Another anecdote from Jeremy Bernstein about the day when Kurt Gödel was due finally to become an American citizen.
“Gödel had detected a logical flaw in the Constitution & was quite capable of refusing to swear allegiance to a country which had a logically inconsistent constitution.”
Fortunately he was being accompanied by Einstein who tried to distract him from that idea with a string of anecdotes. “It was like trying to stop a train with a Q tip.”
Well nobody’s life was threatened, so that was much better than trying to stop a train by pushing a large man off a footbridge.
But why this philosophical obsession with runaway trains.
