"""
"""
A decade after arriving in Princeton, Einstein acquired a walking companion, a much younger man [Kurt Gödel...]. The two would talk animatedly in German on their morning amble to the institute and again, later in the day, on their way homeward. [...] 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 Gödel.” Part of the reason, it seems, was that Gödel 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, “Gödel was . . . the only one of our colleagues who walked and talked on equal terms with Einstein.” [...] People wondered what they spoke about. Politics was presumably one theme. [...] Physics was no doubt another. [OZ: Gödel metric is 1949]
[...]
Einstein [...] quest for a unified theory of physics was proving fruitless, and his opposition to quantum theory alienated him from the mainstream of physics. Family life provided little consolation. His two marriages had been failures; a daughter born out of wedlock seems to have disappeared from history; of his two sons one was schizophrenic, the other estranged. Einstein’s circle of friends had shrunk to Gödel and a few others. One of them was Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, to whom he confided, in March, 1955, that “the exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.” He died a month later, at the age of seventy-six. When Gödel and another colleague went to his office at the institute to deal with his papers, they found the blackboard covered with dead-end equations.

After Einstein’s death, Gödel became ever more withdrawn. He preferred to conduct all conversations by telephone, even if his interlocutor was a few feet distant. When he especially wanted to avoid someone, he would schedule a rendezvous at a precise time and place, and then make sure he was somewhere far away. The honors the world wished to bestow upon him made him chary. He did show up to collect an honorary doctorate in 1953 from Harvard, where his incompleteness theorems were hailed as the most important mathematical discovery of the previous hundred years; but he later complained of being “thrust quite undeservedly into the most highly bellicose company” of John Foster Dulles, a co-honoree. When he was awarded the National Medal of Science, in 1975, he refused to go to Washington to meet Gerald Ford at the White House, despite the offer of a chauffeur for him and his wife. He had hallucinatory episodes and talked darkly of certain forces at work in the world “directly submerging the good.” Fearing that there was a plot to poison him, he persistently refused to eat. Finally, looking like (in the words of a friend) “a living corpse,” he was taken to the Princeton Hospital. There, two weeks later, on January 14, 1978, he succumbed to self-starvation. According to his death certificate, the cause of death was “malnutrition and inanition” brought on by “personality disturbance.”
"""
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/02/28/time-bandits-2
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/02/28/time-bandits-2

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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