Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Janna Levin: Spots, Blues, and Madmen — revealing cosmic mysteries (#056)

Episode Date: July 15, 2020

   Theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin is an-award winning author of both nonfiction and fiction. In her interview on the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE podcast, she emphasizes the important role of creativity in science, and life in general. We discussed Levin’s research on the topology of the universe and black holes, including the Event Horizon Telescope. We also discuss her highly-anticipated upcoming book, “Black Hole Survival Guide.” Subscribe to my newsletter to receive show notes for this episode: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list… 00:03:17 Science is part of our culture. 00:12:17 Cultivating communication skills in scientists. 00:16:29 Gödel, Popper, and what constitutes good science. 00:23:55 Extra spatial dimensions. 00:31:45 “Every kid is a scientist.” 00:37:26 Illuminatin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It's a pleasure to welcome none other than Professor Janne Levin to the Into the Impossible podcast. Jana, where are you joining us? Which bunker are you in right now? The Pioneer Works bunker, Home bunker. I'm in my Manhattan bunker. It's really quite interesting because the students have all evacuated and a lot of the faculty have evacuated. So it's the quietest.

We call it upstate Manhattan. Yeah. It's just a scientist. Yeah. There's a book, I think, called like Once Upon a Time or in New York or something, and it characterizes New York in the 1800s. It's a wonderful kind of historical fan fiction to New York. And it talks about the fields around Broadway up in the Upper West Side.

Quite lovely. But it is a treat to end. Thank you so much for making time. I know it's a very frantic, frenetic time for all of us in the faculty set. And you, especially all the hats and, and balls that you juggle in the air so specifically. I want to give you your official introduction that Jen 11 is that Claire Tao professors,

Tao or tow or how do you say? Tao professor of physics and astronomy. She's a theoretical cosmologist. She's a professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, and she earned her PhD in theoretical physics at MIT, a small technical college in Massachusetts. And her Bachelor of Science as well, with a concentration in philosophy,

at Barnard, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa. I like that. That's great. A bunch of her work deals with looking for evidence support the proposal that our universe might be finite in size, and that, of course, the subject of your really startling, you know, just phenomenal book, how the universe got its spots, which deeply influenced me in the writing of my book

and showed me that a young scientist could effectively write what, you know, was in a series of letters as a memoir, and really captured the spirit of what it feels like to be a human being doing science. So it's such a treat. We've never met in person. We were kind of talking about that. It feels like we should have met, but we never did.

We have mutual friends in common. Stefan Alexander, Amanda Veltman, who speaks so glowingly about her time with you as well. And it's a treat to have you here. So thank you so much, Shannon. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your kind words. You know, books are these things. They kind of, like, their messages in a bottle.

You launch them out into the world, and it's always amazing to hear where they for sure. Yeah, that's right. And so we're going to talk a little bit about books, but the first thing I really wanted to get to is that you wear, as I said, many different hats or however we want to describe it. And one thing that characterizes your work is really, you know, kind of at the pinnacle of scientific research,

but also, you know, without parallel doing outreach to the public. And I want to just kind of pick your brain as someone who aspires to do what you're doing to both be a hardcore physicist as you are in the theoretical front. I'm trying to be in the experimental front. How do you manage to do that? Was that always a goal of yours to be able to do both? And do you feel like it's an obligation to do both? So can you share your philosophy as an educator to the public as well as to your students?

Yes. I never really think of it as outreach. So I think that this is a funny thing we say to scientists. Oh, now you're not being a scientist. Now you're doing this other thing called outreach. And I just, I've never really understood that. So if you're an artist and you spend a lot of your time in your studio, toiling away, and it's, you have these ideas and, you know,

and then you make work and then you exhibit it. Nobody's like, oh, look at you doing outreach. We consider that participation in culture to be part of the, part of the creative process and part of learning. and then communicating and being engaged in a cultural sphere, completely natural. And I've always felt it was very natural as science. Of course, I want to talk about my work. And of course, it starts out just your friends talking to your friends about your crazy work

and trying to translate. And when I would have that over like happy hour with my friends translating to them something I'm trying to understand, I would have my own epiphanies. I would have my own kind of moment of deeper understanding in that process of translating. And it was just something I liked to do. And I don't consider it, I consider it another creative project, but a natural extension of the scientific behavior. Do I think it should be an obligation? I absolutely do not.

I think not everyone wants to do that. And absolutely would be ridiculous if it was an obligation. So I really think you have to have in you this urge to write, urge to use language, this sort of, it has to feel like a creative project of its own, which is a natural consequence of work of being a scientist. And one of your major projects is pioneer works. Can you tell us a little bit about pioneer works for those on the West Coast? Yeah. So pioneer works is a cultural center. It has, it's completely unique to my knowledge in that it has arts, music, and science, all as major pillars.

We're not trying to do sci-art, make scientists be artists or anything like that. It's just we consider science part of culture, and we bring science to this cultural sphere. We have a lot of public conversations. They're surprisingly popular. They're absolutely packed. We have people standing and sitting in a, you know, Pioneerics is going through some upgrades, but we had no AC, one hot summer, an event on animal consciousness, like 1,200 people, nobody budged for the hour and a half.

And so we have this really devoted, awesome audience. And recently we launched, so I'm director of sciences, and so I felt out the sciences. And recently we've launched something called the broadcast, which is going to be our, what we're calling like a virtual assembly, and where it's a very beta version, it's real kind emergency mode because we hadn't planned on launching so fast, but the current crisis has changed our timeline, as they say. So we have this quickly launched version of the broadcast that just is now reaching out some of our archive and our ideas both from science, art, and also from music. So I think that's, you know, it's a unique attribute of this, and it's all free, right?

