Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 27 | Janna Levin on Black Holes, Chaos, and the Narrative of Science

Episode Date: December 17, 2018

It's a big universe out there, full of an astonishing variety of questions and puzzles. Today's guest, Janna Levin, is a physicist who has delved into some of the trippiest aspects of cosmology and gravitation: the topology of the universe, extra dimensions of space, and the appearance of chaos in orbits around black holes. At the same time, she has been a pioneer in talking about science in interesting and innovative ways: a personal memoir, a novelized narrative of famous scientific lives, and a journalistic exploration of one of the most important experiments of our time. We talk about how one shapes an unusual scientific career, and how the practice of science relates to more traditionally humanistic concerns. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Janna Levin received a Ph.D. in physics from MIT, and is now the Tow Professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. She is the author of  How the Universe Got Its Spots, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, and Black Hole Blues. Her awards include the PEN/Bingham Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is also the director of sciences at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY. Web site Columbia web page Publications on INSPIRE TED talk on gravitational waves Amazon author page Pioneer Works Wikipedia page Twitter

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These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, in combination with resistance exercise. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And today's episode, I have a conversation with an old friend of mine who happens to also be an enormously respected scientist and writer, Jana Levin. Like me, Jana maintains both an active research program. She's a professor of physics at Columbia University in Bernard College, where she thinks about black holes and cosmology and astrophysics in various ways, but also a broader effort to

interact with other disciplines and with the general public. But we choose slightly different ways of going about that, broader impact kind of sector of our efforts. In particular, what Jana has done is mastered a way of writing about science that is fundamentally narrative in focus and tone. Her books that explain science to a broader public really read like novels. In fact, one of them is basically a novel. She mixes the human side of science with the actual research being done better than anyone else that I know. So we'll talk a little bit about her research, because that's always where things come from in some sense. but mostly about the book she's written and why she chooses to write about science in this way.

Her most recent book, which I recommend that you read, is called Black Hole Blues, and it's about the discovery of gravitational waves, the building of the LIGO Observatory, and all the effort that went into that over the years. So this conversation serves as an interesting companion piece to my conversation with Kip Thorne from just a couple of episodes ago. As Kip was there, he was one of the people who was interviewed by Janna for his efforts in helping to build LIGO and make it So you get different sides of the same story, which is interesting to compare. Okay, this talk has two old friends talking at great length. There's lots of laughs.

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The BZ isn't just electric. It's Toyota Electric. We make it easy. Toyota, let's go places. Janelle Levin, welcome to the Minescape podcast. Thanks for having me. So as we've been reminiscing here, pre-recording, we've known each other for a long time. We were graduate students, but not at the same place.

You started out at MIT, and I went to Harvard. So tell us a little bit about the trajectory scientifically, like what you started trying to study and where you are now? Well, I mean, mostly we usually talk about our meeting story. There's that, yes. You're welcome to tell that. Which is, what were we on it? We were on a, what were they called?

Tram. The tea. The tea is the subway. Oh, God, so cute. In Boston it's called the tea. And I think I was reading Borell and Davies quantum field theory in Curve Space Time, as you do, as you do, during rush hour. Yes.

And then it's tall, skinny, day. is living over me like, hey, I know Burland Davies. No, you're leaving out the best part. I was with a guy I knew who was trying to hit on you. Oh, yeah, that's right. And I tried to like save you by saying, like, wait, aren't you reading a book on quantum field theory

and Curse FaceTime? So basically, yes, you derailed. He was mad at me afterward, yeah. Was he? He should be. No, he shouldn't be. I was not mad of you. So that's a bad fit. And we've basically been friends since,

which is kind of hilarious. That's right. It is extremely hilarious. We studied a lot. We studied a lot together. There were a lot of problem sets. A lot of problem sets. A lot of discussions about whether coffee should have milk in it or not.

How much coffee should be drunk after midnight? At 2 a.m. In the middle of problem set, this is very important. It's crucial. Decision making. So I would say that in terms of trajectory, I was definitely not that kid. He thought I was going to be a scientist. And, you know, I discovered it really late.

