Godel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Godel Universe

Description

What happens when the century's greatest logician meets the century's greatest physicist? In the case of Kurt Goedel and Albert Einstein, the result is Goedel's revolutionary new world models for relativity theory Although most famous for his Incompleteness Theorems in mathematical logic, Goedel was a philosopher in his own right, with a special interest in the philosophical problem of Time. Most people are unaware that Goedel and Einstein were close friends for many years at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. Goedel extended Einstein's General Theory of Relativity with cosmological models-now known as "Goedel Universes"-with extraordinary properties, including the possibility of closed, timelike curves that allow the philosophical fantasy of time travel to become a scientific reality. For Goedel, however, the reality of time travel signals the unreality of time. If he's right, the real meaning of the Einstein revolution remained a secret for half a century and is only being revealed now.