How do you measure the degrees of separation? Neither two of the three gentlemen ever published anything academic together. All three knew each other well. (I am a biologist. My Erdős number is 3. As a measure of overlap, degrees of separation mean very little indeed :) )
The Gödel metric is a solution to Einstein's field equations. Gödel became interested in mathematical logic after studying Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. Gödel is also an analytic philosopher. Analytic philosophy was co-founded by Russell.
Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein could have had a discussion about algebra or other math, but all the biologists in the room would have still complained that it had nothing to do with their biology research. It's more that biologists generally don't care about abstract topics like mathematics.
Biologists, and other scientists, as scientists, don’t care for things that don’t help them do their research better in a way they and their colleagues perceive as better. Physicists don’t care about much of maths, either. Einstein definitely didn’t have a broad knowledge of theoretical mathematics.
> Physicists don't care about much of maths "Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain, and predict natural phenomena."
Read again what I wrote. Yes, theoretical physics is mostly mathematics. But most of pure mathematics is not used in theoretical physics and theoretical physicists don’t care much about it - until somebody shows that some part of it can be useful for what they do.
Yes, there is an intersection between pure mathematics and theoretical physics, so they have something to talk about, but biology research doesn't intersect with either pure mathematics or theoretical physics. All the scientists in that group were biologists.
So is Carl, who started this discussion. What point are you trying to make?
During that time period, the logical positivism movement dominated in philosophy. Logical positivists thought only logic and science were useful, and prior philosophy was subjective bullshit that nobody could prove. Logical positivism is now considered debunked and dead in analytic philosophy.
Logical positivists were extremists and really into abstract math(s). It's not surprising that Russell enjoyed it but the four biologists from 1949 would find it useless. That says very little about whether philosophy of science, which found problems in logical positivism, would help science today.
In many ways, STEM bros who think only science and mathematics are useful—and philosophy is subjective bullshit—are logical positivists. And that's why some humanities education would help, especially philosophy of science.
Einstein cared. 'Einstein confided that his "own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely ... to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel". ... [The Gödel metric] would allow time travel to the past and caused Einstein to have doubts about his own theory.'
Einstein cared about concrete solutions to his equations. That supports what I wrote above.