Clippings

When [the philosopher Morton White] had been on the faculty at Harvard, he had been instrumental in having Gödel invited to deliver the prestigious William James series of lectures and had been chagrined when Gödel declined. This would have been in the 1960s. When White himself came to the Institute as a permanent member in 1970, he remembers having asked Gödel why he had turned down the invitation. Gödel’s answer had come in two parts.

First of all, he’d said, the Harvard department was too “empiricist,” and he thought they’d have been critical of what he had to say. Second of all — and this part of the answer, White told me, had really interested him — Gödel felt he would have been doing an injustice to the ideas themselves, because he hadn’t yet completed them; to expose them prematurely to an unsympathetic audience would be acting unjustly toward them.

So it seems, at least from this story, that his reluctance to voice his unfashionable intuitions in any form that fell short of a proof was not only a matter of his own distaste for intellectual wrangling but also connected with a perceived ethical obligation toward the ideas themselves, which is appropriate for an impassioned Platonist.

[The] economist Oskar Morgenstern, who had known Gödel back in Vienna, confided in a letter: “Einstein had often told me that in the late years of his life he has continually sought Gödel’s company, in order to have discussions with him. Once he said to me that his own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely um das Privileg zu haben, mit Gödel zu Fuss nach Hause gehen zu dürfen,” that is, in order to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel.

…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.”