When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought - Jim Holt

[Applause] thank you for that very generous introduction appreciate it very happy to be here and delighted to see such a nice turnout are there any string theorists in the audience good because they were there a couple of string theorists when I spoke at the Harvard bookstore last week and they were very formidable and defending string theory against my criticisms so this book in this book I try to canvas what I consider to be the the most profound and most beautiful ideas over the last two centuries in science higher mathematics logic and philosophy and the my kind host mentioned some of them I'll just add a couple the in the early 19th century the advent of higher mathematics with Galois theory and the Riemann zeta conjecture then moving later into the 19th century Georg Cantor's theory of infinity and the infinitesimal which is the infinitely small then moving into the 20th century special and general relativity quantum mechanics the meta logic of Kurt girdle and girdle's incompleteness theorems the theory of computability which was pioneered by Alan Turing then moving closer to today the Langlands program for unifying mathematics string theory which is a program for unifying physics and then finally in a more philosophical area the the theory of truth and the the new approach to it which is ushered in a new era of metaphysics and philosophy and the in the in the issue of what the value of truth actually is which I'll get to in a second so these ideas I think these theories just strike me as profoundly possessing profound intrinsic beauty they are aesthetic patterns in the same way that poems or patterns and words and paintings or patterns colors and music patterns and sounds these are patterns and ideas and they're all the more permanent for that and I think that they demonstrate the how mathematics philosophy and even physics and the sciences are really akin to the creative arts there's a sort of a marvelous creative freedom in them Georg Cantor the the creator of the theory of infinity said the essence of mathematics is freedom the freedom to create beautiful imaginary worlds which are so much more beautiful than the ugly and no constructive world we live in so now that I've and also by the way this beauty truth connection is you know it seems you know you're probably all thinking of Keats beauty is truth truth beauty that is all you need to you know on earth and all you need to know that has taken very seriously by mathematicians and physicists in particular the idea that some theories like string theory which so far is not even a theory has made no testable predictions it's so beautiful it has to be true or the Riemann zeta conjecture which is a very beautiful conjecture about the relationship between the the zeros of the zeta function and the the music of the prime numbers that's so beautiful it has to be true even though no one can prove it so there's almost a mystical strain I think in the in the outlook of many great mathematicians and and philosophers and and physicists okay so the another aspect of this that really interests me is that is the fierce fierce controversy over many of these issues the fact that the nature of time is still being Vemma lead abated and I'm privileged to spend a lot of time in conferences with physicists and philosophers of physics and to hear the terms in which they they denounce one another as being you know not just wrong but crazy or not even wrong and and the more you know the physicists will sometimes agree on their calculations but they never agree on anything else like the nature of time or the nature of space and that sort of thing the the relationship between quantum mechanics and relativity these are the two pillars of fundamental science a very fraught contested issue and an Einstein of who of course created relativity theory was a was a very harsh critic of quantum mechanics as many of you probably know and this debate is going on the databar what's called nonlocality the idea that the universe because of quantum entanglement is holistic and everything is kind of I mean I'm speaking a little bit schlock Lee here but this is a this is an idea that there's still vehement debates over might also add string theory in the future of physics there actually there's almost warfare over this in the physics community string theory has been around now for about 50 years and it's never quite happens it's always you know the success is always just over the horizon and so the feeling is that now two generations of physicists may have been wasting their time and their talent on a will of the wisp and then finally that as I mentioned earlier the the theory of truth is truth really a correspondence between our propositions and reality itself as some philosophers believe or is it merely a kind of as Nietzsche put it is truth merely a mobile army of metaphors Nietzsche said there are no facts there are only interpretations this is a problem you know a issue that has a special practical practical topicality now because for political reasons so the second aspect so beauty controversy and then finally the human element the human factor all of these profound beautiful powerful ideas have flesh-and-blood progenitor z-- men and women and who led very interesting lives often lot comical lives elements of forests and bathos and often lot lives of great tragedy now I feel when this book my book was reviewed last week in the very generously in the New York Times the reviewer a woman named Perl Segal said that as far as she can tell in in looking at the creators of these ideas they fell into three categories these are her words incorrigible eccentrics delusional Hermits and oh no and I thought you know that's not entirely fair but it's a little bit my fault in the in the preface for example I I said you know more often in many cases the lives of these figures as a tragic arc have a tragic Garg the originator of group theory Averys Galois was killed in