When Einstein Walked With Gödel
   HOME
*





When Einstein Walked With Gödel
''When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought'' is the third nonfiction book authored by American philosopher and essayist Jim Holt. The book was initially released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on 15 May 2018. Background The book is a collection of Holt's previous 25 essays on such diverse themes as science, philosophy, the nature of time, eugenics, quantum physics, string theory, relativity, the future of the universe, and the foundation of mathematics; Holt also explores the works of such scientists as Alan Turing, Benoit Mandelbrot, Emmy Noether, and others. Reception Parul Sehgal of ''The New York Times'' stated "In these pieces, plucked from the last 20 years, Holt takes on infinity and the infinitesimal, the illusion of time, the birth of eugenics, the so-called new atheism, smartphones and distraction. It is an elegant history of recent ideas. There are a few historical correctives — he dismantles the notion that Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lor ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Jim Holt (philosopher)
Jim Holt (born October 30, 1954) is an American journalist, author in popular science and essayist. He has contributed to ''The New York Times'', ''The New York Times Magazine'', ''The New York Review of Books'', ''The New Yorker'', ''The American Scholar'', and ''Slate''. In 1997, he was editor of ''The New Leader'', a political magazine. His book '' Why Does the World Exist?'' was a NYTimes bestseller for 2013. Career Holt hosted a weekly radio spot on BBC Wales called "Living in America, with Jim Holt" for ten years. He has appeared on William F. Buckley's '' Firing Line'', NBC News with Tom Brokaw, CNN, and had a brief appearance in an episode of ''Billy on the Street'' in which he ended an impromptu interview after the interviewer insisted he reveal his sexuality. Awards and honors * 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award, finalist, ''Why Does the World Exist?'' * 2012 ''The Philosophers Magazine'' named his book, ''Why Does the World Exist?'' as one of the best books of 2 ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Farrar, Straus And Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger Williams Straus Jr. and John C. Farrar. FSG is known for publishing literary books, and its authors have won numerous awards, including Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and Nobel Prizes. the publisher is a division of Macmillan, whose parent company is the German publishing conglomerate Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. Founding Farrar, Straus, and Company was founded in 1945 by Roger W. Straus Jr. and John C. Farrar. The first book was ''Yank: The G.I. Story of the War'', a compilation of articles that appeared in ''Yank, the Army Weekly'', then ''There Were Two Pirates'', a novel by James Branch Cabell. The first years of existence were rough until they published the diet book ''Look Younger, Live Longer'' by Gayelord Hauser in 1950. The book went on to sell 500,000 copies and Straus said that the book carried them along for a while. In the early years, Straus and his wife ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Why Does The World Exist?
''Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story'' is a nonfiction work authored by Jim Holt. He and the book were on the ''LA Times'' bestseller list during the last quarter of 2012, and the first quarter of 2013. The book was also a 2012 National Book Critics Award finalist for nonfiction. Central theme A central question of the book is 'Why is there something rather than nothing?', which lies in the domain between philosophy and scientific cosmology. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was the first to publish the question in 1714. In this book, the author records a quest to answer the question through a series of interviews and discussions. Some of the people interviewed are John Updike, David Deutsch, Adolf Grünbaum, John Leslie, Derek Parfit, Roger Penrose, Richard Swinburne, Steven Weinberg, and Andrei Linde. Along the way, Jim Holt also introduces the reader to the philosophy of mathematics, theology, physics, ontology, epistemology, and other subjects. Revie ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Publishers Weekly
''Publishers Weekly'' (''PW'') is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents. Published continuously since 1872, it has carried the tagline, "The International News Magazine of Book Publishing and Bookselling". With 51 issues a year, the emphasis today is on book reviews. The magazine was founded by bibliographer Bibliography (from and ), as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology (from ). English author and bibliographer John Carter describes ''bibliography ... Frederick Leypoldt in the late 1860s, and had various titles until Leypoldt settled on the name ''The Publishers' Weekly'' (with an apostrophe) in 1872. The publication was a compilation of information about newly published books, collected from publishers and from other sources by Leypoldt, for an audience of booksellers. By 1876, ''The Publishers' Weekly ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. He is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Born in Maida Vale, London, Turing was raised in southern England. He graduated at King's College, Cambridge, with a degree in mathematics. Whilst he was a fellow at Cambridge, he published a proof demonstrating that some purely mathematical yes–no questions can never be answered by computation and defined a Turing machine, and went on to prove that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable. In 1938, he obtained his PhD from the Department of Mathemati ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Benoit Mandelbrot
