I’ve just heard that CUP will probably look kindly on a proposal for a second edition of my Gödel book, to come out two or three years hence. There have already been a couple of (quite heavily) corrected reprints, but this time I’d do an end-to-end rewrite, and the whole thing could perhaps be up to 10% longer. So if you have bright ideas about how to make the thing better/more useful, or views about stuff I’d left out that ought to be in the book, I’d be delighted to hear them. It will be good to have a limited retirement project to fall back on when other work isn’t going so well.
I would appreciate details at crucial places. Cases that come to mind are the argument that Q can capture all p.r. functions in GWT (but this is excusable), the demonstration that Prf is p.r., and the “sketch of a sketch” for the third derivability condition. In such cases, the student is left thinking, “but… it was supposed to be a proof!?” Grant the details can get in the way of understanding, but maybe an appendix? or or some sort of web links?
Yep: I agree. The current version is an uneasy three-quarters-way house, it seems to me, not quite nailing down full proofs of some key results. I should have about 40 more pages to play with, and I think will now be a major priority to round out bits that are currently left in too unfinished a state.
AS you say though, too many details can get in the way of understanding. One possibility would be to set off skippable detail in a smaller font or use some other typographical signalling.
I’m still intrigued by the ‘incompleteness after Godel’ you were thinking of writing a book about. Perhaps something about that?
That book is still a gleam in my eye: whether it happens depends how much energy I have in retirement. (But I am ruthlessly cutting out post-retirement distractions that can eat into time so much.)