Yourgrau P. A world without time.. the forgotten legacy of Goedel and Einstein (Basic Books, 2005)(ISBN 0465092934)(176s)_PPop_

idol of this group. ... An argument could be settled by citing his Tractates." The unofficial
saint, however, was Godel's future friend Einstein, considered by many to be the greatest
scientist since Newton. (Wittgenstein himself once stated that in a sense he was a follower
of Einstein.) It was not only that Einstein's theories had revolutionized the scientific image
of the world. The philosophical aspects of Einstein's theory of relativity held a special
appeal. In the special theory of relativity, Einstein had rejected Newton's "metaphysical"
postulates of absolute space and time, which resisted any direct empirical confirmation.
Time, Einstein insisted, was physically real only to the extent that it could be measured by
a clock. (As the positivists would put it, the meaning of a term consists in its method of
verification.) Since physical experimentation demonstrated that not all clocks could be
definitively synchronized, Einstein declared that time was not after all absolute, as
Newton had believed, but rather relative to the frame of reference of the clock by which it
was measured. Similarly, since there existed no definitive empirical method to detect
whether an object's motion through space was absolute, Einstein declared that all spatial
relations were also relative to a given reference frame chosen, by convention, as the "rest
frame." For the positivists, the success of this theory meant that the tenets of their credo
made for good science, while their rejection could lead to bad philosophy or a scientific
dead end.
For Einstein, the rejection of absolute space and time was merely a statement about the
physical world. It was much more, however, to the Vienna Circle. As much a religion as a
scientific methodology, positivism denied that science or philosophy, with the help of
mathematics, could provide a Weltbild, or worldview, a picture or account of ultimate
reality. They could only supply the scientist with a method of calculation and prediction.
In addition to rejecting the task of providing a metaphysical picture of realityóthe very
goal of philosophy itself as it has been historically practicedóthe positivist confined his
episte-mology to direct sensory experience, rejecting any claims for insight into, or
intuition of, the concepts of the theorist or the abstract objects
of the mathematician. Godel and Einstein, in contrast, held the faculty of intuition in the
highest regard. "I put my faith in organization," John D. Rockefeller Jr. once said on
meeting Einstein. "I put my faith in intuition," the physicist replied. Godel was even more
explicit. In perhaps his most (in)famous philosophical remark, he laid down the gauntlet
against positivism: "Despite their remoteness from sense-experience, we do have
something like a perception of the objects of set theory, as is seen from the fact that the
axioms force themselves upon us as being true. I don't see any reason why we should have
less confidence in this kind of perception, i.e., in mathematical intuition, than in senseperception."
For the positivist, however, there is neither an abstract realm of concepts nor
a human faculty of intuition that could provide insight into this realm. The concepts
invoked by the philosopher must give way to the techniques employed by the engineer.
Thus Wittgenstein, a sometime aeronautical engineer, in the Tractatus: Mathematics is
not, as Frege had it, a science of the platonic realm of mathematical concepts and
objects, but rather a system of techniques for the manipulation of mathematical signs.
The War of the Titans