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I just can't read these articles that try to be a little book narrating a cute little story. Just get to the point.

Pull 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.

Then avoid The New Yorker

Although 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.

I 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."

It'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.

=== 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).

Those 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.

Why do some comments like this one turn grey?

Downvoting.

It was downvoted.

The person who wrote it is deemed to be an idiot, according to the hivemind.

We don't need such inflammatory and obviously unfair comments like this on Hacker News.

I 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)."

Yeah, 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.

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