a duel before he reached his 21st birthday the most revolutionary mathematician of the last half-century Alexandre gratin deke and a disturb Yulin days as a delusional hermit in the Pyrenees the creator of the theory of infinity Georg counter was a Kabbalistic mystic who died in an insane asylum by the way David Foster Wallace who shares my deep or shared my deep interest in Cantor also unfortunately shared Cantor's depressive tendencies and I write about the relationship David Foster Wallace's attempt to grapple with Cantor's theory of infinity in the book and as you all know David Foster Wallace very sadly and tragically committed suicide about four or five years ago by hanging himself then Oh another good example Ada Lovelace who is the cult goddess of cyber feminism she was in the namesake of the computer language that the Pentagon uses to control weapons systems Ada Lovelace she was plagued by nervous crises brought about by her obsession with us atoning for the incestuous excesses of her father who happened to be the poet Lord Byron the great Russian masters of infinity Dmitri Edgar of and Pavel renske were denounced for their anti materialist spiritualism and murdered in Stalin's gulag and then finally Alan Turing mino' his story it was just a subject of a film starring Benedict Cumberbatch called the imitation game which very bad film I think because it made touring seem a humorless insufferable nerd which he was not at all but touring who conceived the computer solved the greatest logic problem of his time and saved countless lives by cracking the Nazi Enigma code took his own life for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious by biting into a cyanide laced Apple of course he had been arrested for homosexuality after he had been you know he had heroically saved Britain during the the dark days of the early 1940s when it looked like it was going to go down to defeat by the Nazis by cracking the Enigma code and could never talk about this it was top secret and when he was arrested and and sentenced to either a prison term or chemical castration he didn't say wait a minute I saved this country I cracked the Enigma code I saved hundreds of thousands of lives i shortened the war for two years no he just accepted the punishment so and then finally I mentioned Kurt girdled and the girl incompleteness theorems a girdle was it was a bit of a paranoiac he thought there was a universal plot afoot to poison him and so he reacted to this by refusing to eat any food and so he starved himself to death which is almost like dying of a logical paradox so um let me just die I'm going to go on to mention a figure whom who is the to me is the real hero or I should say heroine it's a woman of the book a bit later but first I want to just tell you a little anecdote about Kurt girdle and I'm going to I hope you'll forgive me I don't like reading but this is very short and if any of you feel you're being bored into a coma you can you can frown and mutter and but it's very short it's about five minutes it's called girdle takes on the US Constitution so Aristotle the second greatest logician of all time was also an expert on political constitutions can the same be said for the greatest logician the greatest logician of all time curt girdle girdle had a genius for detecting the paradoxical and unexpected places he looked into the axioms of mathematics and saw incompleteness he looked into the equations of general relativity and saw closed timelike loops and he looked into the Constitution in the United States and saw a logical loophole that could allow a dictator to take power or did he the scene is New Jersey 1947 sixteen years earlier girdle had son the intellectual world by proving that no logical system could ever capture all the truths of mathematics a result that along with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle was to become iconic of the limitations of human knowledge he had left Austria for the United States when the Nazis took over and for nearly a decade he had been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton it was time he decided to become an American citizen earlier that year he had found a curious new solution to Einsteins cosmological equations one that made space-time rotate rather than expand in this girdle universe it would be possible to journey in a big circle and arrive back at your starting point before you left but girdle's research into time travel was interrupted by hit a citizenship hearing scheduled for December 5th and Trenton New Jersey his character witnesses were to be his close friends Albert Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern he was one of the cofounders of game theory and who also served that day as a girl chauffeur being a fastidious man girdle decided to make a close study of the American of American political institutions in preparation for a citizenship exam on the eve of the hearing girdle called Morgenstern in state of agitation he had found a logical inconsistency in the Constitution he said Morgenstern was amused by this but he realized that girl was dead serious he urged him not to mention the matter to the judge fearing to eject it would jeopardize the citizenship did so on the short drive to Trenton the next day Einstein and Morgenstern tried to distract girdle with jokes Einstein is speaking the practical one it's kind of a role reversal so they arrive to the court the judge whose name is Philip Forman otherwise forgotten history was impressed by girls eminent witnesses you know Einstein borgen's not bad and he invited the trio up into his chambers after some small talk he said to girdle up to now you've held German citizenship no girl corrected Austrian oh and anyhow continued the judge it was under an evil dictatorship but fortunately that's not possible in America on the contrary I know how that can happen cry girdle and he began to explain how the Constitution might permit such a thing to occur the judge however indicated that he was not interested and