I had really negative ideas about science and physics in particular, which is really kind of hilarious in retrospect. It's like my punishment in life was to become a physicist and have to redefine the identity. So I think that one thing that you and I always really enjoyed when we were, even students, was the sort of creative aspect of physics and how there are different solutions and different ways to, approach things and that it's like cracking the walnut. You find these really clever insights, and it's just this pleasure. It's this pleasure to be connected to the universe through this medium, which is wild that it works. And I feel like you and I kind of grew up together with that, learning that, not like high school, college level, but like feeling it.

Yeah, because it's in graduate school that you first get to sort of be right up close and personal with the universe in some sense, right? Right, right. Right. Right. And we're still asking the most naive questions then. I hope so sweet. And it's so sweet. And a lot of people do something in grad school and then end up doing it for their lives, right? Yeah. Which is not exactly what you've done.

No, that's true. Tell us what science you did in grad school. Well, gosh, I was kind of lost in grad school, to be honest, because I wasn't at my happiest point. But I was definitely working on alternative theories of gravity and space-time. stuff and how to interpret the Big Bang. But I don't think it was my best work. I mean, I know it's not my best work. I think that a lot of that came later with sort of more fluency

and lots of different subjects and less trying to prove something to somebody. Graduate school was very much about making sure your professors thought a certain thing about you so that you could go on. And my most creative work definitely came, I think, later when I felt, less of that, you know, less constrained by what other people thought. And yeah, so you got into a whole bunch of, you know, interesting buzzwords stirred together with chaos theory and topology and cosmology and black holes. Still like all that stuff. Yeah, still like all that stuff. So what does it mean? How does that come together to do science? Well, it's funny. So I think that right from a distance,

it looks like none of the things I'm interested in have a coherent theme, but they all do really, which is basically space-time physics. It's basically the coherent terrain on which, all the other stuff plays out. So even when I've done chaos theory, which I learned a lot from other people just by collaborating with other people who were very thoughtful by dynamical systems, it's the best way to learn, actually, is from other scientists. So very much borrowing and sharing and collaborating on chaos theory from people like Neil Cornish, it all happened in a curved space time. That's where we were interested. And one of the most interesting questions was, you know, chaos is usually defined as a loss of predictability.

over time, an exponential deviation over time, but you can't define a singular time and relativity. That's the whole point. So suddenly you have this, what does it mean to be chaotic? What are there unambiguous declarations? And chaos really does mean that there are not functional solutions to, sorry, my phone, I can arm my phone. God damn it. I thought I put it on silent.

you know, that there are not functional solutions to the equations of motion. That's unambiguous. It can't be ambiguous. Whose time? What time? So a lot of the fun we had was to try to make understandable declarations of chaos that were the same for all observers in space time. Well, this actually puzzled me about chaos. Still always puzzled me about chaos.

Maybe because I learned relativity first. You know, in relativity, time is up to you. You can choose time however you want. Sure. So you could have a logarithmic time or something like that where the chaos goes away, technically. No, the other way around, I'm thinking like if two things diverge only linearly with time, I'll define time to be log time. Right, right. Exactly. Make it exponential. So did you succeed? Yes. And what we realized is that in a lot of these systems, what you can look at is the possibility of large sets. So, for instance, large numbers of orbits around black holes, whether they merge or escape or are stable, that you can,

begin to find fractal sets in the space of possibilities. And fractals are unambiguous declarations of chaotic behavior because what's happening with a fractal, which is so smart that nature does, is it figures out a way to pack tons of information in the smallest space possible. Right. So our heads can remain volume-wise small-ish, but surface-wise very large by having lots of fractal folds. Because the brain is a two-dimensional sheet crumpled up inside our right. Crumpling it up, making it a fractal, allows you to have this huge surface area without scaling up the volume, which we couldn't support on our little necks.

And so what are you looking at in the black hole? You're like throwing a particle at it and seeing how it comes out? Yeah, like here's an example. Two black holes can be arranged to be completely static with charge and gravity balancing. So they're charged. So they're electromagnetically repulsive. but they're massive, so they're gravitationally attractive,

and you can tune it just on paper to be perfectly stable. These are not real experiments. These are not real experiments. It does not exist in astrophysics. But the orbits of stuff around those two will be like a pinball game. It'll be like a complex game of pinball. And so what you can do is look at the fractal set of possibilities. So how many little things you throw in there fall in,

how many little things escape, how many little things are stable. And if you start to try to very precisely define whether it's stable, merging, or escaping, no matter how precise you try to make those definitions, you still find a mixture of all possibilities. Right. And that's classic fractal behavior that you look closer and closer, and you still can't pinpoint what happens because a subtle, subtle dependence on the tiniest difference in the initial condition leads to the exactly opposite outcome. So what we did show was that the fractal dimension was related to things like the Leopin of exponent, which is measures and time.