It's most of the, all these programs are open to the public. And you have an extensive library catalog videos that you posted with Nobel laureates, with artists, with famous scientists from all these different spheres, including our mutual friend, Brian Green. Yes, we just featured a live conversation with Brian. We released the video on the broadcast. It was just a couple weeks ago. Right, that's great.

So I want to segue using Brian and kind of parallel. what you do with him and maybe contrasting with other people in the science communications business in that sometimes people will trot out somebody like a Neil deGrasse Tyson to opine. And one thing I really love about Neil is that he'll always say, well, why don't you ask the scientist who did the result first? And I wanted to segue into that in just a minute, something that's going around the intersphere as we speak about exciting things that have tangential relationships to the work that you and I do. But first, have you noticed, and do you ever perceive that there's sort of this maybe slight denigration or lowering of esteem if somebody chooses to popularize science and does something in the mass market, as they say, you know, versus or to what, if you do believe that's true, do you attribute it to? I do sense it even to the extent, you know, that there might be a jealousy of someone like a Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's so outstanding. at popularization and branching out.

Admittedly, he doesn't practice as a scientist as you do anymore. But how do you bridge that get? Was that something you were worried about? You speak a little bit about that after the writing of how the universe got its spots. I remember you talking about that. But how do you look back on it now? That book is about 15 years, 20 years old now. Did you worry about, you know, kind of the level of respect or esteem or maybe,

not vitriol, but jealousy. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, for sure. I was told in no uncertain terms not to do this. I was just fresh out of graduate school. And I was told absolutely by people who cared about me and meant well, do not do this. This will be the end of your career.

And that was a very strong 15 years ago. That was a very strongly, widely held opinion. And even when I went through my tenure process as a professor, I was told quite absurdly, if you ask me, but that none of my books would be considered in my dossier. They just would not be included. They would be kind enough. The attitude was sort of like, well, we won't penalize you.

So you're getting off lightly, right? It's not going to actively penalize you, but we won't consider it. And this is crazy. These are like one of my books won a Penn Award. And, you know, if I was in, if I walked over to the next building, I'd get tenure on the basis of that pen award, right? Right. So it is, you know, it was a lot of mixed messages, but, and it took me kind of a long time to find a position in which I felt I had support from my college and, you know, that they knew what they were getting and they didn't tell me to stop or to quit.

It was very important. Yeah. And so, so I feel very supported where I am. But I do think the tide has also turned. And it's turned in part because of people like Brian. You know, Kip Thorne wrote this wonderful book. Lenny Susskin has a great book. Black Hole Wars.

Sean Carroll writes wonderful books. So I think that the respect for the quality of the writing went up. And with it sort of greater acceptance that this was a valid aspect. of what somebody should be doing when promoting science to the world. And so I do think it's turned, not 100%, because we've all gotten wraps on the knuckles at various times. And you could ask that whole group that I just mentioned, they've gotten a rap on the knuckles more than once.

But I think that we've also sort of changed the culture in that way. And now everybody wants to write a book. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So now, yeah, I'm waiting for it. You cannot get tenure unless you write a book. in the physics department. But I think that's what it's going to be.

Oh, we've always thought this was really important. That's right. It'll be first dismissed as crazy and then accept it as obvious. Right. Yeah, so that's, you know, I always find it ironic because many of us got interested in science because of the great popularizations of, you know, people like Stephen Hawking and Brian Green and Sir Roger Penrose, all these folks that influenced me. And I know a great impact on your life as well.

And yet, even our scientists, colleagues, who don't write a book, you know, it's kind of like, you know, eventually it might be like we described them as not having, you know, two different cohorts and we'll say the ones that haven't written books. But I do feel like it's sort of, you know, sometimes there is this notion, you know, of, well, you must not have, you know, time for real science if you're doing, if you're doing these extraneous projects like I'm doing this podcast or writing my book or what have you. But then you look at, you know, how poor a job I just had on Eric Weinstein on the podcast just this week. And he, you know, saying, you know, physicists are really not good at making use of the vast array of tools that they have at their disposal. And by that he means you have these incredibly, the most fascinating things ever, you know, contemplated by the human mind. And we're like the best at, we're the worst at public relations. And I feel like because we're so bad, and it is. is hard to do what you do. And I remember Brian Green telling me that he had received coaching

for how to communicate. And I think that's incredibly important. And why would that not be a skill that should be cultivated? I mean, after all, our salaries, in most cases, are paid by the public. Yeah. I agree with all that. I also think it's a very foolish, linear attitude. So if if I just sit there and crank out publications, that's going to make better quality work. That's It's not how it happens. Sometimes you have to sleep and sometimes you have to eat, and sometimes you have to take a walk and clear your mind and to do something else. And to be creatively, you know, we're not walking off to write a manual for how to use a Betamax,

which might genuinely degrade the quality of your scientific. That is useful. Yes, it is in short. But it is a whole, these are creative experiments. You know, we are impacting the creative culture and the conversation around science and changing attitudes. And so my antidote to the criticism, you just leveled like, well, you're not doing as much science. I had the opposite situation with a friend who said he had just published a paper on the archive, which is where you share publicly your work. And it was rejected because it was the same author list and the same title.

as a previous paper they had written. So, like, that's not so great either. Right, yeah. Okay, take a break, creatively, think about something else, put your mind to something else, and then, like, find the enthusiasm and the freshness to come back and look at a new project. Yeah, I feel like it is.