an Einstein to Morgenstern succeeded in quieting the examinee down by the way this exchange I got this secondhand I got this from Salomon pfefferman who was an eminent logician and a friend of mine who got it from Morgenstern himself so a few months later girdle took his oath of citizenship writing to his mother back in Vienna he commented that quote when went home with the impression that American citizenship in contrast to most others really meant something now for those of us who've never read the Constitution all the way through this anecdote cannot but be disturbing what was the logical flaw that girdle believed he had described in the document could the founding fathers have inadvertently left out left open a legal door to fascism it should be remembered the girdle while it was supremely logical he was also supremely paranoid and not a little naive there was something sweetly ponine liked about him panini of course was the character in a Nabokov novel who reminded me of girdle girdle believed in ghosts get a morbid dread of refrigerator gases he pronounced the pink flamingo that his hornish wife placed outside is in the front yard of their house first pothead sig which means awfully charming and he was convinced based on those measurements he had made on a newspaper photograph the general mcarthur had been replaced by an imposter now you're laughing but I say this parent his paranoia Noah though was decidedly tragic certain forces quote-unquote were at work in the world directly submerging the good he believed so was the contradiction in the Constitution or is it girls head so I began to wonder about this and I got in touch with Lawrence tribe the great jurisprudential figure at Harbor who actually should have been a Supreme Court justice by now if things had gone better in previous elections and I knew that Lawrence tribe had had an interest in in higher mathematics when he was an undergraduate and so I thought maybe you know he had a hypothesis about what girdle might have seen and he said you know I don't think girdle found anything like a you know a P and not P contradiction in the Constitution but what could have bothered him is article 5 which is which pertains to amending the Constitution and it imposes no substantive restrictions on what sort of amendments can be made so a tribe said it would be possible by a series of amendments to eliminate the essential features a Republican form of government and obliterate virtually all the protections of human rights but talking to you but if I'm correct girdle's concern rested on something of a non sequitur the idea that any Constitution could so firmly entrench a set of basic rights and principles as to make them invulnerable to orderly repudiation as unrealistic nations like India that purport to make certain basic principles uh namenda below sense experience greater fidelity to human rights or democracy than has the United States so a couple of other legal scholars I spoke to agreed with this interpretation but the the mystery of whether a girdle found something genuinely kinky and the constitution it remains a mystery a bit like the mystery of whether fair MA really found a marvelous proof to his his theorem so how I wish I had been the judge of that citizenship hearing imagine being presented with the opportunity to lean forward look this agitated genius in the eye and say surely you must be joking mister girdle so I want to talk finally about the time is there any way I rattle on so okay no good I want to talk about another figure who unlike all of the figures I've mentioned so far had nothing really the least bit pathological or dysfunctional about her psychic makeup her name is Emmie nurture that's n OE th er she was born in Bavaria in the 1880s she showed great mathematical genius earned a PhD in mathematics and should have been appointed to the Faculty of the German center of mathematics at the time which was in Guertin gun but she was a woman and the faculty was wood wood could not accountants the idea of a woman being a professor there and it wasn't the mathematicians who objected it was the historians and the classicists a garden again said no way we're having a woman on the faculty and the great mathematician the Dean of a German mathematics at the time David David Hilbert said I see no reason why Emmie nurtures sex should be an impediment to her appointment after all gentlemen we are a university not a bathhouse so but he did not prevail she was allowed to give unpaid lectures she was she was Jewish so when the Nazis took power and destroyed virtually destroyed German mathematics and physics she was able to escape to America ended up in Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania and died prematurely at the age of 52 of a sudden infection when she died Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the New York Times pointing out that one of the great geniuses of the era had had had died without the Times noting in an obituary and I'm quoting from the letter he said that that he called Emmie nurture the the greatest creative genius that mathematics had produced in the era since women had access to higher education and he went on to talk about how her approach to pure mathematics was the equivalent of poetry was the poetry of logical idea of logical ideas as Einstein put it now what did I mean nurture achieve to to their two categories of achievement the first is that she revolution what revolutionized the way higher mathematics was done she created what is now called abstract algebra I hope some of you were lucky enough to study that as undergraduates it's it comprises group Theory ring theory field theory Galois theory beautiful stuff beautiful abstract structures towers of structures with subtle correspondences between them it's it's a way of grappling with mathematical mysteries by raising the level of abstraction and and generality and she pioneered this she single-handedly revolutionized the way mathematics was done and and but it and is if that is not