'To the Edge of Thought'

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Everyone has heard of Albert Einstein, but Kurt Gödel will need explaining. He was the German refugee mathematician who—although he sometimes disagreed with Einstein—became friends with the man behind the general theory of relativity. They spent hours together at Princeton, walking the wooded grounds discussing the equations of reality. Their leisurely rambles inspired the title and general thrust of the latest book by science writer Jim Holt, When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Like Einstein and Gödel, Holt rambles through a universe of related topics for which definitive answers remain elusive. How far do the infinite and the infinitesimal extend? What is time? What about string theory, anyway? How will the universe end (and are there other universes parallel to ours)? Although sometimes too dismissive of ideas that don’t factor into his worldview, Holt writes lucidly and with humor. And at least when it comes to the hard facts of biography, he brings clarity to his subjects. Holt debunks the popular idea that Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, was the first computer programmer, as well as the infelicitous portrayal of Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. Carefully unpacking and examining theories pro and con on the effects of the worldwide web on the human mind, he finds that the skills involved in videogames sharpen decision-making, but the reliance on Google for memory blunts the creative dynamism linking remembering with conceptualizing.

As physics and mathematics ascend together up the ladder of abstraction, the conflicting theories arrived at are often closer to poetry than science. Maybe the “final theory of everything” Einstein sought can never be written. “Perhaps the most fundamental truth about nature is simply beyond the human intellect, the way that quantum mechanics is beyond the intellect of a dog,” Holt concedes.