look at your speeding car, I would actually see its length contracted and you moving in slow motion inside.

This is not quite true. If you were to actually observe a relativistic object with your eye, you would not observe the object to be contracted in the direction of its motion. To quote A. French:

"It seems almost incredible in retrospect, but for over 50 years after Einstein's 1905 paper there was an unchallenged belief among physicists that the Lorentz contraction of a moving body could be seen or photographed. ... When proper account is taken of the time for light to travel to a stationary observer's eye from different parts of a moving object, one recognizes that the appropriate instants at which light must start out from various points of the body must be different, and hence are associated with different positions of the body as a whole. The general result of this is that the body appears distorted."

French then goes on to describe the case of a moving rod and the case of a moving rectangular board. Were you to actually see either of these objects moving relativistically, they would not appear contracted, but would instead appear rotated.

It's a subtle point and it was not recognized until 1959 by J. Terrell.

While reading this I was wondering about Godel's constitutional loophole to allow a dictatorship and Google'd upon a hacker news discussion of the same topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=447852

It's interesting that the Constitution loophole story seems to be based on hearsay. The New Yorker is pretty meticulous about fact-checking.

The quickest and latest summary (linked in the discussion caudicus posted above) is probably this: http://blog.plover.com/law/Godel-dictatorship-3.html

Follow to http://morgenstern.jeffreykegler.com/ to get the PDF of one participant's telling. The first page is a handwritten letter, but the story is typewritten.

A little more reading material:

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/G/Godel_universe.h..., and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel_metric

Searching for a detail, I found that this piece is reprinted in this book: E = Einstein: His Life, His Thought, and His Influence on Our Culture, by Donald Goldsmith, Marcia Bartusiak ( http://books.google.com/books?id=zGzcV40b3IkC&lpg=PP1... )

[The detail was the name of the founder of the Vienna circle, murdered in 1936 - it was the philosopher of science Moritz Schlick.]

The table of contents looks good. Einstein's Bovine Dreams would be a good name for a band ...

Incidentally:

> As another member of the institute, the physicist Freeman Dyson, observed...

This would be the same physicist who, among his many accomplishments, came up with the concept of the Dyson Sphere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

To see him and his son speak, along with possible Craig Venter:

http://www.brown.edu/Research/CCMB/Conferences/SYMPOSIUMMAY2...

I'm definitely going to be there; email me if you're going/interested.

Holy geez, that's an awesome set of speakers! I wish I could go to that conference.

Ahhh, Alastair Reynolds strikes again!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_spheres_in_popular_cultur...

I love it when reality leaks into my head from the world of imagination!

Great read! There's lots to ponder, but this cracked me up:

In referring to the Pink Flamingos Godel's wife put in their front lawn, Godel says "urchtbar herzig," or “awfully charming." If that isn't the greatest definition of kitsch, I don't know what is.

[edited for clarity]

Godel would probably have said "furchtbar herzig".

It seems to me a certain definition of Heaven could be eternally accompanying Einstein and Gödel on their walks to and from the office, trying to understand just what the hell it is they are talking about.

(Or Hell, depending on your disposition towards such things.)

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