I never remember which hemisphere of the brain is responsible for what aspect of human creativity. But, and I think that means I am one of those two brains, and sort of a solipsism that you describe In this book, you know, you get the statement is false, which I just love, I mean, you know, I'd always contemplated that, you know, this, this kind of all the statement is false, that girdle that leads in this book, which is a sort of, you know, I view it as like Schrodinger's book between fiction and nonfiction, because there's a lot of nonfiction in it and there's a lot of, there's a lot of obviously fan fiction in a good sense. But it's a very touching book, as was your first book, how the university. Scott at Spots, I want to take a step back and now talk about that book and how it influenced my life and just the way that I think about things. And I think this is an ideal way to think about it. So as I'm reading that book, I'm thinking about, you know, this is as a young

postdoc at Caltech in the early 2000s, mid-2000s, and I was thinking about, well, how could you actually test some of these ideas that Jana is discussing in the book? And so I wanted to take the opportunity to kind of walk back in time because everyone's familiar with your, you know, you know, award-winning bestselling books, this, this, The Mad Man Dreams of Turing Machines, Black Hole Blues, which we'll get into in a little bit. But I want to take you back to that first book. And because I think it's so charming and it's influential in ways that you might not have understood at the time to people like me who build experiments.

And I want to talk about that, the interface between you and the work that you do as a theoretical physicist, as a theoretical cosmologist, and the work that people like me do, which is to build instruments. And I've had on people like Sean Carroll and others on the podcast and we and as I said, Eric Weinstein, and it kind of runs the gamut. I think I've only had one true experimentalist and that was your colleague Elena Priil at Columbia University. And she was wonderful. And we talked a lot about dark matter and xenon. What do you view as a fundamental equivalent? In this book, you talk a lot about girdles and completeness theorem, which is the statement that mathematics, when encoded and encrypted in a special way that you just

describe really wonderfully in the book, is inconsistent, that it's incomplete, that there are statements which cannot be proven or disproven. Is that right? Yeah, well, I think the choices go to what was faced with was either inconsistency, which would have been devastating or incompletes. And so he formulates his proof believing that there will never be any outright paradox. Something will never simultaneously be true and false. But there will be things that are incomplete, undecidable, that you will not be able to formally prove as an axiom of a, or sorry, as a theorem of a set of axioms that something is true or false. That there are simply facts about numbers we will never know. And one of the examples

I like to give is there are numbers with an infinite list of digits 0.1, 7, 6, 2, and each digit is like a toss of the coin. There is no way to prove, predict, no facts are true or false about that list of numbers. They are uncomputable, unknowable, and therefore arithmetic is incomplete. So the shortest way to describe them is by them. There's no shorter, more compactified way to describe it. They're uncomputable numbers. Yeah. So we had a- We never deal with them. Right. You know, we only deal with computable numbers. So of the infinite set of numbers that we can deal with, there is a larger infinity that we know nothing about. I want to get, I mean, you're just stimulating so many different directions that I want to go in. But

But before we leave Gertel, I want to get back to infinity because I believe that we can't even deal with infinities in the human mind and not just writing down a symbol on a piece of paper or when your kid tells you, I love you, infinity, hopefully. But I want to get back to Gertl for one second, just to say that, in my opinion, running around Vienna, not too long or too different in time was a PhD or doctor named Sigmund Freud. And Dr. Ford spoke about this concept, a certain type of envy, which we won't get into because it's a family show. But he talked about envy. And I kind of conjecture that physicists have mathematician envy in the sense that we don't have a crisp criterion that mathematicians do, thanks to Gertl, as you describe in this book. We don't have a criterion to tell us what is good science. We typically will use Popper. And we'll say, Popper says that if something cannot be falsified, it doesn't count as science.

I always point out that he was talking at the time when Carl Popper conjectured that dialectic, that dichotomy between what constitutes science or not, he was really talking about the demarcation between things like socialism and capitalism or psychoanalysis like Freudian analysis and basically quackery or astrology versus astronomy. And he sort of went to his grave where people do take that as a cynic. quenon of what is physics, let's say. But we don't have a crisp, we can't compute it in the same way that Gertil provides as you described. What do you make about this, the obsession that my colleagues and I have with falsifiability? You know, because I want to turn that obviously to your theories of topology and spatial that you brought forth and have the universe got its spots. So can you tell me, how do you, as a theorist, as a card-carrying theorist, look at what constitutes actual good science? Well, I mean, I think it's a very subtle question.

I think there's a lot of danger of moving away from false applicability, mostly in the sense of it being misunderstood. So, for instance, I can compute something about the shape of the ten-dimensional space, and it is falsifiable on my page, even if I cannot perform a different kind of experiment to verify whether our universe. manifests in that way and in that sense it might be that my theory exceeds falsifiability because of our human limitations maybe it'll happen in 300 years but doesn't not make it science because it is a kind of an experiment to look on the page and say look there's this thing called the circle it has diameter to R and it has circumference to pi R and why don't you do the same experiment and you're going to find a same answer and it's totally theoretical it only exists in our

mind, but it's a real experiment. And it is falsifiable. Because if we go around, you ask a billion people, and if they know what they're talking about, we're all going to agree that the circle is 2 pi-R. And anyone who tries to build a bridge based on a different principle, the bridge is going to fall down, right? So that's a form of verifiability to me. And that's the kind that I seek when I'm working. If I get to, so for instance, let's take Kodal, because it's a really wonderful example of that where you could say somebody who's not a scientist or mathematician might say, oh, we'll never know everything, right? Or that's not knowable, don't bother. And they don't understand the difference between that attitude, which is completely psychological and not verifiable,

how distinct it is from Godil writing a proof, proving that there are facts that we will never know. It's verifiable. We all can check his proof. And, So I think that there's a subtlety to these things. Now, that leads us to things like string theory. Maybe there's a multiverse of possibilities, and that's not verifiable experimentally. But the mathematics of it being a viable possibility for the universe is falsifiable. So, yeah, so when you encode and crypt it in ways that you describe, then perhaps, right, we can have a glimpse at the underlying superfluid.

structure, the reality, veracity of that, without perhaps being able to conclude something about what lies at the very top, folks like Weinstein and others really conjecture that the pinnacle of culture, even civilization, is theoretical physics and that experimental physics. And he and I went back and forth on this. He's kind of like the tailor, you know, who might put on the last button on a suit or something like that, or a theorist who makes an incremental contribution. What's that? Eric is opinionated.

