Clippings

…Gödel was coolly detached from the sort of drama that escaping Nazi Europe afforded. “Gödel has come from Vienna,” wrote Oskar Morgenstern in his journal. Morgenstern, too, was originally from Vienna and was naturally eager to get news of his beleaguered city from the newly arrived logician. “In his mix of profundity and otherworldliness he is very droll. …When questioned about Vienna, he replied ‘The coffee is wretched.’”

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.”

Von Neumann believed that the possibility of a universal automaton was ultimately responsible for the possibility of indefinitely continued biological evolution. In evolving from simpler to more complex organisms you do not have to redesign the basic biochemical machinery as you go along. You have only to modify and extend the genetic instructions. Everything we have learned about evolution since 1948 tends to confirm that von Neumann was right.

[Feynman] was also a profoundly original scientist. He refused to take anybody’s word for anything. This meant that he was forced to rediscover or reinvent for himself almost the whole of physics. It took him five years of concentrated work to reinvent quantum mechanics. He said the he couldn’t understand the official version of quantum mechanics that was taught in textbooks, and so he had to begin afresh from the beginning.

[Richard Feynman] talked of his dead wife, of the joy he had had in nursing her and making her last days tolerable, of the tricks they had played together on the Los Alamos security people, of her jokes and her courage. He talked of death with an easy familiarity which can come only to one who has lived with spirit unbroken through the worst that death can do. Ingmar Bergman in his film The Seventh Seal created the character of the juggler Jof, always joking and playing the fool, seeing visions and dreams that nobody else believes in, surviving at the end when death carries the rest away. Dick and Jof have a great deal in common. Many people at Cornell had told me Dick was crazy. In fact he was the sanest of the whole crowd.

[Secretary of War] Stimson was well aware of the enormous quantitative difference in destructive potential between nuclear and conventional bombs, but it was difficult for him to feel that there was a difference in the quality of evil between the killing of 130,000 people by old-fashioned fire bombs in Tokyo and the killing of about the same number by a nuclear bomb in Hiroshima. … The ground on which Stimson might have been able to make a moral stand was already surrendered when the fire bombing started in March. Long before that, in England and in America independently, the moral issues had been effectively prejudged when the decisions were made to build strategic bomber forces and to wage war with them against civilian populations. Hiroshima was only an afterthought.