Tell us what that is. I know. Oh, geez. You said it. Sorry. No, it's my fault. Oh, my God. That was a really naughty. So if it was just ordinary space, we would say that the time scale over which there was a divergence and predictability was set by something called the Leopin of exponent.

but because of what you raised about the ambiguity of time in relativity, it's different for every different observer. So we were basically able to show that the fractal dimension was the same for all observers. And it was a combination of things like Leapenov timescale and a spatial time. Details don't matter, but everybody would agree that the fractal was there. And this is a classic thing that physicists like to do, that you can sort of calculate something one way, but you worry that it depends on how you calculated it.

So you look for something you can show everyone would agree on this, no matter how they calculated it. Yeah, physics is really hard in that way. Physics is nothing, not hard. Don't tell the audience that. I've been telling it's very easy the whole time. Yeah, so what you want is a measure of something that's the same for all observers. That's really what you strive for.

So, you know, as you well know in relativity, you can't say time is the same for observers, you can't say space is the same for all observers, but you can say that there's a space-time interval, which is a measure in the four-dimensional space-time, which is the same for all observers, and that's really gratifying, and that you can orient all your interpretations around that invariant. And has, did this interest in the chaotic behavior of particles going around black holes lead you later to think about real astrophysical black holes that are out there? It did. Oh, my God, this crazy thing. And I think you, and I also suffer from this a little bit,

which is that in our youngest years, being most fascinated with the most abstract, most surreal, maybe not astrophysically relevant. Right. And because there was something about it, they just appealed to our tastes. Yeah. So for the audience out there,

there are astrophysicists who are, as I keep saying, relatively down to earth, despite doing astrophysics, right? Like, they're worried about real stuff. We see it in telescopes. We understand the underlying physics, but then there's some of us who go right to the edges of what we understand, which is a little fuzzier. Yeah, and I think that there's still that poll for me, but a part of as I started to sort of think about, you know, what's your contribution and what comes back to you, I wanted to see something predicted and verified. Yeah, it's about nature at the end of the day, right?

It's about nature at the end of the day. I move this total, and I love to call it an unrequited love for nature. We love her. She does not love us back. Very true. She is quite indifferent to us. Playing hard to get. She is very hard to get.

So I think that there was this sense of, oh God, if there was one thing, just one thing. And then I'll go back to my insane abstractions. But one thing that was verifiable while I was alive, like, that would feel so good. It would be so fun. It would be very childlike fun. Right. You know, just exploratory. And then there's the instinct gratification.

So, yes, it did lead me from being completely theoretical, imagined models of black holes to, wait a minute. There are real black holes. They're out there. That's pretty cool. There are things that we can say about them that people haven't said yet. It's still, in some sense, accessible to discovery. So I started getting really into more how black holes could contribute to like electronic circuits and weird things like that.

But wait a minute. So I think that the typical person listening is going now. Electronic circuits, I do build in a little lab room and I put things together in a light bulb comes up. So how do I like stick a wire into the black hole and light a light bulb or what happens? It's so funny. It's one of these things that I learned as a student, but always. Never really understood. And one of the things, if I try to tell my students now,

is that if you don't understand something, keep leaning on it because maybe you're going to crack something that everyone else has been glib about. And this was sort of one of those examples, which was black holes have no hair, meaning they cannot support complicated things like magnetic field lines. That magnetic field lines, if you remember in high school throwing iron shavings around a magnet and seeing the path of the field lines traced out

that you couldn't see with your eyes but that the iron filings trace out for you, that you see it literally looks like hair. Yeah. Coming out of the top of a head. And then usually going into the chin. So it's a hair beard. Perfectly spherical head. It's a hair beard. And the earth has such a magnetic field.

Neutron stars have very big magnetic fields. Black holes? Black holes, the formally proved cannot support the hair of magnetic fields meaning they just can't have them. So I was always confused about that because as you said, neutron stars

have these big magnetic fields. They can be a trillion times that of the earth. They're literally the strongest magnets in the universe, neutron stars. They're almost black holes, but not quite. They're dead stars that don't make it to be black holes. And if a black hole swallows one, which we suspect happens quite frequently,

what happens to the magnetic field? And there was always this very glib argument. And I think that it just by not accepting the standard lore and just sort of scratching at it, just being stubborn. You know, we realized that there's this phase where the huge magnet is whipping around the black hole and it's going to create an electronic circuit.

