A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel [Godel] and Einstein by Yourgrau, Palle - 2005

New York: Basic Books, 2005. Hardbound . 4th Printing. BINDING/CONDITION: pale yellow binding with gray at the spine; a Very Good+ book, with a Very Good+ dust jacket; publisher's price on the jacket flap is intact. Includes a short section of black and white photo plates. The publisher's blurb reads: ''Albert Einstein, the twentieth century's greatest physicist, and Kurt Gödel, its greatest logician, were best friends for the last decade and half of Einstein's life. They walked home together from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study every day; they shared ideas about physics, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German-Austrian science in which they had grown up. What is not widely known is the discovery that grew out of this friendship. In 1949, Gödel published a paper proving that there exist possible worlds described by the theory of relativity in which time as we ordinarily understand it, does not exist. He went further: if it is absent from those theoretical universes he showed, time does not exist in our world either. Einstein's great work has not explained time as most physicists and philosophers think but explained it completely way. Einstein recognized Gödel's paper as an important contribution to the general theory of relativity. Physicists since have tried without success to find an error in Gödel's physics or a missing element in relativity itself that would rule out world models like Gödel's This book places Gödel and Einstein's epoch-making discoveries in the context of the great and disturbing movements in physics, philosophy, logic, mathematics, and the arts that dominated the twentieth century. It presents an intimate account of the friendship between these two thinkers, each put on the shelf by the scientific fashions of their day, and attempts to rescue Gödel's brilliant work from obscurity.'' 8vo (9.5 inches tall) 210 pages. Notes, bibliography, index. Light yellow endpapers.