24 There’s a way more grievous example of this sort of thing involving Kurt Gödel and the plot’s first real crisis. Alan Turing (here a wide-eyed undergrad) accidentally exposes Petros to Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem in 1933, whereupon Petros freaks out because he fears that the Goldbach Conjecture may be one of the F.I. Theorem’s “formally unprovable” propositions. This is so implausible and reductive as to be almost offensive. As Science’s own readership is hereby presumed (q.v. FN9) to more or less know already, Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem is concerned with the abstract possibility of Completeness in axiomatic systems, and the formally unprovable propositions it succeeds in deriving are all very special self-reference-type cases—the mathematical equivalent of the “I am lying” paradox. To believe that the First Incompleteness Theorem could apply to actual number-theoretic problems like the Goldbach Conjecture is so crude and confused that there is no way that a professional mathematician of Petros’s attainments could possibly entertain what the novel says is “the one and only, dizzying, terrifying question that had jumped into his mind the moment he’d heard of Gödel’s result…: what if the Incompleteness Theorem also applied to his problem? What if Goldbach’s Conjecture was unprovable?”

But then it gets even worse. Petros supposedly rushes off to Vienna and looks up Gödel—“a thin young man of average height, with small myopic eyes behind thick glasses”—and has a soap-operatic exchange that makes the reader keep wincing on behalf of everyone involved: