Kurt Gödel was a brilliant mathematician best known for his incompleteness theorems. He was also, in later days, more than a little bit crazy, and eventually became so paranoid that, when his wife got sick and couldn’t prepare food for him, he refused to eat and starved to death. But in-between upending the foundations of mathematics and going insane he found time to devise a novel solution to the equations of General Relativity known as the Gödel metric. The Gödel metric universe is a spinning universe, and it allows for closed timelike curves. That means time travel! The Gödel universe is not identical to our own, but it’s not inconsistent with General Relativity. (More recently, other possibilities that lead to CTCs have been proposed, but Gödel discovered this way back in 1949.)
dailymeh posted this on June 29, 2011
