A World Without Time

I am half-way through the book and I love it. The entire history of philosophy, mathematics and physics, which was all pretty much the same in the early part of the 20th century, is pretty fascinating.

It was an age of passion. Some of the philosophers were so passionate, they were in fact crazy. They had super fragile egos and every third person at the Vienna Circle had a temper like my athimber. They even puked on each others work!

Until I read this book I never knew of the intellectual cold war between Boltzmann and Mach. Mach did not believe in atoms, because they could not be perceived by the senses and Boltzmann's kinetic theory was built on the existence of atoms. On account of this Mach and Boltzmann did not get along. Boltzmann had to wait it out at another University until Mach retired to come back to Vienna as the head of philosophy and physics. Boltzmann's lectures were famous and widely attended. Things were going well for him until one day when he committed suicide while vacationing in Italy.

Einstein was very influenced by Mach and called him the "forerunner of the Theory of Relativity" and Mach later rejected Einstein's theory of relativity! When Gödel first presented his incompleteness theorem, it had little impact on his immediate listeners. A report on the meeting did not even mention Gödel, although the mathematical community recovered enough to ask Gödel to add a postscript summarizing results.

All this makes you wonder what a boring place these civil scientific conferences have become! Until string theory, I really don't remember a time when physicists puked on each others work. I wish scientists would be more entertaining than they are these days. Except the evolutionary biologists, who talk so loud, even they cannot hear themselves.

ps: The need for entertainment may also be due to the excessive time spent watching the election campaign on youtube.