Clippings

Though Princeton’s population is well accustomed to eccentricity, trained not to look askance at rumpled specimens staring vacantly (or seemingly vacantly) off into space-time, Kurt Gödel struck almost everyone as seriously strange, presenting a formidable challenge to conversational exchange. A reticent person, Gödel, when he did speak, was more than likely to say something to which no possible response seemed forthcoming:

John Bahcall was a promising young astrophysicist when he was introduced to Gödel at a small Institute dinner. He identified himself as a physicist, to which Gödel’s curt response was “I don’t believe in natural science.” …

The linguist Noam Chomsky, too, reported being stopped dead in his linguistic tracks by the logician. Chomsky asked him what he was currently working on, and received and answer that probably nobody since the seventeenth-century’s Leibniz had given: “I am trying to prove that the laws of nature are a priori.”