I started reading Rebecca Goldstein’s Incompleteness on Kurt Godel and his theorems—and life. It’s more a “popularization of science” text than anything else, which is not what I wanted. However, one interesting point has already emerged. Assuming she’s right, both Einstein and Godel were appalled that their results were given what we would now call a postmodernist (or, at that time, logical positivist) twist. Such a twist (I was going to say “distortion,” but it’s the interpretations that differ, not the math or physics, so it’s hard to say which is the distortion. It should be just as possible to do great math and not understand its philosophical implications as it is to be a charismatic speaker and have no idea to what ends the results should be put.)
Anyway, logical positivists and postmodernists tend to take Einstein’s special theory of relativity to mean that everything, even time, is relative. Which is true. But then they infer that nothing can be constant if mass, length, and time itself can vary. It’s worth remembering, apart from Einstein’s vehement rejection of their inference, that relativity starts with a proposition that something is constant: the speed of light. And that what is “relative” is not nature, but the particular intuitive—and flawed—perception we have of it. If we perceived spacetime directly, instead of its two component parts, presumably we would not consider that fundamental aspects of our cosmos were unreliable.
Godel had a similar result and a similar mass interpretation. His incompleteness theorems basically state that any reasonably complicated mathematical system contains true statements that cannot be proven within the system. Again, popular interpretation called the theorems the death knell of certitude in mathematics. Godel apparently saw them as vindication of the Platonic nature of math—that there were ideals not amendable to the manipulation of people and their theories and systems.
Quite a stretch to go from a Platonic to a postmodern interpretation of the same theorems!