Benoit B. Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 – 14 October 2010) was a Polish-born French-American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as "the art of roughness" of physical phenomena and "the uncontrolled element in life". He referred to himself as a "fractalist" and is recognized for his contribution to the field of fractal geometry, which included coining the word "fractal", as well as developing a theory of "roughness and self-similarity" in nature. In 1936, at the age of 11, Mandelbrot and his family emigrated from Warsaw, Poland, to France. After World War II ended, Mandelbrot studied mathematics, graduating from universities in Paris and in the United States and receiving a master's degree in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology. He spent most of his career in both the United States and France, having dual French and American citizenship. In 1958, he began a 35-year career at ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Emmy Noether
Amalie Emmy NoetherEmmy is the ''Rufname'', the second of two official given names, intended for daily use. Cf. for example the résumé submitted by Noether to Erlangen University in 1907 (Erlangen University archive, ''Promotionsakt Emmy Noether'' (1907/08, NR. 2988); reproduced in: ''Emmy Noether, Gesammelte Abhandlungen – Collected Papers,'' ed. N. Jacobson 1983; online facsimile aphysikerinnen.de/noetherlebenslauf.html). Sometimes ''Emmy'' is mistakenly reported as a short form for ''Amalie'', or misreported as "Emily". e.g. (, ; ; 23 March 1882 – 14 April 1935) was a German mathematician who made many important contributions to abstract algebra. She discovered Noether's First and Second Theorem, which are fundamental in mathematical physics. She was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl and Norbert Wiener as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. As one of the leading mathematicians of her time, she developed some ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid digital subscribers. It also is a producer of popular podcasts such as '' The Daily''. Founded in 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, it was initially published by Raymond, Jones & Company. The ''Times'' has won 132 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any newspaper, and has long been regarded as a national " newspaper of record". For print it is ranked 18th in the world by circulation and 3rd in the U.S. The paper is owned by the New York Times Company, which is publicly traded. It has been governed by the Sulzberger family since 1896, through a dual-class share structure after its shares became publicly traded. A. G. Sulzberger, the paper's publisher and the company's chairman, is the fifth generation of the family to head the pa ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Ada Lovelace
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (''née'' Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and to have published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer. Ada Byron was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron and Lady Byron. All of Byron's other children were born out of wedlock to other women. Byron separated from his wife a month after Ada was born and left England forever. Four months later, he commemorated the parting in a poem that begins, "Is thy face like thy mother's my fair child! ADA! sole daughter of my house and heart?" He died in Greece when Ada was eight. Her mother remained bitter and promoted Ada's interest i ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English romantic poet and Peerage of the United Kingdom, peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the greatest of English poets. Among his best-known works are the lengthy Narrative poem, narratives ''Don Juan (poem), Don Juan'' and ''Childe Harold's Pilgrimage''; many of his shorter lyrics in ''Hebrew Melodies'' also became popular. Byron was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, later traveling extensively across Europe to places such as Italy, where he lived for seven years in Venice, Ravenna, and Pisa after he was forced to flee England due to lynching threats. During his stay in Italy, he frequently visited his friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Later in life Byron joined the Greek War of Independence fighting the Ottoman Empire and died leading a campaign during that war, for which Greeks rev ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

The Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published six days a week by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corp. The newspaper is published in the broadsheet format and online. The ''Journal'' has been printed continuously since its inception on July 8, 1889, by Charles Dow, Edward Jones, and Charles Bergstresser. The ''Journal'' is regarded as a newspaper of record, particularly in terms of business and financial news. The newspaper has won 38 Pulitzer Prizes, the most recent in 2019. ''The Wall Street Journal'' is one of the largest newspapers in the United States by circulation, with a circulation of about 2.834million copies (including nearly 1,829,000 digital sales) compared with ''USA Today''s 1.7million. The ''Journal'' publishes the luxury news and lifestyle magazine ' ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Contemporary Philosophical Literature
Contemporary history, in English-language historiography, is a subset of modern history that describes the historical period from approximately 1945 to the present. Contemporary history is either a subset of the late modern period, or it is one of the three major subsets of modern history, alongside the early modern period and the late modern period. In the social sciences, contemporary history is also continuous with, and related to, the rise of postmodernity. Contemporary history is politically dominated by the Cold War (1947–1991) between the Western Bloc, led by the United States, and the Eastern Bloc, led by the Soviet Union. The confrontation spurred fears of a nuclear war. An all-out "hot" war was avoided, but both sides intervened in the internal politics of smaller nations in their bid for global influence and via proxy wars. The Cold War ultimately ended with the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The latter stages and afterm ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]