Mter crossing the beautiful Cascades and eastern Oregon's desert, I
wound up in Moscow, Idaho. Since Quicksilver had a little engine trouble
and needed some repair, I took advantage of the spare time and went to the
University of Idaho's library to look up some of the articles about Godel's
proof in DeLong's annotated bibliography. I photocopied several of them,
and in a day or so headed off toward Montana and Alberta. Each night I
would stop and pitch my little tent, sometimes in a forest, sometimes by a
lake, and then I would eagerly plunge by flashlight into these articles until I
fell asleep in my sleeping bag. I was starting to understand many G6delian
matters ever more clearly, and what I was learning was truly enthralling.From Letter to Pamphlet to SeminarMter a few days in the Canadian Rockies, I headed south again and
eventually reached Boulder, Colorado. There, one afternoon, a host of
fresh ideas started gushing out in a spontaneous letter to myoId friend
Robert Boeninger. Mter several hours of writing, I saw that although my
letter was longer than I'd expected - thirty handwritten pages or so - I'd
said only about half of what I'd wanted to say. This made me think that
maybe I should write a pamphlet, not a letter, and to this day, Robert has
never received my unfinished missive.
From Boulder I headed further east, bouncing from one university town
to another, and eventually, almost as if it had been beckoning me the whole
time, New York City loomed as my ultimate goal. Indeed, I wound up
spending several months in Manhattan, taking graduate courses at City
College and teaching elementary physics to nurses at Hunter College, but as
1973 rolled around, I faced the fact that despite loving New York in many
ways, I was even more agitated than I had been in Eugene, and I decided it
would be wiser to return to Oregon and to finish graduate school there.
Although my hoped-for "new life" had failed to materialize, in certain
respe~ts I was relieved to be back. For one thing, the U of 0 in those days
had the enlightened policy that any community member could invent and
teach a for-credit "SEARCH" course, as long as one or more departments
approved it. And so I petitioned the philosophy and math departments to
sponsor a spring-quarter SEARCH course centered on Godel's theorem, and
my request was granted. Things were looking up.
My intuition told me that my personal fascination with strange loops -
not only with their philosophical importance but also with their esthetic
charm - was not just some unique little neurotic obsession of mine, but
could well be infectious, if only I could get across to my students that these
notions were anything but dull and dry, as in those frigid, sterile logic
courses I'd taken, but rather - as Nagel and Newman had hinted - were
intimately related to a slew of profound and beautiful ideas in mathematics,
physics, computer science, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and so on.
I gave my course the half-dippy, half-romantic title 'The Mystery of the
Undecidable" in the hopes that I might attract students from wildly diverse
Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-