enough she proved what is called nurtures theorem in 1918 this theorem was called by richard fineman the great physicist you all know a theorem of unbelievable beauty and profundity and a discovery that most physicists still find staggering what is this theorem what is nurturers theorem what she discovered was that in any theory of physics any ace any symmetry in the theory any invariance which means an asymmetry in a theory means that the theory looks the same regardless of the angle from which you view it a physical theory of physics for example is invariant under time translation because if you do an experiment now and you do the same experiment in a hundred years you'll get the same result etc what nurture proved was that for every symmetry or invariance in a theory there's a corresponding conservation principle so corresponding to the two the symmetry of a theory under time translation is the conservation of energy which you know is it is is the most you know it perhaps the most profound and important conservation principle that you know the bedrock of science now who would have thought that an invariance in a theory corresponds to a conservation principle this something that is that physicists you know a discovery that they use every day and it's still rather mysterious it's almost as though the conservation of energy is in the eye of the beholder rather than in the theory itself and I spend a lot of time trying to explain these ideas I know I'm giving them in a very elliptical way right now and no one should be expected to understand where they're based on on the garbled account I've just given but my point of the book is to try to take these profound ideas to strip them down to their essence and and to show their beauty and and often their philosophical implications so I really if if there's any takeaway it's a vulgar expression but I use it anyway from this book I would like it to be that any nurture is is the most unappreciated underappreciated figure in 20th century physics and mathematics and that her great discovery nurtures theorem is a discovery of great philosophical richness which I explore in the book so ok Emmie nurture also a lovely lovely person as one of her contemporaries said she had a heart that was absolutely free of malice she loved her students and they loved her she had an amazing intellectual generosity and humility she was also a poet and a novelist a great great woman okay so I've described all of these figures a lot of them you know a bit daft a bit balmy a lot of them who were sort of cut down prematurely in a duels or in Stalin's gulag what are we to make of them of the lives they led these are all people who just who created structures of abstract beauty who created organic unities that that I would argue and I do argue in the book a transcend merely concerns and have objective value and in they may have led tragic lives in many cases but a tragic life can be a life well worth living it can be a good life it can be much better than a happy life and all of us who lead sort of relatively carefree happy lives we live in the moment you know we should be envious of these figures even though they suffered a great deal in the pursuit of these beautiful structures and in doing that not only did they transcend their finite limits and they contact with it with a transcendent reality also by the way they had you know huge antagonistic forces arrayed against them you know every scowl wha the young guy who was killed on the eve of his 20th 21st birthday who discovered Galois theory and group Theory killed possibly by an agent provocateur of the of the French monarchy because he was a political firebrand you know we're talking about a teenager if a movie were made about every Skywatch it should have been played have been played by Leo DiCaprio circa the titanic's they actually look alike cheap observation but I had to make it he so he was killed you know possibly by an ashram provocateur of the French monarchy in the stool the Cantor or tore the the pioneer of the theory infinity was mocked by his his his peers who said his idea of infinity he was introducing a one of them put a cholera bacillus into mathematics it was mathematical insanity it was fog upon fog so there was you know a great deal of obtuseness uh on the part of this peers and that caused him to get become depressed and to check into asylums you know when I said he died in an asylum a Alan Turing a victim of homophobic bigotry and was you know got a you know a terrible treatment given what he had accomplished for Britain and by the way I just want to read the the Prime Minister several years ago of England Gordon Brown said a very beautiful thing about touring apologizing to him and I'll just read it it's two lines in 2009 the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a formal apology to touring on behalf of quote all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work for the inhumane treatment touring received we're sorry you deserve so much better you said any nurturer a victim of sexism and and of Nazism these and then the other the name worshiping mathematical mystics who pioneered also pioneered infinity were murdered by Stalin in the gulag but also these are figures I don't know how many of you I'm taking a long time to wind up all right this is like the longest peroration how many of you know Plato's allegory of the cave and good and when you know so basically where all of us are in the situation of we're in a dark cave and we're seeing shadows on the wall cast by a fire and we mistake those shadows for reality but then some of us some warf sort of intrepid figures among us decide to leave the cave and they go out into the sunlight and they see real things for the first time not just shadows of things and then they look up and they see the Sun which is the source of all truth and all being and I think oh this is reality and they go back in the cave and of course they've been looking at Sun sir they're a bit blinded and when they returned to