So if I disconnect a light bulb out of a lamp, I don't have a lamp here, and I disconnect the light bulb and I hold it in my hand, in principle, absolute basic electricity magnetism, no relativity, no black holes, nothing fancy. If I wave a magnet around strongly enough, I will light up that light bulb. It doesn't need to be plugged into a battery or the wall or anything. So I create electricity by a waving magnet. Because the magnetic field stretches away from the magnet. So even though you don't see it, there's something stretching from the magnet. magnet to the light bulb. Varying magnetic fields create electric fields. It's not spooky action at a distance. It's completely predictable. It's totally normal. It's totally natural. And so basically that's what we have. We have

this magnet whipping around near the speed of light around the black hole and it's creating actually an incredibly powerful electronic circuit. I don't know how we were the first ones to point this out because this is basically from like 1885. But there's so many things like that. Like someone must have pointed this out, therefore I won't think about it. Right. And then you leave. lose the chance. Yeah. Yeah. And also this no hair theorem, which is so lovely, doesn't say that a black hole can't have a magnetic field. It says it can only have a magnetic field consistent with the certain circumstances. The stuff around it. Exactly. And charge, which we can get into it. So that's fun. I mean, I was drawing circuit diagrams for like the

biggest, most powerful batteries in the universe. Well, you know, it seems like, we're just doing it for fun, but that's where a lot of great science comes from, right? Like, why care about chaos in black holes or electric circuits in black holes? Like, part of the motivation might be not just, well, this is going to lead us to the super secrets of the universe. It's just kind of cool. It is cool. And that's where super secrets sometimes get revealed. Yeah, and I think when people, and I know you and I have also had this conversation privately,

but when people say things like it's murdering to dissect or doesn't it make you? you feel glum or despair that the universe is this, you know, mathematical shape. You don't see God there in the black hole. I don't know how you can walk away from this and not feel meaning. Right. Not feel exactly the opposite, which is how are we so fortunate to be connected to the origin of the universe through math? What a gift.

And that it's so meaningful and so moving. So we absolutely do this for emotional reasons. Yeah, which is fine. There are no other reasons, right? That's where the reasons come from. Exactly. America's first pledge was freedom. Jeep still carries that fighting spirit. With the Jeep Declaration of Deals, we're pledging our allegiance to the American people with great deals on the luxurious Grand Cherokee, with available three-row seating, premium craftsmanship and tech that turns every drive into an adventure, or Jeep Rangler with legendary four-by-four capability and open-air freedom, because freedom deserves the vehicle built to carry it.

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BZ reflects decades of experience, reimagined for what's next. The BZ isn't just electric. It's Toyota Electric. We make it easy. Toyota, let's go places. And this is a great segue right into what I mostly wanted to talk about was you've been extraordinarily successful in addition to the science at things science adjacent, especially in telling stories, telling stories strictly about science or scientifically inflected.

You've written several books, a memoir, a novel, and narrative history. In every case, you know, there's a story going on. So maybe, I don't know whether you either want to tell us about the first book or tell us about the underlying motivations throughout them. I am, I'm super interested in structure and writing. And I think we are all taught to write very, very badly. And I was a philosophy student for philosophers. And this is also another conversation we have to get into. I learned to write so badly and I saw it.

Because of the philosophers. Because of the philosophers. I love philosophers. I'm sure the physicists would have taught you just as badly. Oh my God. Even worse. Even worse writing. Passive construction.

It was shown by and it is known that, whatever. It's terrible. But I grew up loving books and loving narrative and loving fiction. Not so much nonfiction. I'm actually not a huge nonfiction reader. So it was so much the power of fiction. Fiction is so rich and it's so complicated and it's so interesting. And so every time I sat down to write a book, I would be lost in terms of structure.

Structure was always the hardest thing. What am I doing structurally? It's not what am I trying to say. That was in some sense more accessible. You had that. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of knew what that was.

but how to say it was so challenging. And time and time again, I would throw away entire books. The second book especially, which ended up being a novel, I tried to write as a straightforward nonfiction, expository, math-proof sort of discussion about what can be known and what can't be known, the unknowability of certain mathematical facts. This is a book about Turing and Gertle. Yeah, Turing and Gertl.

