{"id":173773,"date":"2023-10-08T12:32:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-08T17:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/john-wheeler-kurt-godel-and-the-closed-time-like-line"},"modified":"2023-10-08T12:32:00","modified_gmt":"2023-10-08T17:32:00","slug":"john-wheeler-kurt-godel-and-the-closed-time-like-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/john-wheeler-kurt-godel-and-the-closed-time-like-line","title":{"rendered":"John Wheeler \u2014 Kurt G\u00f6del and the Closed Time-like Line"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"John Wheeler - Kurt G\u00f6del and the Closed Time-like Line (91\/130)\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/YIutbiPiJVg?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>To listen to more of John Wheeler\u2019s stories, go to the playlist: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzVlqiUh95Q881umWUPjQbB\">https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzVlqiUh95Q881umWUPjQbB<\/a><\/p>\n<p>American physicist, John Wheeler (1911\u22122008), made seminal contributions to the theories of quantum gravity and nuclear fission, but is best known for coining the term \u2018black holes\u2019. A keen teacher and mentor, he was also a key figure in the Manhattan Project. [Listener: Ken Ford]<\/p>\n<p>TRANSCRIPT: I knew the stories about G\u00f6del being concerned always about his health. I knew from his friend Oscar Morgenstern how G\u00f6del would never take a pills prescription from his doctor without getting out a big medical book and studying up on that pill himself to make sure that it was okay. But I didn\u2019t realize how far his dreams went, because I had failed to resonate to a talk he gave in 1945 at the symposium held in honor of Einstein\u2019s birthday. In that talk G\u00f6del had described what he called a Rotating Universe, a universe where all the galaxies turn the same way, and where the geometry is such that you keep on going living your life and you come round and come back and can live it over again; \u2018Closed Time-like Line\u2019 was the magic phrase to describe it. So you didn\u2019t have to worry about the pill because you come back and live your life all over again. Well, after I\u2019d introduced the two I said \u201cProfessor G\u00f6del, we\u2019d like to know what the relation is between the great Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty or Indeterminism; and your famous proof that every significant mathematical system contains theorems which cannot be proven, your theorem of Unprovable Propositions.\u201d Well, he didn\u2019t want to talk about that. It turned out that later that he had walked and talked enough with Einstein to dismiss quantum theory. He didn\u2019t believe quantum[theory]. All he wanted to know is what we were going to say in our book about the rotating universe that he had described. Well actually, we weren\u2019t saying anything. Well, this bothered him and he wanted to know what the evidence is today, at that moment, about whether galaxies do rotate in the same way. We said we hadn\u2019t studied it. Well it turned out that he himself had taken out the great Hubble atlas of the galaxies and page after page had opened it up and looked at each galaxy, determined the direction of its axis. He made a statistics of these numbers and found there was no preferred direction of rotation, so they couldn\u2019t all be rotating in the same way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To listen to more of John Wheeler\u2019s stories, go to the playlist: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzVlqiUh95Q881umWUPjQbB American physicist, John Wheeler (1911\u22122008), made seminal contributions to the theories of quantum gravity and nuclear fission, but is best known for coining the term \u2018black holes\u2019. A keen teacher and mentor, he was also a key figure in the Manhattan Project. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,1495,2229,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-173773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-health","category-mathematics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173773\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}