Adam Kucharski

be really fully satisfying so particularly in mathematics he showed that there were this problem that is very hard to have a set of rules for something like arithmetic that was both complete and covered every situation but also had no contradictions and I think a lot of countries if you go back things like Napoleonic code and these attempts to almost write down every possible legal situation that could be imaginable

always just descended into either they needed amendments or they had contradictions.

I think Godel's work really sums it up.

And there's a story that's in the kind of late 40s when he had his citizenship interview and Einstein and

Oscar Morgenson went along as witnesses for him.

And it's always told as kind of a lighthearted story as, you know, this logical mind, this academic, just saying something silly in front of the judge.

And actually, to my own admission, I've in the past given talks and mentioned it in this slightly kind of lighthearted way.

But for the book, I got talking to a few people who had taken it more seriously.

I realized he has this extremely logically focused mind at the time.

And maybe there should have been something more to it.

And people who've kind of dug more into possibilities were saying, well, what could he have spotted differently?

that bothered him.

And a lot of his work that he did about consistency in maths was around particularly self-referential statements.

So if I say this sentence is false, it's kind of self-referential.

And if it is false, then it's true.

But if it's true, then it's false.

And you get these kind of weird self-referential contradictions.

And so one of the theories about Goodell was that

And in the constitution, it wasn't that there was a kind of rule for someone can become a dictator, but rather people can use the mechanisms within the constitution to make it easier to make further amendments.

And he kind of called it a downward cycle amendment that he had seen happening in Europe in the run up to the war.