Palle Yourgrau is the Harry A. Wolfson Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University. He is the author of Gödel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Gödel Universe (Open Court), A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein (Basic Books; translated into 9 languages), Simone Weil (Reaktion Books, UK), and (most recently), Death and Nonexistence (Oxford University Press). He rarely gives public lectures, and even more rarely, travels. This summer, however, he traveled to Vienna to give a keynote lecture at the University of Vienna at a conference — “Gödel’s Legacy: Does Future Lie in the Past?” -- celebrating Einstein’s relativity and Gödel’s contributions to relativity (and “time travel”).
by Palle Yourgrau Where does this strange notion of non-punishable crimes come from? … Isn’t it high time it were proclaimed that every discernible crime is a punishable one …? —Simone Weil, The Need for Roots When the finger points at the moon, the idiot looks at the finger. —Confucius What Happened at Verbier At the 10th anniversary of the…