Gödel, Einstein, Mach, Gamow, and Lanczos: Gödel's remarkable excursion into cosmology (Q2856491)

This paper ``was written in the hope that it might serve a readership that may not necessarily be familiar with the details of Einstein's general relativity theory but that nevertheless may appreciate the gist of Gödel's contribution to relativistic cosmology.'' Nevertheless, it contains all the technical details a specialist expects and, moreover, the author presents ``an elementary derivation of Gödel's metric and of its geodesics.''NEWLINENEWLINEAfter a brief preliminary description of Gödel's rotating cosmological model with its surprising and partly paradox properties, the author discusses grounds that brought this model into being. Based on Gödel's 1949 contributions to the topic found in the Einstein Festschrift (as well as in the correspondence with the Festschrift editor and letters of Gödel to his mother), in the Einstein issue of Reviews of Modern Physics and in the lectures on rotating universes held by Gödel at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, Gödel's philosophical and physical motives are discussed. It is shown that these motives were mainly founded in Gödel's ``sympathy for Kant's philosophy of time'', which led him to criticize the time introduced in Friedman's cosmological models (containing the static Einstein cosmos as a special case) and in ``Gamov's note in Nature with its challenge to find a rotating universe consistent with general relativity.''NEWLINENEWLINEFollowing Gödel's 1949 lecture, the author considers a Newtonian rotating (but not expanding) universe to prepare the relativistic Gödel model, which is constructed in analogy to the Newtonian model. In contrast to Gödel's derivation, the latter is done by using ``only standard results from the general theory of stationary space-times'' published by the author in 2006. Afterwards, light cones, time-like world lines, geodesics and the stability of the Gödel model are discussed. In commenting Gödel's work in this field, the author hints at its great meaning for extended investigations of rotating cosmological models later carried out by many cosmologists. Referring particularly to a later paper (1952) by Gödel, the author comes to the conclusion that ``it is probably fair to say that Gödel's 1952 paper was one of the main impulses for many of these extensions.'' -- In the epilogue, one finds a report on a model by Lanczos, who ``came so uncannily close to discovering Gödel's universe exactly twenty-five years earlier.''NEWLINENEWLINEFor the entire collection see [Zbl 1253.00009].