Yes, he is. He's so shy. It's very hard to get him out of his show. So I want to talk about the actual subject of that book, how the universe got its spots. And in particular, the connection between topology, the size, the shape of the universe. Because I do think it's sort of underappreciated and not only has led to searches in the field of experimental physics, but even other theorists like our friend Glenn Starkman, has also gone off. and is still fruitfully looking for features of the universe that you describe in the book. So I looked it up. It was published in 2002.

Is that right? The book? Yeah. Is it that long ago? I think it is. Terrible. Okay. Well, anyway, it's a wonderful book.

Don't say terrible. Thank you. Because I remember where you were when you were turning a physical page. I mean, before we had this swiping left and swiping right. Oh, no, that's a different app. That's a different app that I don't know. Right, right. But the, yeah.

could you take us back to the physics, the conjectures that you were putting forth, which are very highly original, and what the status of them are today? So that work that you mentioned with our colleague, Glenn Starkman, and he was also working with David Sprogel and Neil Cornish, it's some really clever ideas, so maybe we'll get to it. It's a little bit hard to. Glenn's been on the show, or he's given a talk here, and it's on the channel. I'll put a link to it, too.

So pure audio explanation of this is pretty challenging. But this part isn't. So the idea is pretty simple. You know, Einstein teaches us that our experience of gravity is really an experience of a space time. That really what we're doing when we're experiencing the gravitational pull of the sun as a planet is we're falling freely along the curve in the shape of that orbit. We're not firing rockets. We're actually falling the whole time.

We're just cruising along fast enough that we never crashed into the atmosphere. of the sun. And once Einstein teaches us that, you start to say, well, space time has one time dimension and three space dimensions. I need to tell you where to meet me, north, south, east, west, up and down in a building, and as well as the date. It can't be 100 years earlier or 100 years later. And that's space time. You can find each other there. Now, as soon as you think about that, there becomes a common question, which is why three? Why should the universe be conventional? So this was thought about very early on, right away, actually, people started to dabble in theories of space time that had more spatial dimensions. And then you, yeah, back to Kaluza and Klein back in the early 1900s, 1920s and things.

So then beautiful things were discovered there. Sorry, can you hear my sirens? Yeah, I can hear this. It's okay. It's New York City. Yeah, that's right. It takes us to reality. It's a pandemic. It's a pandemic, people.

Not coming for you, John. Yes, I know. I'm living in my own bizarre fantasy. So those ideas, part of the argument was if the extra spatial dimension was small, we might not notice it. And that's really the conversation starts. So classic example, you're an aunt walking on a straw. You're aware that there's a long dimension. You're a little less able to explore the width of the straw, especially as I shrink. get smaller and smaller, you might believe you are only on one dimension, not two. And so similarly,

there could be at every point in space, a wrapped up manifold, like a little space-time origami that's all folded up, it's spatially small, too small, literally for me to put my hand in it. And we cannot rule that out. And in fact, there's some advantages to it. You brought up Brian Greene. Brian and I have thought about, well, is it possible these extra spatial dimensions are responsible for dark energy? It's a possible we're observable. We're observable. them. So there's a lot of really interestingly, I love doing extra-dimensional cosmology. But eventually you do run out of things that you can, you can, as you said, verify. And that just, you know, it means that comes back to it occasionally. Right. Well, as I said, it is extremely

influential. And you may have been luck because one of the top science journals in the world is, of course, published in your hometown currently, and that's the New York Post. And the New York Post, you know, New York Post has an article yesterday that said NASA scientists detect evidence of parallel universe where time runs backwards. And I point out, as they say, you know, just because it's published in the New York Post

doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. They usually say that about nature. I'm just kidding. So this is a study that kind of really, could be pulled out of, you know, how the universe got its clock or something. And they claimed, you know, I kind of digressed here because, to be honest, the universe got its spots, coming back from this whole idea of extras spatial dimensions and saying, well, when the universe was born, why would three dimensions instantaneously be infinite? And the other dimensions stay

wrapped up and small. And so how the universe got its spots was like, well, maybe those large dimensions are just very big. They're not actually infinite. They are also compact, like the direction of the straw. And it's just really explaining, like, you know, those balloon tricks where you make a animal balloon. So if you squeeze down the extra dimensions, maybe that blows out the three large. So is there some way where now we're looking more holistically at a universe that's

democratically totally wrapped up and what you're trying to do? explain is why three got big. Mm. Ah, so flipping it around. Flipping the script, as our friend Stefan would say. Ah, very interesting. Yeah, that's delightful way to think about it. And I think, you know, one aspect of this research, so the reason I bring up this New York

Post article about, you know, parallel universes is really to, you know, kind of highlight the fact that what you work on is some of the most interesting aspects of modern physics and cosmology. And the surprise is that, you know, these things are unified. to what do you attribute the fascination the public has in the very, I mean, they're following you, so they're interested in black holes, they're following you, they're interested in aspects of parallel dimensions. But besides that, why are people so interested in the multiverse, in the extra dimensions, the arrow of time, and things like black holes? It's funny. I think I can answer it, because I can answer it to some extent for myself. It's some combination. of the strangeness and the truth. Right?