And it just was wrong. And so I threw away an entire book. in order to write this other thing, which was a novel, which structurally seemed to be truer, which was to say there are some facts we cannot know simply by listing the data. In mathematics, we'd say the transformation rules from the axioms do not always yield a theorem, which is verifiable within the context of that, you know, what's the word I'm looking for, that theory. The formal system, yeah. That formal system.

And so the whole idea of the novel was there are some truths we can only get to by stepping outside, by being fictionalized or by being narrative or by being something different. Right. And once you say that, of course, it has to be a novel. Right. Exactly. So it became a novel with an unreliable narrator who doesn't know the truth, but it's grasping for the truth. And it was such a pleasure to write. It was such a pleasure once I was a terrible pain before I realized that. But once I made that decision, it just became this fluid. I just knew what I was doing.

Is there something besides the obvious that drew you to Turing and Ellen Turing, famous computer scientist and Kurt Gertel, famous mathematician, I mean, they're both fascinating characters. But did they, I'm sorry, this is the one book of yours I haven't read. So I have to confess that right from the start. Okay, we're going to go out for drinks and I'll read it. Do you? Download the audiobook right now.

Were they close? No, they never met. They never met. But they knew each other. They're very influenced by each other. So how do they fit together? I think, oh, wow, that's a good question, John, because I think the way people rarely ask me that because they don't fit together that well, except for cumulatively their proof is about

limitations of what we can know. but I think I was fascinated by the fact that Turing became such a cool-hearted atheist and that Godil continued to believe in an afterlife where he would be reincarnated and find a more platonic existence in a pure mathematical state. I just think that despite the fact that they started in the same intellectual, mathematical core, that they had these. wildly divergent beliefs. And that's actually why

I think I paired them. Why don't we just be very straightforward because I'm realizing you and I know who these people are, but maybe not everyone does. Who is Alan Turing? Like I said, Alan Turing became very famous as a very young mathematician for realizing

that there were some numbers that were uncomputable. Meaning, literally, if you tried to mechanize thought, and so here he invented the computer, So this is why Alan Turing is most famous, just point blank for inventing the entire idea of the computer, which at the time was a word for people who calculated things, but we now understand as a machine that's able to do lots of flexible stuff. And they used to be called universal Turing machines after Turing. But Turing's idea was to imagine mechanizing thought and figuring out a way in which theorems work and proofs work,

And in that process, he proved that there were numbers that could never be computed in a form shorter than the number itself. Right. So let's say I have a number, 0.1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9. It goes on and on for infinity. The code to generate that number is exactly as long as the number. Right. And no shorter. Which is not true of like the number two or three-fourths. We can write a very short-code. Well, the number two, it is true.

It's two plus two is five, right? It's Orwell. But the square root of two. Yes, the square root of two is actually, it's an irrational number, but it is computable in a very short code. Exactly. So the difference between square root of two and these other numbers was that there was no code that could be written,

no mechanized system that could be devised that would yield the number any more quickly than just randomly tossing the die of what the next digit should be after the decimal point. Okay. So it sounds very abstract, but what it means is that there are facts about numbers, simple numbers, numbers between zero and one about which we will never know anything. Not only that, but there's an infinite number of such numbers. Not only that, but it's the largest infinity of the numbers between zero and one.

Most numbers. Most numbers are numbers about which we will never know anything. Okay. So this is a cutting revelation in the time when people are trying to recover from the wars and they're trying to find solace and rationality, and they're trying to find, you know, some sense. So this belief that everything can be rational and noble and suddenly there's this kick in the teeth. Well, yeah, this is all not only in the aftermath of World War II, but in the early days of the 20th century, we had this optimism about mathematics,

Russell and Whitehead, Hilbert had this program. We're going to set out some axioms. We're going to prove every true thing. Totally. So here comes. It's not going to happen. Total. You know, like Turing is a strange character.

