Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is a book by Douglas R. Hofstadter, published in 1979 by Basic Books, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Award for Science. The Spanish first edition appeared under the title «una eterna trenza dorada», later replaced by the current form, which preserves the initials game GEB:EGB proposed by the author. In the preface to the twentieth-anniversary edition, Hofstadter explained that the book attempts to answer a central question: how living beings can arise from inanimate matter, and what kind of «self» can emerge from things as lacking in selfhood as a stone or a puddle.

The theme that holds the work together is the relationship between the achievements of the logician Kurt Gödel, the artist M. C. Escher and the composer Johann Sebastian Bach. Hofstadter argues that the three are, in a sense, shadows cast in different directions by a single underlying essence, and his aim is to reconstruct that central core. From there the book explores formal systems, self-reference, isomorphism, the relationship between syntax and semantics, number theory, computability and artificial intelligence, always asking whether words and ideas follow formal rules.

The structure is as important as the content. Expository chapters alternate with fictional dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise, descendants of Zeno's paradox and of Lewis Carroll's «What the Tortoise Said to Achilles». Other characters, such as the Crab, extend the conversation. These narratives are often self-referential and metafictional, and the book is full of puns, riddles and musical canons, some built as crab or sloth canons in which the form of the dialogue mirrors its content. Hofstadter coined the term «strange loop» to describe systems that, by referring to themselves, leap between levels of description, and he later developed the idea in I Am a Strange Loop.

The book was widely received and became a classic of popular science and philosophy, though it has also been criticised for its length and the dispersion of its topics. Its translation posed unusual problems, since it depends on wordplay and on structural puns in which form and content reflect one another; the author himself took part in adapting it to different languages, and in Chinese the subtitle became a different phrase that is homophonic with GEB.