It's the idea that this is something that transcends where you're from in the world. It transcends what time, what era you were born in, and presumably from a different galaxy. These are the strangest things you could think of, but they're true for all of us. And there's something about that combination that I think is very exciting,

whereas I can read something that's completely fictitious and strange, and implausible and I don't get that same excitement, right? So I'm getting some excitement from walking away from believing that they actually are real and that they're out there. And that is the physicist versus the mathematician, right? Wanting to know that it's not just a neat little problem on my page, but that somehow these thought experiments are telling us things

about the universe 13 billion years ago. there's just a, I think that's incredibly moving and powerful and a sense of meaning and connection and being progeny of the universe is all rooted in that. And I also see it as a human story. You in the same tradition as Alan Lightman, I don't know if you interacted with him when you were at MIT or not, but, you know, I find you two of you almost unique amongst, you know, popularizers and practicing scientists in that you can write the most journalistic, hardcore fact reporting, you know, On one hand, with Blackhall Blues, you can write something in particular about the nature of a scientific theory, which might be a speculation. And then you can write a work of fiction as he's done.

And as you did in this book, Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. What about that? I mean, was this sort of like you going into a parallel universe where you could control at least some of the fictional aspects of these individuals and get inside their minds maybe? And even to the, yeah. So how did that attract you? as a writer, as a thinker? Yeah, I mean, I love reading fiction. I just love reading fiction.

And I, by instinct, would read a lot more fiction than nonfiction, except that I also interview a lot of people, like a pioneer. So I read a lot. I have to read a lot of nonfiction books, but I love language, right? So if the world had been a different way and I could not have pursued being a physicist, I think it's quite natural. I would have wanted to become a writer. and that, you know, we're not born with these divisors in our brains.

And if anything, I think the bigger questions is, why do we outgrow being artists and scientists? Every kid is a scientist. Every single kid is palpating, texting, measuring, experimenting. Why are we taught that we have some kind of falsehood that we outgrow this? So, yes, writing itself was always something I loved. I just love language. And so I took very seriously the process of writing itself, of playing with words, of experimenting with structure.

I mean, you brought up a Mad Men's and Trane Machines, and then in that book, like you said, it's kind of like the Schrodinger's book of reality and fiction. And in fact, I was doing, I was playing on the theorem itself, that there are some true facts that cannot be proven as a theorem yielding out of the axioms, right? It's not just a systematic list of steps,

and you get to the truth. And so in some sense, by telling a lie, by fictionalizing, I felt I was getting in some sense closer to the truth than if I had pretended that biography doesn't have a narrator or an author. Right. And that truth deforms under touch. Any book that you write is automatically altering the truth through the filter of your perception,

the way you speak, the way you write, the decisions you made as a biographer. And so I just decided just to give over to it totally as a statement and just to call it fiction. And also give myself a leeway to invent. And in my experience, nonfiction is very hard. So I think this fourth book that I'm finishing is going to be my last nonfiction for a while.

Yeah, it is. Well, I mean, this book, you have a lyrical, style that is very unique to you. I don't think of another author like you. I mean, there are, as I said, Lightman has his genre, but he's not actually practicing in the same sense that you are. And even in Black Hole Blues, and certainly in how a universe got its spots, you're able to weave together these very lovingly lyrical, you know, phrase, turns a phrase and just capturing the essence of the personality in a way that is on par with, obviously, you won this Penn Award and, you know, That is they don't hand those out

And so I think it's it's quite It's quite impressive to do that at the end of this conversation. I'll ask you You know what steps can people take to really delve further into this craft as you've done and maybe you'll say it's it's impossible Maybe you'll say it's innate some half the about half the listener reader sorry half the authors that I've had on you know Freeman Dyson used to tell me you know a lot of it was just you know is just kind of luck and and how he came out into the world other people say you can work on it. So we'll get to that towards the end. I know you don't have too much time. I do want to get to a couple other things. I really just do appreciate you saying that because like I said, the book to me is in its own object. Yes. And build it like I'm building a

sculpture. Yeah. It's just in words. But I want to be as careful as if I was chisling something in an art studio. Right. Like everything has to be thought through over and over and over and over again and you're playing with clay and structure and anyway I didn't mean to get a no it's it's lovely and actually that's that'll be our last topic that we discuss and the standard set of topics that I have for all my guests and that's Carl Sagan's quote about the astonishment of a book which actually had the pleasure to read to his daughter Sasha when she was a guest a couple weeks ago on our special Mother's Day episode we'll get to that and I you know have a finger puppet of him so it's it's appropriate that I'll mention that towards the end before we leave the

topic of your next book, I want to talk about things that you're interested in current cutting edge research. Obviously, you thrilled and you had a one-year anniversary of the event horizon telescope detection of measurement of the event horizon in M87. And I'm wondering if, you know, the new book, if you could give us a preview of it, you've also given a delightful lecture that's actually very accessible even to lay people or people like me who aren't, you know, card-carrying theorist at Brown University will put a link to that colloquium. And was that sort of a preview? You're talking about the black hole battery or the black hole pulsar.

Yeah, can you tell us a little bit about your current research and how that can be feathered into your upcoming book if it is? Well, just as an aside, so I had Shep Doloman, who's the project director, the founding director of the Event Horizon Telescope, and Andy Strominger, who's a brilliant string theorist from Harvard, in a conversation together about a month after the announcement last year. And we just published it on the broadcast. So you can watch the whole conversation.