the cave they kind of fumble around and look a little bit kind of wonky and not fully functional and the people say ah you know they're talking about these higher realities and they can barely function with us in the cave well all of these figures were a little bit like the people who escaped Plato's cave and saw the Sun and so I think we should we should all delight in their achievements we should contemplate their achievements we should resonate with them and that's why I wrote this book thank you so now let's have a little let's stir it up a little bit someone I hope someone's yeah you know we have no string theorist that's unfortunate but I I hope someone will take issue with something I said or did I make any substantive assertions anyway anyone anyone oh yeah sorry but why don't you up to the microphone no okay oh well that's a look let me just add that in addition to these big controversies over string theory the existence of God the fate of the universe and so forth there are lots of smaller controversies that I described in the book that turn on really curious and very beautiful puzzles and I'll just name a couple of theirs one of them is called the Monty Hall problem which I don't know if any of you remember let's make a deal but Monty Hall actually played a very clever clever logical trick on the contestants and that's the and and that actually actually leads to something of a tragic story in my book but I you'll have to look you know check it out the library to see what that is the Newcomb's problem and the paradox of choice a really good one just one more second a really interesting question why does a mirror reverse left and right but not up and down that may seem like a silly problem to you but it's engendered a really amusing and deep philosophical controversy then the pan psychism the idea that everything is endowed with consciousness why can't anyone get Heisenberg's uncertainty principle right etc etcetera so there all of these oh the the Doomsday argument that sounds he pocket of so yeah I didn't want and also a couple of two more things and yeah one second I'm sorry we all know death is bad but exactly why is death bad Epicurus had one idea Spinoza had another idea Thomas Nagel a contemporary has a third idea I tried to kind of sort and finally we all know life is absurd but I figured out exactly the reason why life is absurd and it's not because you're so tiny or you live so so it for such a brief time or because none of your concerns really have objective value it's something else okay sorry about that but I will know it's all very entertaining I wonder if you grapple with this and this is a question that I find difficult to phrase I would have do you grapple at all with this tendency to put insanity or near insanity on another plane from experience and did you find it odd that taking I mean I mean it's a-- and kind of setting her aside from the griddles and the other disturbed people of the world was attention or odd yeah I mean when you think about it only two of the figures had suffered from anything like clinical insanity and that yeah yeah and so the other I mean touring even though he committed suicide was had a sort of a very wholesome psychological makeup and it's it's it's also it's possible by the way the touring was assassinated I I think there's about a maybe a 10 to 15 percent probability of that because he not answering your question at all I'm sorry you were asking yeah so the girdle was you know almost clinically paranoiac he refused to go to Washington to receive the National Medal of Science from from Gerald Ford in 1976 because he thought someone might try to assassinate him there and then yeah Kanter who was depressive and you know I think that was you know probably just a case of done you know biochemistry not having enough you know kind of happiness molecules completely contingent matter you know the same is probably true of David Wallace I don't know whether the this sort of genius the very different sort of genius that girdle I'm sorry the Kanter and David Foster Wallace had was linked to their depressive Ness I know that you know there there are psychological studies on this as you may know that if you did that your chances of being a creative genius go up if you are subject to sight bipolar disorder and they go up even more if you have a near blood relative who is prone to a bipolar disorder so you know ideally that's really life is unfair because you know your your your sister is the depressed one and you're the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist that's awful but yeah i don't know i mean i i think that if you that that that having encounters with with abstract structures that are sublimely beautiful tends to cheer people up in my experience but I know that some people and I you know friends of mine are in this genius category especially a certain philosophy of physics that I'm very good friends with who is that one of the most Swift witted and and and profound thinkers I know and every once in a while he feels that he's a charlatan and that a and fraud and he's actually not connecting with anything important and he goes into a very deep depression and he's the least fraudulent person I know that's the irony of it so well anyway I I sort of evaded your question but it was a good question that's thank you hi hi I hope it's not too disappointing but I'm not going to take issue with anything that you said here didn't think so but I would like to know a little bit more about ME neuter and her and her theorem I wasn't familiar with her even though I have some familiarity with Bryn Mawr College I guess that's where she was on the faculty is that right oh yeah only for about she died about two years after she escaped the Nazis in Vienna so I was just wondering whether you have any other examples that you could kind of tell us quickly of where a conservation law sort of goes along with a particular invariance principle for example you mentioned conservation of energy that was the example