Kurt Gödel had been on my mind and it looks like I wasn't the only one. His incompleteness theorems should be required study.
Posted on 06/15/2009 11:19:50 PM PDT by Maelstorm
If you travel two hours southeast of Fairfield County and 70 years back in time, you may come upon two old scientists taking a leisurely walk home from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. You'd instantly recognize the one with the bushy mustache, suspenders and wild white hair — that's Albert Einstein. But who is that impeccably dressed, clean-shaven gentleman with the wire-rimmed glasses next to him?
That's mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel. In Einstein's later years, he once confided to a friend that his own research "no longer meant much" and that he came into work only "to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel."
Gödel, like Einstein, did his most famous work in his mid-20s — he published his two breakthrough incompleteness theorems at the age of 25 — but continued working throughout his life. For Einstein's 70th birthday, Gödel gave him this present: a new solution to Einstein's equations of general relativity, one that allowed time travel.
Most of their conversations were secret, so without a time machine, perhaps made possible using Gödel's solution to Einstein's equation, we'll never know what these two titans talked about on their walks home.
In the fall of 1947, Gödel took the U.S. citizenship exam. Gödel was a "very thorough man," in the words of Oskar Morgenstern, the same friend to whom Einstein confided his joy in walking with Gödel. In preparation for the exam, Gödel looked all through "the history of the settlement of North America by human beings," diving into matters of constitutional law and finally into ultra-local study about Princeton.
We know from Morgenstern's writings that in "looking at the Constitution," Gödel, "to his distress ... found some inner contradictions" that could show how, "in a perfectly legal manner, it would be possible for somebody to become a dictator and set up a Fascist regime, never intended by those who drew up the Constitution."
No one knows exactly what the flaw was that Gödel uncovered, though speculation is that it had something to do with amendments or additions.
Let's put ourselves in Gödel's mind. His biggest contributions to logic were his incompleteness theorems. Mathematicians were searching for a set of axioms from which all truth would flow. Gödel proved this search was impossible. There would always be truths that the formal system could not prove, and there was no way to make the system large enough to make that problem go away. If you adjust that idea to apply to government, you might think Gödel was a libertarian.
Back in 1946, most of today's government agencies hadn't even been authorized or hadn't grown to any sizable power. The first permanent agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission, was created in 1887. It regulated trains and it was, of course, a failure (though Congress didn't abolish it until 1995).
We don't hear much about agencies but they pass laws, adjudicate violations, punish transgressors and have their own courts and enforcement arms. And the only real oversight on them is the Administrative Procedure Act, a bill passed in 1946, the same year we are snooping on Gödel and Einstein. The APA came about because of Franklin Roosevelt's unprecedentedly copious births of new agencies. He was the political octo-mom of the 20th century. More than half of the 51 agencies in existence at that time came from FDR in a few years.
How many U.S. government agencies do you think we have today? I just counted them from www.usa.gov. There are 557, each an ugly appendix trying to solve the problem du jour. And we know that there will always be problems the government cannot solve.
Perhaps Gödel recognized that the path leads to a country where big companies regulate themselves at our expense, when powerful agencies answer only to the president. Welcome to 2009.
During Gödel's citizenship exam, he brought Morgenstern and Einstein as witnesses. The examiner asked him about the form of government of his homeland, Austria, and Godel replied that it was a republic but "the constitution was such that it finally was changed into a dictatorship." The examiner asserted that this could not happen in America. "Oh, yes," Gödel said. "I can prove it."
Fast forward 70 years and the proof is right there.
I’ve mentioned Godel’s remarkable observation a number of times on this forum but it seems to go unnoticed.
He was basically told to take his oath but otherwise keep his yap shut.
I personally think he is one of the most fascinating men in history and the importance of his theorems is in the humbling of the mind of man.
“Walking with Godel”.
I think I read that play,in college.
Whenever I ponder the breadth of human intellect, names like Feynman, Einstein and Godel are concentrated at one end while names like Obama and Clinton cluster at the other.
so how did it work?
I read it while I was waiting for somebody.
(Who never showed up!)
Godel never revealed the details of his observation. He only hinted that within the legal framework of the Constitution it was possible for a malevolent politician to legally usurp power and become a dictator. When Einstein and Morgenstern heard of this they basically told him in no uncertain terms that it would be unwise to piss off the oath examiner and bite his tongue.
bookmark for later
It’s also interesting to note that Harry Mudd’s androids were evidently unaware of Godel’s work.
Oh, yes, and Godel proved the existence of God. Well, not exactly (given the limitations of the systems within which he was working, which he himself had circumscribed). But he did codify the Ontological argument for the existence of God into formal symbolic logic and set theory, and discovered both to his delight and dismay that his (atheist) friend Bertrand Russell was right - it was far more powerful than it appeared.
He was also a closet Lutheran, but not a churchgoer, who read the Bible on Sundays in bed with his wife. She didn't divulge that one until after his death. It wouldn't have fit the image, one supposes...not that Godel would have remotely cared. Fascinating fellow.
When the Constitution was written honor meant everything.
Now it means a good deal less.
Who needs to do it legally WHEN THE MEDIA AND THE COURTS IGNORES ALL THE ILLEGAL STUFF?!?!?!
LEGAL???? I’m afraid Marx and Stalin had a little bit of an edge on this guy.
I bet the flaw has something to do with Czars
Im pretty sure from watching MSNBC that Einstein was stupid
Since the Supreme Court moves slowly, establishing a dictatorship would be fairly simple as citizens and law enforcement are prone to obey the law.
That law can be made to be too complex for the average person to understand and passed so quickly as to give the dictator sweeping powers for a long enough time to seize control of the Supreme Court or render it powerless.
All political allegiances aside, we live in the scariest of times.
Franklin’s description of the new government as a “... a republic, if you can keep it ...” still applies. There’s no substitute for an informed and pro-active electorate. Expecting any document written by human hands (even the best) to protect our liberties in some automatic fashion - that’s probably the road to the exact type of fascism to which Godel was referring.
The entire workings of our system was revealed to me once by the seemingly innocuous phrase “we have the best government money can buy”.
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