And it's so wonderful, a spontaneous pause from the audience when we revealed the image, even though they had already seen it a month ago. But it just was so incredible that they succeeded. So going back to my own work, the supermassive black holes are very interesting to me. Some of the stuff I do relates to that. tricky thing about what Event Horizon Telescope did was it had to find the biggest black hole it could find that was the closest so that, you know, I can take a marble and I can see it, but if I take a marble and put it at 26,000 light years, I obviously can't see it.

So there's a black hole the center of our galaxy. It's four million times the mass of the sun, but what people don't realize is black holes are small. And one's like black holes or these monsters. The thing, the whole point is that they're tiny. So if you looked at the sun on the sky and you kind of imagine 17 widths of this one across. In that space, you're crushing four million suns. So it's impressively small, actually. And at 26,000 light years, they compare that to resolving a piece of fruit on the moon

to try to take the picture of that. And M87 is, of course, the one that was actually discovered. It's much further away, but it's also much bigger. So that it's about the same size, 55 million light years away, but six and a half billion times the massive size. So I was at the announcement. I was very excited about that,

but a lot of my work is about how to light up black holes lately. And so it might be a supermassive black hole, or it might be a black hole that formed from stellar collapse. It's not so big. And one of the cool ideas, this is something, you know, it probably just also came out of teaching. I was given electricity and magnetism as my curriculum for a while. There's something about these funny things.

If you take, like, I have a light back here, if I were to unplug my light bulb and I had a big magnet magnet, and I waved the magnet around, I would create electricity and light up that light bulb. It's a stunningly strange fact. It's just electricity and magnetism. So here I'm thinking, okay, you have this dark black hole, and next to it might be a neutron star,

which is a dead star that doesn't quite make it to be a black hole. Small, but not as small. and they are giant magnets. And so there's neutron stars whipping around this black hole. So now I have a magnet that's waving around. It must create electric fields. It's the idea. Those electric fields can light up the light bulb of the black hole neutron star system.

So it's a very cool little idea. And it's something that would be very hard to see from far away. We can't be sure we've seen it. We are looking for it. And so as these things merge, and if we were to get the ringing of the space time through the gravitational waves, we could hear them and see a flash of light. That's part of the hope. And then this idea of a black hole becoming a pulsar is the idea that the black hole will acquire its own magnetic field in this process and it will become its own magnet. And a pulsar is a neutron star with a huge magnetic field.

And so if I take a black hole and I put a huge magnetic field on it in the same way, it should. emulate a lot of the features of a pulsar, which is to say to power jets as it spins around. And so we could look for something like a black hole pulsar. So this could be a multi-melti-messinger type signal from such an object. Right. And when we saw two neutron stars collide, because they're made of these incredibly superconducting, unbelievably condensed materials, what we did see was a series of fireworks, literally like fireworks. Like there's this. And then it's followed by. Right that. And then there's a different explosion. And, you know, it went on for a year, and it was probably the most widely studied event in the history of astronomy.

Yeah. Right. And Blackhall Blues, of course, is this peon to, you know, detecting sort of the silence of space time, but the vibrations of space time due to this coalescence and really the human story of the Lago team and trying to come to fruition. But really, it's sort of a silent film. I think that's what you call it. you call it sort of the most important silent film ever made in some sense. But now you're talking about, you know, a real, well, maybe, I don't know what the opposite is, a talkie or something like that, but where you now have not only sound, but you have light, right? So you're adding a soundtrack to the universe. Yeah. And we're seeing things in the past. So we really, it is like we're seeing those, we recorded two black holes collided.

in 1.3 billion years ago at a time when multicellular organisms were just differentiating on the earth. It's just kind of wild to think about that coming towards us over 1.3 billion years while we evolve. Einstein lives. We build instruments, put them out there, and then there's this, like, beautiful. Yeah. Actually, I had Mario Livio on the podcast a couple weeks ago for his new book, Galileo and the Science Deniers. And he, at the end, he, sort of summarizes what he would, you know, sort of use to convey how far humanity has come in a single sentence. And it's that, you know, but we've detected black holes coalescing, you know, from a billion light years away is sort of the pinnacle of all of civilization

because, you know, there's so much encrypted in that. So I know you don't have too much time. I want to finish up this discussion. So the new book will be out in the fall or winter. We're late 2020, maybe early 2021. We hope to have you back on. Maybe in person. Yeah, we'll see how the world is it. We still won't need masks, but I'll provide you with a Simons here. We'll have our own Simons Observatory branded.

I have a great mask that a friend designed with a Calabiao manifold on it, the six dimension and extra spatial dimensions from string theory. It's pretty cool. I just have a black hall because that's what my mouth is anyway. We're making a whole bunch of them. So I want to turn to to wrap up this conversation with some questions that I ask all of my guests. And I try to really dig into a little bit of their own personality on these questions. But it kind of standardizes things and makes it nice for the audience to sort of tie together different episodes from these different brilliant scholars that I'm blessed to have on the podcast.

So the first one is something we kind of alluded to earlier, which is that, you know, know, books are sort of this magical DNA that connects human beings throughout the, throughout the eons. And none of than Carl Sagan said the following. He said, what an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny, dark squiggles, but one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person. Maybe somebody dead for thousands of years across the millennia. An author is speaking clearly and silently, inside your head directly to you. And I want to ask you about all your books.

But yeah, it's so beautiful to, you know, kind of talk to Sasha, say again, about this wonderful quote that's so influential to me and many other people. And her book, of course, is about her parents and also about her daughter and her new rituals that she's establishing on this small little marble, on this pale blue dot, as her father would say. So I want to ask you first. I've heard it said by some authors that they trade 100 readers a year from now for one reader 100 years from now. And I want to ask you of your books, and you can choose any one of them, besides the book sales, let's say, you know, in 100 years, the book will cost 100 times much inflation. What should you prefer?