you gave is that same correspondence cover conservation of matter well I mean that would be mass energy that would fall out of the conservation of energy that would be good another example would be invariance under spatial translation is equivalent to conservation of momentum invariance under angular orientation is equivalent to conservation of angular momentum but there also lots of internal symmetries that give rise to conservation principles if you explore that the standard model of particle physics and now we're getting into deep waters but no it's it's a very very general principle and it's a you know supreme utility if you're doing physics that goes beyond quantum mechanics this beautiful idea due to any nurturer is is is one of the most powerful ideas that underlies quantum field theory so yeah it's well worth exploring and I just you know provide there's an essay on it in the book and you know I give sources for further reading because I think it's something it's it's so profound and delightful to explore and I said even though even Richard Fineman still finds this theorem and the in the equivalence between invariance and conservation principles to be staggering and you know if he's staggered that's that's pretty this thing a lot thank you I have won one concern and that is Thomas yeah well I complete lack of rigor is that it it's it's this that I would like to know about these wonderful things like the conservation laws and how they are related to symmetry and so on and at the same time I am modest in my ability to understand abstract ideas I don't not I'm not a Richard Fineman and I'm not even a Jim Holt in any way I feel very frustrated in the sense that you speak about beauty that is transcendent but I'm down here and I can't understand do you like Bach yes okay do you have a deep understanding of the theory of counterpoint no okay there you go you can you can see the beauty in Bach without knowing the theorem of counterpoint into the theory whew their you know their levels at which all of us can participate in this beauty and resonate with it and I do appreciate that much yeah I'm I just feel frustrated in the fact that there is so much more that is inaccessible yeah and then the tragedy is that we've all lost brain plasticity it's too late in a sense but you have to learn this stuff when you're young so if you you know any of you it can have any sway over young people tell them you know get this stuff hardwired in your brain when you have brain plasticity take some challenge and you know courses in that didn't force you to think abstractly in in abstract symbolic terms and that will play you know life long dividends and an intellectual pleasure and I got just enough of it you know these the circuitry laid down early on I wish I had done so much more it's like when you're in the foxhole and the war you think I wish I wish I'd dug this foxhole a little deeper that's how I feel but you know the bullets are whizzing overhead but yeah I mean there's you can still I mean a lot of this I you know I try to explain things most montón but most of my friends are not mathematicians or physicists or philosophers they're just you know ordinary they're journalists and I love talking about this stuff with them and Paroles Segal who doesn't know who the Times reviewer doesn't know anything about this and she said it's really accessible and I think she was you know she was being charitable but yeah but as far as you know learning enough physics to master string theory it's hopeless for both of us so you know well I feel your plan of the comment if I can make it to be different sure is that I understand that Einstein wrote a letter to the man who invented the word holism in which he said that in the twenty in the next century relativity and holism will be the main things to look at that we were aware of that no I know Einstein hated holism Einstein believed that it very strongly the principle of locality you know someone said all politics politics is local line sign that all physics should be local that one thing on one side of the galaxy shouldn't be able to entry to influence something on the other side of the galaxy instantaneously it could only happen through waves or particles going between them unfortunately quantum mechanics turns out to be non-local yeah so the you know Einstein was Einstein wrong he was sort of betrayed by nature day if if God had been clever as Einstein the world would have been rational and local but it's not that's part of the tragedy of Einstein but he hated holism yeah all of us hate holism because it's kind of new agey sounding and you know the bad kind of metaphysics okay yeah yes certainly there must have been there must have been some brilliant mathematicians or physicists of philosophers who who had relatively normal quiet calm lives right Einstein has come up maybe David Hume and philosophy are they talked about in the book too or is it just not they just not make an interesting don't worry or is that not the subject of the book well eccentrics are fun I mean sorry I do play up that angle and the you know the thing about being a genius is you're not that concerned with self presentation because you know it's obvious you know Einstein could get away with not wearing socks and combing his hair with that pillow because he was Einstein and whereas if you are a professor of if you're in the literate crowd you have to be very careful about your self presentation because all of the Theory you're spouting is basically bull right that's right right there by the last essay is about truth and I mean since this is c-span I guess I should say it's about truth versus the excrement of the male of the bovine species which can be abbreviated to Bowl and the in the academic Bowl is of large characters but anyway I'm Way off the subject yeah so yeah I guess the point is that um sorry my point is that if you write a book that's all about all these geniuses and they all have very eccentric bizarre personalities then you're almost