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Article Excerpt
In 1933, with his great scientific discoveries behind him, Albert Einstein came to America. He spent the last twenty-two years of his life in Princeton, New Jersey, where he had been recruited as the star member of the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein was reasonably content with his new milieu, taking its pretensions in stride. "Princeton is a wonderful piece of earth, and at the same time an exceedingly amusing ceremonial backwater of tiny spindle-shanked demigods," he observed. His daily routine began with a leisurely walk from his house, at 115 Mercer Street, to his office at the institute. He was by then one of the most famous and, with his distinctive appearance--the whirl of pillow-combed hair, the baggy pants held up by suspenders--most recognizable people in the world.
A decade after arriving in Princeton, Einstein acquired a walking companion, a much younger man who, next to the rumpled Einstein, cut a dapper figure in a white linen suit and matching fedora. The two would talk animatedly in German on their morning amble to the institute and again, later in the day, on their way homeward. The man in the suit may not have been recognized by many townspeople, but Einstein addressed him as a peer, someone who, like him, had single-handedly launched a conceptual revolution. If Einstein had upended our everyday notions about the physical world with his theory of relativity, the younger man, Kurt Godel, had had a similarly subversive effect on our understanding of the abstract world of mathematics.
Godel, who has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle, was a strange and ultimately tragic man. Whereas Einstein was gregarious and full of laughter, Godel was solemn, solitary, and pessimistic. Einstein, a passionate amateur violinist, loved Beethoven and Mozart. Godel's taste ran in another direction: his favorite movie was Walt Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," and when his wife put a pink flamingo in their front yard he pronounced it furchtbar herzig--"awfully charming." Einstein freely indulged his appetite for heavy German cooking; Godel subsisted on a valetudinarian's diet of butter, baby food, and laxatives. Although Einstein's private life was not without its complications, outwardly he was jolly and at home in the world. Godel, by contrast, had a tendency toward paranoia. He believed in ghosts; he had a morbid
dread of being poisoned by refrigerator gases; he refused to go out when certain distinguished mathematicians were in town, apparently out of concern that they might try to kill him. "Every chaos is a wrong appearance," he insisted--the paranoiac's first axiom.
Although other members of the institute found the gloomy logician baffling and unapproachable, Einstein told people that he went to his office "just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Godel." Part of the reason, it seems, was that Godel was undaunted by Einstein's reputation and did not hesitate to challenge his ideas. As another member of the institute, the physicist Freeman Dyson, observed, "Godel was . . . the only one of our colleagues who walked and talked on equal terms with Einstein." But if Einstein and Godel seemed to exist on a higher plane than the rest of humanity, it was also true that they had become, in Einstein's words, "museum pieces." Einstein never accepted the quantum theory of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Godel believed that mathematical abstractions were every bit as real as tables and chairs, a view that philosophers had come to regard as laughably naive. Both Godel and Einstein insisted that the world is independent of our minds, yet rationally organized and open to human understanding. United by a shared sense of intellectual isolation, they found solace in their companionship. "They didn't want to speak to anybody else," another member of the institute said. "They only wanted to speak to each other."
People wondered what they spoke about. Politics was presumably one theme. (Einstein, who supported Adlai Stevenson, was exasperated when Godel chose to vote for Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.) Physics was no doubt another. Godel was well versed in the subject; he shared Einstein's mistrust of the quantum theory, but he was also skeptical of the older physicist's ambition to supersede it with a "unified field theory" that would encompass all known forces in a deterministic framework. Both were attracted to problems that were, in Einstein's words, of "genuine importance," problems pertaining to the most basic elements of reality. Godel was especially preoccupied by the nature of time, which, he told a friend, was the philosophical question. How could such a "mysterious and...
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