It's just a discussion of Gödel and Einstein written for the layperson. It has a little biographical detail and context of both, pretty reasonable brief explanations of their respective theories (incompleteness, photoelectric effect, brownian motion, special and general relativity) and then Gödel's contribution to General. A nice article
In typical New Yorker fashion it assumes you have never heard of platonism, formal logic or 20th century physics but assumes you remember the future conjugations of regular latin verbs.
=== In typical New Yorker fashion it assumes you have never heard of platonism, formal logic or 20th century physics but assumes you remember the future conjugations of regular latin verbs.===
So true and so well put - And I love the New Yorker. If I use this phrase in the future should I attribute it to you (although "according to gumby" might not fly so well with my other New Yorker aficionados).
I think the point of the article is summed up in one of the last paragraphs,
"If time travel is possible, he submitted, then time itself is impossible. A past that can be revisited has not really passed. And the fact that the actual universe is expanding, rather than rotating, is irrelevant. Time, like God, is either necessary or nothing; if it disappears in one possible universe, it is undermined in every possible universe, including our own."
In typical New Yorker fashion it assumes you have never heard of platonism, formal logic or 20th century physics but assumes you remember the future conjugations of regular latin verbs.