perhaps sending the wrong messages sir yeah yeah well that what is what is important is having it or what will lead you to be a genius is having a bizarre personality and and that's not why these people are so tremendously interesting it's it's Sara their personality per se it's it's what they're able to discover yeah and by the way I think the case of Alan Turing I complained about the film the imitation game because it presented touring as someone who was the antisocial morbidly shy and incapable and even grasping the idea of a joke in fact touring was extremely funny he was we wonderfully collegial everyone loved working with them because he was so generous in explaining things and he was fun to be around and so forth and so I I hated you know I'm guilty of doing what the movie did in some respects making these people seem to be more morbid and more tragic and were absurd than they actually are so yeah but criticism well taken and thank you for that the was annoying Minh pretty normal well considering that he was one of the models for dr. Strangelove yeah yeah he was yeah he dressed well he was he was he bought a Cadillac every two years whether he directed a previous one or not yeah so von Neumann is sort of a betting war in my book because and I contrast him with touring because von Neumann was responsible for the creation of the first big functioning computer which was in Princeton in the late 1940s he got it built and the initial calculation it did was for the hydrogen bomb and the calculation was successful and that first hydrogen bomb was detonated in the Pacific I tell the story but in the book I forget the exact atoll where it happened and it just and you know it destroyed all the coral reef for you know hundreds of miles around and and burnt up all the fish and the porpoises and everything and so you know this seems that hydrogen bomb has never really done anyone any good and it was it was created with an actual computer and touring created an imaginary computer the touring machine and that enabled him to see his way to cracking the Enigma the Nazi Enigma code which actually did save hundreds of thousands of lives and so but yeah by Noman as you know you know as a mathematical genius of the very first rank one of the three or four greatest ones of the 20th century you're quite right there very different from Einstein because he tended to take other fine Norman would take other people's theories and put them in a more perfect version he created this you know the standard formalism for quantum mechanics as you as you probably know but then he died early as so many of the people involved in Los Alamos did from cancer you know they were probably all poisoned by radiation from watching those tests at Los Alamos but yeah he was a relatively normal sociable guy and so forth and he was but yeah III prefer touring the other thing is because you quickly explained with Kripke good did you know is you know so all Kripke is a is the most influential philosopher alive today it's possible that many of you haven't heard of them he was the only four who has ever been on the cover of the New York Times Magazine that was in 1977 by the way the profile him written in the New York Times magazine that year was bye-bye I can't see I'm slippin saying that the the man who won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Martin Luther King Taylor branch Kripke created what's called the new theory of reference which revolutionized the way philosophy is done and brought bat back metaphysics as a live option for philosophers or did he a few years ago someone made the case that these ideas on which the new theory of reference is based were actually due to a woman named Ruth Marcus and there was a big controversy over whether the credit for these for this philosophical revolution had been stolen from the rightful author of these ideas and and attributed to Kripke because you know they flipped the profession needed a new genius figure they needed a kind of romantic genius figure in the mold of Ludwig Wittgenstein the last great genius figure in philosophy and so the possibility was raised that a grave injustice had been done to this woman who by the way was was just was a housewife during the years when she came up with these ideas which are rather technical ideas in what's called modal logic that's the logic of possibility and necessity and she generalized them to the philosophy of language and so I examined you know who should get credit for this these discoveries very closely anything you know they both deserve credit but you know clearly Ruth Barkin Marcus another case of a woman who was who was robbed of the full credit that she was due due but but I'm not questioning the genius of saul kripke who is is you know by by consensus the greatest living philosopher and by the way his father is a rabbi who Kripke was born in Brooklyn and then the family moved to Omaha and his father became friends with Warren Buffett and he had a little bit of money to invest back in the 50s city invested with Buffett and it grooved you know something like $10,000 and and and it grew to some you know 50 or 70 million dollars so he's the second richest rabbi in America and the The Times business section ran a front page profile of Rabbi Kripke a few years ago and they completely neglected to say that his son was the most famous philosopher and had been on the cover of The Times magazine which I thought was ironic anyway sorry that's for that bit of irrelevant information how are we doing for time have I bored you all into a coma no once we have five more minutes would it would someone like to yes good there are all these questions by the way are so succinctly people say I've I have a comment in two questions and then they make a speech where's the question thank you where you're tied this is actually the third that the first one was a history and philosophy of jokes and I doubt you would thank me for that why does everything in the universe seem to go round and round well that's