That's a tough question. It's like asking about your kids or something to pick one. I used to ask my mom that. I used to say, mom, you know, we have three brothers. And I'd say, mom, you know, which kid is your favorite? And she'd say, that's like asking me to choose which arm I like better. And I said, mom, you're a left-handed person. You can choose.

Yeah, that would be really hard, I think, because my relationship with my books isn't my reader's relationship with my books. I mean, to a large extent, the first book was very special because it was so unselfconscious. I didn't think anyone would read it. it was very much a message on the bottom. And so I was very surprised that that book had a life and had an audience and was a wonderful experience. And the second book is a lot scarier because suddenly you're like, you're stuff at stake. And so I think that's why that book is so different.

I couldn't repeat what I had already done. And so I just figured, you know, people often forgive your second book in the shadow of your first. So a madman, James of Turing Machines, I got totally experimental. I've delved into the whole fictional side. And for me, I cannot understate how it felt like I had opened new doors in my own mind. Like rooms I didn't know existed. And so for me, I don't know for a reader. But for me, that becomes what was so important about that book. And then Black Cold Blues was just such a love letter to the experiment to Ray and Kip and Barry and the people involved. Some of the people who didn't even get named, who I just, you know, I loved and worked with

and struggled with. So I don't think I can answer that question I am sorry to say. Okay. That's fine. That's the guest prerogative. You don't have to answer it. Do other people answer? Oh, yeah. I've heard people answer everything, you know, from the venal. I want as many sales of the book now as possible. I interviewed Sarah Friar, who wrote a book about Instagram and the founding of Instagram, which kind of, it's been called, you know, the social network equivalent for Instagram. It's a lovely, wonderful book. And she was like, yeah, I definitely want people to read it now. Like 100 years from now, who knows, you know, Instagram? They won't even know what that is. That's like, yeah, your Betamax, your Betamax manual that I can't wait for you to write. Another question about books.

in terms of readers, not numerically, but sort of quantity or the disposition of the readers, would you rather have somebody, you know, we've all gotten negative reviews of our work, our creative work, and obviously our, you know, our kind of day jobs as physicists, we were used to that. A lot of criticism. Yeah. So which would you rather have, pick up this book? If you could force somebody to read it, cover to cover, really digest it, really grapple with it. Would you rather have a hater, you know, the player hater, you know, of the genital?

set or a fanboy like me, who would you rather have read? And let's just go through the three books. Yeah, the fan boy, all the way true. Because, I mean, the haters, you know, that's not criticism and that's not critique. And so I learn a lot from hard criticism and critique from my editor or a friend who's read it. They're not haters. Not haters, but I really mean like skeptic or someone. you know, who's, who's, and it kind of takes a contra-factual perspective.

Yeah. You know, I don't, like, I don't enjoy arguing about the flat earth. Yeah. And I don't enjoy trolls who are, you know, who's ultimate. No, no, no, I don't mean that at all. Just as a skeptical, like, why is this so important? Why? And it's like that beautiful quote you just read from Carl Sagan, that somebody is speaking to you in your head.

Yet you are the one animating that speaker. So there's this meeting of personalities and psyches in the experience of a book. So no book is experienced the same by all readers. It's not like, this is the book. And this is how you will receive it. So I'm very interested in a whole range, obvious, in responses to that because it's just fascinating. what some people are drawn to and what other people found uncomfortable. So I can handle the person who says, you know, I could not read that chapter about Turing,

dying, or, you know, I couldn't, you know, and I can sympathize with that. But, and it's interesting. It's fascinating. So I love that, that, that it's an interplay between reader and author. And I've been listening to books lately, and it's not the same. to not have the control of how you've animated that character in your own interpretation. Hearing your own voice in your own mind, yeah. It's your voice being influenced by another voice, right? And that's there's something, that's why their books still exist even after film. Film didn't feel books because we want that quiet experience of conjuring up in our own imagination

what that house looked like, what that felt like. And that intimacy is very special. You were on the Stephen Strugatz's podcast called The Joy of X, which was... I really liked that. He wrote his book, The Joy of X. He was like, am I going too far? That's right. I'm sorry, you can call it.

Your podcast will be a mad girl dreams of... Yeah, I thought about it. So in one of those episodes, he talks about the difference between music being much more emotionally evocative with one of the guests. I forget who it is. And versus the painted art, you know, two-dimensional art. And he claimed the guest who name, I think he's at the Institute for Advanced Study, but I'm not 100% sure. Oh, I think was it the string theorist? Was it the head of the Institute?

Yeah. That's difficult to pronounce Dutch name. Yes, exactly. Anyway, I'll put a link to it in the show notes. But anyway, the physicist who's speaking, he's saying, you know, it's deeper to listen to music because it's one-dimensional. It flows towards you at its own pace, and you can't change the speed of it. You can't alter it. So you must confront it on its own time scale.

Whereas art, you can kind of take in the visual arts, you know, all at once. And the eye is sort of more shallow, less deep than the heart or the ear. And I think that's even maybe more so. If music is under one-dimensional, maybe reading is zero-dimensional. I don't know. You're only taking in one squiggle at a time in Carl Sagan's language. So I agree with you 100%. The next question is, you strike me as someone who's just very abutient, very optimistic, has a very positive world.

Of course, I've never been in a faculty meeting with you. I'm sure I'd see a different side of you. But everyone, all of our mutual friends paint you as this ball of energy. Amanda Veltman said something like, you know, when you were pregnant with your second child, I think it was. Like, you were this dynamo who is equally tall as wide, you know, and it's just like, you set that you were like such a model for how to be this complete human being. I don't know what it is about Columbia and Barnard because, you know, I really find the frankness and the approach of you and Elena and Brian, obviously, so refreshing and it's really wonderful. I'm trying to encourage Elena to write a book, so hopefully we'll get her to be. Oh, yeah, I love Elena.