He's lovely, but he's very likely autistic, openly gay and persecuted for his homosexuality, and also contributed significantly to the war effort, turning the tide in favor of the Allies. Breaking codes. And yet is breaking codes. yet is convicted of homosexuality and given hormone treatments, which leave him, you know, depressed and devastated and suicidal. And so it is largely believed that he takes his own life. He was obsessed

with Snow White, which had recently been aired, you know, it's screened. And he bit from a poison apple, an apple that he dipped in cyanide. And so some people say things like, which might be apocryphal, but that the Mac symbol of the half-eaten apple, the apple with the bite out of it is a reference to Turing. Because Turing does invent the computer in this indirect way. Right. Because what he's really thinking about is mechanizing thought. Yep.

And then he not only says, sure, I bet I could build a machine that could think as well as we do, that machines could think that there's AI. So he's really the father of AI. But then he says, we are machines. Yeah. That think. So then he becomes this sort of cool atheist that he gives up all of this other stuff and says, we simply are machines.

And I think we've been playing catch-up with Turing ever since. Yeah. Yeah. And meanwhile, Austrian lituritian, Kurt Gertel? Gertl. Yeah. Gosh, Austrian. Yeah.

Gordo. Home of any number of famous brilliant, crazy people. Lots. I think I have a little bit of a thing for crazy, brilliant people. She moved to Austria. I do pretty well in New York. Godo is so fascinating because he predates Turing and he makes the first blow. So Hilbert, as you said, is this brilliant mathematician.

He's the most powerful mathematician. of the era, it's turn of the century, and Hilbert calls for a proof that all true facts among the numbers can be proven to be true. He doesn't literally mean he wants a list of an infinite number of proofs. But that it can be done. He just wants a proof that it can be done. And everyone expects that this is true. I mean, why wouldn't you expect this is true?

So Goetal is the one who deals the first blow before Turing. Turing's very influenced by Gordell's work, and even though they never met. and Goodell shows, really, it's so lovely the way he does it, that there are facts among the numbers that can never be proven to be true. And his is more... True facts. True facts. Well, at least, what is the technical statement?

Either the formal system is inconsistent. That's true. Or there are true facts that can't be proven. And he rejected inconsistency. So either there's a bold-faced paradox in math, which he rejected. or there are facts that can't be proven to be true, and that is largely where people side. It would be much worse if one plus one was sometimes two and sometimes three. I wouldn't put it past those mathematicians.

They come up with all sorts of crazy ideas. And so Godel initiated up low, but he was, you know, he was a strange character. He was very isolated and very withdrawn and had strange ideas. about the afterlife and Platonism. He really believed in math was real in a physical sense. I can never draw a circle,

but there's no such thing as a perfect circle in reality, but he believed that the, and maybe he's right, I don't know, that the mental experiment of a perfect circle is sufficient to prove it exists. And I think that's insightful and interesting. I don't know.

Yeah, he was a little crazy, Gertil, but then, But they have this thing in common where there's something that always slips through your fingers, the more you tighten your grip, right? Something true about the universe that we can never grasp. Yes. What Godell did, and actually, oh, show me, we should talk about this later. What Goddall did, which was so clever, was he constructed a sentence which basically says,

this true statement can never be proven. Right. And then he translated it through a very clever cipher into a purely arithmetic statement that was just like about numbers. And proved that that equation was correct and therefore unprovable. If it were provable, it would have to be incorrect because Satan said it's unprovable. Right. Now, it is possible that you try to construct such a sentence and you cannot mathematicize it.

Right. And you don't prove anything. Yeah. But he mathematicallyed it perfectly and there it was. And ever since then, every mathematician who's been trying to prove things and getting stuck is always wondering, like, is this one of the thing? It's not provable. Yeah.

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The best skincare is Farmhouse Fresh, and the award is you, your best you. Visit Farmhousefreshskincare.com and use code radio for a free starter routine with any purchase. So I'm sure you could ask us a lot too, which is, oh, don't you think that something will never know? And my argument is, until somebody proves to me, we can never know it. And that can happen, and we have examples of that in history, and tearing and go at all. Then we keep trying. And then, so these are fascinating stories, obviously, very important, human intellectual history, blah, blah, blah. So at what point did you say the right way to tell this story is via a story, via a novel?

I think just because I failed so badly at telling it as nonfiction. It just wasn't working. It wasn't interesting. It didn't. It would have not reached. I just feel like sometimes we experience an almost. Moment of Truth in the solar plexes. Like, we just feel it through the narrative.

