So this is pretty weird.
I'm reading this book about Gödel's kooky denial of time's existence (which, by the way, I thought might somehow tie in with
Eckhart Tolle's kooky denial of time's existence, only in a more scientifically rigorous way, but that turns out not to be the case; whereas for Eckhart time doesn't exist because there is only ever the now, Gödel says that actually it's precisely the now that doesn't exist — there is no objective moment which is THIS moment independent of frame of reference, according to Einsteinian relativity — and, in fact, it's possible to invent universes in which one can travel to a past moment, using a really fast but sub-light-speed spaceship, thereby creating a
closed time loop; hence, the concept we mean when we talk about time [moves in one direction, can be divided at any given moment into past and future, ...] doesn't actually exist), and I come across an interesting bit of trivia. It turns out that Gödel's favourite movie was
Snow White! He used to rave about it to all his friends and try to convince them of its greatness!
I guess his friend Alan Turing, who developed the precise account of
recursive functions contained in G's 1931 first incompleteness theorem into a deep analysis of computability, thereby making the modern computer on which
I am writing this blog post possible, must have been at least partially listening, because when he decided that his (at the time criminal) homosexuality was not curable, he decided to
take his own life... by eating
an apple that he had injected with cyanide!
Gödel, by contrast, was morbidly afraid that others were trying to poison his food, and starved himself to death.
So this is pretty weird. I'm reading this book about Gödel's kooky denial of time's existence (which, by the way, I thought might somehow tie in with Eckhart Tolle's kooky denial of time's existence, only in a more scientifically rigorous way, but that turns out not to be the case; whereas for Eckhart time doesn't exist because there is only ever the now, Gödel says that actually it's precisely the now that doesn't exist — there is no objective moment which is THIS moment independent of frame of reference, according to Einsteinian relativity — and, in fact, it's possible to invent universes in which one can travel to a past moment, using a really fast but sub-light-speed spaceship, thereby creating a closed time loop; hence, the concept we mean when we talk about time [moves in one direction, can be divided at any given moment into past and future, ...] doesn't actually exist), and I come across an interesting bit of trivia. It turns out that Gödel's favourite movie was Snow White! He used to rave about it to all his friends and try to convince them of its greatness!
I guess his friend Alan Turing, who developed the precise account of recursive functions contained in G's 1931 first incompleteness theorem into a deep analysis of computability, thereby making the modern computer on which I am writing this blog post possible, must have been at least partially listening, because when he decided that his (at the time criminal) homosexuality was not curable, he decided to take his own life... by eating an apple that he had injected with cyanide! Gödel, by contrast, was morbidly afraid that others were trying to poison his food, and starved himself to death.
1 comment:
Man.
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