that's good because these circular paths are actually geodesics in general relativity if you look at the actual geometry of space-time it's distorted by the presence of mass and so these round orbits are actually the closest thing to straight lines in the romani and geometry I know that sounds like an evasion of your question by the way girdle I mentioned his he came up with a novel solution to Einstein's field equations which he presented to Einstein on a 70th birthday and this was a rotating universe in which as I mentioned earlier they were closed timelike loops so if you traveled on one of these loops you would end up traveling around the university and coming back into your past so what girdle believed he had proved was that time was unreal of course we don't live in one of these rotating universes but he thought if it's possible that's enough to destroy the reality of time because either time exists in every possible universe or doesn't exist at all but that's a really poetic question you asked and I I I'm sorry I produce a little poetry that's very good thank you my question is a little more prosaic but also succinct who would get your vote for the greatest mind of the 20th century of course in all the caveats about varieties of intelligence and everything but well i this is disappointing it has to be Einstein but if I the more surprising answer for sheer mathematical vision and in a transhuman vision it's Alexandra grote and eek who is who died in in 1914 actually let me let me just do I have just two more minutes one paragraph about growing geek because he his he created a degree of abstraction that was just stupid one more minute okay okay okay someone think of a question and I I'll just I'll just read a one one paragraph about routine deep what chapter is it in hold on but I urge you all to look yeah this is the galley so it doesn't have an index but I'm getting there I urge you all to explore to its gr o th e ND IE ck he's he's you know the by consensus the greatest mathematician of the last 50 years and he led in an absolutely astonishing life I can't find what I'm looking for but he he did die as a delusional hermit in the Pyrenees he he was very strongly anti militaristic and he would he discovered that the French mathematical institution that had support him was receiving money from military sources he renounced it he clashed with the French establishment and he went to the puree the Pyrenees and became a recluse and no one was in contact with him for the last 15 years of his life and he became a little bit nutty I'm sorry to continue this theme and he believed that the there were forces at work sort of demonic forces that were destroying the essential harmony of the world possibly by altering the speed of light which is a really crazy idea but no gross antique created a new language for mathematics in which ideas that were hitherto inexpressible could suddenly be stated and and did it single-handedly by sheer feat of genius and so he's probably the most other-worldly transhuman intelligence of the 20th century even you know beyond someone like Einstein okay sorry for the longer today sir I appreciate your reading it's a lot for the average individual to digest but I have to disagree with you with one thing you said death is bad I don't believe that I know that's what we are taught in the Western oval but I think the ancients had a different view of it I know when I get sick I think of it but it's my mind that that it's thinking that way but I know it's part of a process so why do you say that death is bad before before you answer yeah yeah I would say it's it's it's good for no other reason that it takes care of bad people actually it's it's a it's a it's a slightly longest argument I won't i won't presented here but i kind of agree with you I think I think Woody Allen once said that um he compared it to a colonoscopy he said you know you go in for a colonoscopy and they inject you with his stuff and suddenly everything gets dark and it's quiet and it's peaceful and he says you know death is like a colonoscopy unfortunately life is like prep day for a colonoscopy so anyway that didn't get much of a laugh actually I have a colonoscopy jokes would kill with this audience I'm sorry I say you're still there looking skeptical because I'm still waiting on your answer yeah yeah I don't think I can do it actually it's not my answer because I have no original ideas it's Tom Tom nagels answer whoo he's basically responding to the Epicurean idea that how can death be bad because where death is I'm not and where I am death is not and and Nagel says okay supposing you know you you you're not actually you don't undergo death but something very close to death you're reduced to the state of a baby you're you loot you know an animated vegetable and you're happy you you're being fed and it's they change your diaper and everything are you really you know that that you you that it's less of a loss and then complete death but you're being you know you're you're deprived you're happy but you're deprived of everything that was a value to you so this is the general idea it it requires a little more elaboration that I just gave it but but you you make an excellent point and I think this is you know very much at issue whether you know maybe Epicurus was right you know Spinoza didn't think death was bad Montaigne thought all of philosophy was a preparation for dying so yeah there are lots of opinions about it which I sort of canvas and I kind of come down on the death this bad side but what do I know thank you very much you good coming out books are available at the register we also right at the front have some copies of his other books as well so the signing will begin right up here

Channel: The Artificial Intelligence Channel

Views: 25,601

Rating: 4.7918215 out of 5

Keywords: singularity, Einstein, Alan Turing, Ada Lovelace, Emmy Noether, Kurt Gödel

Id: 4bY_3uli608

Length: 56min 41sec (3401 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 29 2018