And that that spoke so much more, even to the premise of there are things that we can only know by stepping outside and looking in. I mean, that is really ultimately Godel's lesson, is that you know it's true because you step outside of the mathematical system and you reflect on it and you can declare it's true. And that there was something about narrative that allowed you to do exactly that. Right. So I basically wanted to structure the narrative. on the premise of the theorems,

but I thought it would reach people much more than if I forced them to go through the agony of Cantor's diagonalization method. Just between us, that was an extremely elegant and compelling rationale for why we should. But did you have that before you wrote the novel, or did this come up after you wrote it? No, again, I only had it after I failed it writing the non-fiction.

No, but before you wrote the novel version, did you say, like, oh, maybe I need to step out of the system? Yeah, okay. By then, by then, by the time that I had given way, like most of, so I've written three books and almost every one, I write the wrong book first. Yeah. And I bomb out and then I figure out what the right book is to write. It's your process. So I definitely, you know, it was painful. It wasn't feel, it didn't feel good until I abandoned that first approach and then thought, okay, I mean, maybe I'm going to try this.

And a lot of it is just worrying you don't have permission. I mean, we're all sort of like that a little bit. Do I have permission to do this? Am I going to get slammed by my colleagues? Is my editor going to be furious? Is my agent going to kill me? So I have to... And one of which is perfectly reasonably implausible, right?

I mean, these things happen. Right. They all basically showed up at my door with torches. But even my last book, the third book, was the same way. I kept trying to do the right. thing to like do what was expected of me and failing. Right. And then just you have this terrible moment where you decide, okay, what's worse?

A bad book? Right. Or getting some flack from. And, you know, every single time my agent, my editor and my scientist friends have all stepped up. So in reality, it was all in my mind, basically, the fear. Yeah. Well, but you had this previous experience.

You'd already written one book. and that book, How the Universe Got Its Spots, I've said it before, and I'll happy to say it on tape, was one of my favorite books of all time. Oh, I love that. And it's a combination of narrative, your personal narrative, right, which is yet another daring thing to do. You're not supposed to do that as a scientist, with an explication of the science of cosmology and the topology of the universe.

That book was definitely written because I thought we would never know the answer scientifically. And so, you know. So again, whether or not the universe was infinite or finite. So this was a question we were asking. Again, because we could, because it was, the math was fun, the math was accessible. It's a big question. It's a great question. Did I, honestly, at no point working on it scientifically, did I think it was going to be answered observationally?

Because what year are we talking here that you're writing? Oh, man. It's like 15 years ago. Probably like a little after the turn. of the early 2000s. And honestly, it's probably never a question we're going to answer. The universe could be finite. It could be wrapped onto itself, but it's just so big.

We'll never see it around. And I knew that that was likely. It's not that I was foolish, scientifically thinking we were going to observe it. But the question was fun, and it was fun to do. And I think the whole book was about what happens to these ideas if they're not measurable and this anxiety about being disconnected, not only from other. people because what I work on and what you work on is so weird and difficult to grasp, but because it might not even end up in the canon, right? So basically, could these be wasted

years because I was fantasizing about something real scientifically, but not necessarily measurable? But this was a special case. It wasn't intrinsically unmeasurable. There were, you know, for certain answers, we could have measured it. Like if the universe had been small and topologically interesting. Right. But if you had put a gun to my head, I would have said, It's not that small. And you would have been right. And it would have survived. I mean, there was no part of me that was pushing it as this is going to be my big mark.

But it was just the beauty also and the fascination of the conversation. Talk about narrative. The idea that if light wraps around the universe, I can look far enough away and far enough in the past that I could see myself or the Milky Way or I could see Sean and I studying for physics. And that's how the universe got its spots, literally, right? And that is literally how the universe got its spots. Yeah. But so at what point do you then say, I mean, everyone we know has written a book about cosmology, but then you decided to put your personal story in there, right? Is that something that came in later? Did you get resistance from your editor and publisher?

Yeah. I think that that one actually, I knew that's how I wanted to write it, because partly at the time I had no quote-unquote right to write a book at that point. point. We come from a field where you can write a book when you're coming down from the mountain, you know, with the tablet. Right. Do your thing first. Do your thing first. Come back as Professor Emeritus and declare the results. And this was much more, hey, we are never going to have this result. And so it was sort of turning it on its head. And I think, so I thought a lot about how I don't like that tone of I know things that I am sharing with you my conclusion. And I think that that contributed to my really negative idea about physics when I was a kid

and scientists when I was a kid is that they simply recite facts or know facts or have information. So it was therapy writing this book. Well, it was definitely like physics is about not knowing. Right. And that's the fun. And that's the experiment. and that's the experience that leads you to be so lost from more normal pleasures of life and, you know, traveling all the time and separated from your closest and your dearest.