She's terrific. But speaking about optimism and pessimism, you're an optimist, what are you pessimistic about? In particular, how do you perceive the post-COVID fallout afflicting our work in education and outreach? So the optimist in me wants to, because I'm also playing an editorial role in the broadcast, I want to commission an article, and this will speak to the optimism,

that's titled something to the effect, we stopped everything to protect ourselves. What will we stop to protect the planet? So I do think that there is a place in which this horrible COVID experience could teach us lessons about environmental protection, about our academic structures, about riding bikes versus cars, about flying around the world so much that we actually, we did okay for the two months of quarantine. The real problem is the economic collapse, right? People not having work and food. It's not so much as I can't fly to Spain as much as I really wanted to do that. So I think it was a brutal lesson for a lot of us that actually we are contributing things that we could individually stop.

We are contributing harm to the planet. Things that we could choose to stop. There could be some really wonderfully optimistic lessons. And I feel the same way about academia that I realized when I was kicked out of the classroom onto Zoom, how much of that dynamism of teaching is about being in that room with your students, looking at their faces, knowing it's a very human interaction. And it simply is not the same over the Zoom and how I struggled with that. And it made me feel bad.

Like, I didn't feel as good about it. You know, it was really tough. And I think that instead of immediately reverting to old norms, maybe we'll learn something about that process, you know, an understanding, a re-examination of what was so wonderful about being in the classroom. And maybe it'll help us, you know, update our systems in a way that's really hard to,

we get very intransigent, very hard to update just philosophically for philosophical motivations. It's very different when it's life or death. Yes. And so the optimist in me thinks that if we're smart about it, if it means enough to us, as much as our own health and safety met, that we could do things post-COVID that will have incredibly positive influences on the way the world plays out.

The last question I want to ask you is based on a quote from Soron Kierkegaard, which I think is appropriate for astronomers like ourselves. And that's what he said was that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. And this title of the podcast is The Into the Impossible podcast. And it's one of Sir Arthur C. Clark's three laws, the first of which being any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from magic. Another one being for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert.

And then the third one is the only way to find out what is possible is to go beyond and venture into the impossible. That's where our podcast gets its name here at the Arthur C. Clark Center for human imagination. I want to ask you, what as a 20-something, 30-something, you know, seemed impossible to you, and it could be anything, that having gone venturing into the impossible, you'd like to advise yourself about, you know, go back in time and advise yourself that it'll work out. What seemed impossible, but now is possible eminently because you ventured into the impossible? Well, I mean, I could take a personal approach to that question, in which case wouldn't have been impossible, just daunting, right? I do think so.

I wasn't a kid who had a chemistry set in my basement or anything like that, and I came late to physics. I started studying it in college, and I think that I found, I had those moments of how could I, possibly catch up on this subject when some, you know, the guy next to me has been doing pretty advanced physics since like his sophomore year in high school. Right. At MIT, it's probably not so uncommon, right? It's like a five-year prelude on me, and his dad is like a famous experimentalist or something. And, you know, that got me down for a while. I've struggled, I struggled with that. And I think most scientists do until they get. something under their belt that really feels like them. So even if I published a few things,

but I felt like I was doing what, you know, maybe my advisor wanted or my some other colleague, mentor. And when I, until you do something, we think, oh, that was so, that was such a weird way of approaching the problem that somebody else might have solved it, but like I solved it in this weird way. And then you have this like feeling of like, oh my God, it's like finishing a rubik's cute. It's your brand. It's now. becomes your own brand. Right. And I think like I'm kind, that's kind of my brand. So like I don't write long papers anymore, pages and pages and pages and pages. If I can't figure out how to solve it shorter, you know, then I haven't really done my thing. So I might just not publish it, right? So part of what

I'd like to to do and explore my work is these interesting ways of cracking the walnut open. But I think even more so, more than that sort of personal stuff, is when I discovered things that I would have thought were physically impossible, and you confront it in the mathematics on the page, and it hits you in the solar plexes, that you really have to change your mind. Open your mind to something that seemed absolutely inconceivable. That is like one of the greatest experiences. It is both terrifying because you feel some smallness of not having the vision, the foresight to be open-minded to something, to have had to fight it, fight the math, and then be forced to change your conclusion. It is just a great experience all around. So, yeah, if I ever realize that some things are possible, that it seem impossible, it can be very exciting. Yeah. Well, Jen, I want to thank you so much. I want to now enter into the plug zone, which is where I want to promote you on Twitter.

And we're all following you there at Jan 11. You have a website and you also have the Pioneer Works website. and I want to, for the audience, listening out there, we're going to give away a copy of either Black Hole Blues or Mad Men Dreams of Turing Machines for listeners on the iTunes version of the podcast. I want to say thank you so much, Janet, for joining us today. I will be delighted if you'll come back again when Black Hole Survival Guide is out on the shelves

later on this year, hopefully, or early next year. Thank you, Jana, so much for sharing your mind, your ideas. Thanks. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible, please subscribe, comment, share, rate, and review. For a chance to win a free copy of our most recent guest's newest book, send a screenshot of your review to info at imagine.ucsd.edu.

We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for a few. future episodes. For more information, go to Imagination.ucsd.edu. Find us on Twitter at Imagine UcSD. Watch us on YouTube, listen on iTunes. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark

Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Viri, director, Brian Keating, co-director, Patrick Coleman, Associate Director. Produced by Stuart Volko.