In 1942, the logician Kurt Godel and Albert Einstein became close friends; they walked to and from their offices every day, exchanging ideas about science, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German science. By 1949, Godel had produced a remarkable proof: "In any universe described by the Theory of Relativity, time cannot exist," Einstein endorsed this result reluctantly but he could find no way to refute it, since then, neither has anyone else. Yet cosmologists and philosophers alike have proceeded as if this discovery was never made. In "A World Without Time," Palle Yourgrau sets out to restore Godel to his rightful place in history, telling the story of two magnificent minds put on the shelf by the scientific fashions of their day, and attempts to rescue the brilliant work they did together.

The dead are gone. They count for nothing. Yet, if we count the dead, their number is staggering. And they account for most of what is great about civilization. Compared to the greatness of the dead, the accomplishments of the living are paltry. Which is it then: are the dead still there to be counted or not? And if they are still there, where exactly is "there"? We are confronted with the ancient paradox of nonexistence bequeathed us by Parmenides. The mystery of death is the mystery of nonexistence. A successful attempt to provide a metaphysics of death, then, must resolve the paradox of nonexistence. That is the aim of this study. At the same time, the metaphysics of death, of ceasing to exist, must serve as an account of birth, of coming to exist; the primary thesis of this book is that this demands going beyond existence and nonexistence to include what underlies both, which one can call, following tradition, "being." The dead and the unborn are therefore objects that lack existence but not being. Nonexistent objects - not corpses, or skeletons, or memories, all of which are existent objects - are what are "there" to be counted when we count the dead.

The philosophical elucidation of demonstratives is a task of considerable and wide-ranging significance. These words, like "I", "now", and "this", seem to represent a point of contact between thought and reality. Any account of these must therefore deal with metaphysical issues such as the nature of the "self" and the reality and significance of the present. This collection brings together for the first time an important set of previously published papers, some of which have been slightly altered to suit this volume. They seek to provide the correct semantic account of thoughts involving demonstratives, as well as giving an insight into the metaphysical concepts which lie behind. Philosophers, especially those interested in philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophy of science will be interested in this book.

What happens when the country's greatest logician meets the century's greatest physicist? In the case of Kurt Godel and Albert Einstein the result in Godel's revolutioinary new model of the cosmos. In the 'Godel Universe' the philosophical fantasy of time travel becomes a scientific reality. For Godel, however, the reality of time travel signals the unreality of time. If Godel is right, the real meaning of the Einstein revolution had remained, for half a century, a secret. Now, half-century after Godel met Einstein, the real meaning of time travel in the Godel universe can be revealed.