metamerist

Thursday, January 27, 2005

Gödel & Snow White

The article Gödel and Einstein: Friendship and Relativity from the Chronicle of Higher Education contained an interesting fact about Kurt Gödel. His favorite movie was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. An article on the friendship between Gödel and Einstein, this paragraph notes their disparate tastes:

"..Their tastes, however, remained distinct. Einstein, a violinist, could never bring his friend to subject himself to the likes of Beethoven and Mozart. Gödel, in turn, had no more success in dragging Einstein to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, his favorite movie. History, sadly, does not record which of the seven dwarfs was Gödel's favorite, but we do know why he favored fairy tales: "Only fables," he said, "present the world as it should be and as if it had meaning." (That meaning, of course, may be dark. It is not known whether Alan Turing acquired an affection for Snow White from Gödel when visiting the institute in the 1930s, but some have heard an echo of the dark side of Snow White in Turing's decision to end his life by eating a poisoned apple when, as a reward for his having broken the "Enigma" code of the German navy, the British government ordered him to receive hormone injections as a "cure" for his homosexuality.)..."




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