And so I think it was much more a clear decision to not write the definitive book of factual information, but to more write about the struggle. The fact that it was in process was a feature, not about in progress. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But okay, but why did you put you into it? Is this why? Because you wanted to reflect the sort of psychological state you were in while doing the research?

You know, I think I was disciplining myself not to sound, you know, what's the word, not to sound authoritative. I think by choosing a person to speak to, which in this case it was letters to my mom, who is somebody I respect but is not a physicist. that it was a way for me to be respectful to my audience, not authoritative. Right. Exactly. And kind of like to experience that humility of the not knowing. And so I think that's why I chose her as my target audience. And I just thought, why not just declare that that's my target audience?

Why pretend otherwise? Why not to say? I'm writing this to her. Make the subtext text. Yes. Just do it. Just be blunt. And I think it really helped me find the voice for a first book, especially, where, you know,

voices of you struggle to find voice. Yeah. And even when books are written not by famous scientists, but by, you know, journalists or whoever, they generally wait until the result is in hand, right? And so there is this idea of a rational reconstruction. We tell the story how it makes sense, not how it happened. And you got to tell the story. in all the messiness, right?

Because there's so many mistakes you make and blind alleys you go down. Oh, yeah. And actually, the last book was so much about that. So it's really funny because Ray Weiss, who won the Nobel Prize, along with Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, for the discovery of gravitational waves,

kept saying to me when he realized that there was a discovery, he kept saying, so what are you going to do about the book? What are you going to do with doing? And I was like, oh, my God, Ray, I love to write that the book was about not knowing.

You know, the tension, the anxiety, the reality of failure, like looming. So the book was about gravitational waves? It was originally about the search for gravitational waves. It was originally about the search for gravitational waves. It turned into a story of the discovery of gravitational waves. Well, only an epilogue. And again, I mean, there's no way I would have,

I could never had I known about the discovery. I mean, I'm not sure I could have maintained that sense of the tension and the, you know, anxiety and all. of that stuff, the climbing Mount Everest aspect of that story, I don't know if I could have reproduced if I had known it succeeded. So it was so great to write it, not knowing if they were going to succeed, that the failure was real and looming as a real possibility. But again, you threw away tens of thousands of words. Yeah. How was the book different in the first conception? I had a lot more stuff about physics. Like I had a lot more peasant. I had a lot more

pedagogical kind of stuff. And it wasn't, and it was, what I was doing is I was chickening out. I was burying these stories because I was really scared to talk about Ray. Never goes away. And Kip, you know, and I love these guys. They were really important people to me. They're, they're statesmen of the field. And Kip especially, I mean, I became very close with Ray during the writing of the book,

but I've known Kip since I was, what, 19, 18, something. like that. And he's always been this wonderful, supportive inspiration. And to write about him made me incredibly uncomfortable. Looking to start 2026 with an unforgettable getaway. Fiji Airway's sale is on now. Fly nonstop round trip to Fiji from just 748. Or enjoy a sunny Fiji stopover on your way to Australia with roundtrip fair starting from 839. As a one world alliance member and American Airlines Advantage program partner, your miles go further across the side. Pacific. Book now at Vigeeairways.com or contact your local travel agent. Conditions apply. Toyota builds an electric vehicle. We don't start with a blank slate. We start with everything

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It's not all great. And I was trying to bury it. I was chickening out, basically. And that was a point where my editor, Dan Frank, was fantastic. Because I knew I was doing it, but I wasn't sure if other people would notice. You hope they wouldn't. And Dan was like, what is this shit? He's like, stop pulling your punch.

That's why you still need editors. Yeah. And in literally 24 hours, I threw away half the book. It was so easy to disconnect because it just didn't belong there. It was literally like two disconnected pieces jammed together, and I took one and I threw it away. And there was the book. But it sounds like someday in the future there's going to be a thousand page, you know. Exposition of Blackhawls.

Yeah. Well, and Cantor's diagonalization theorem on infinity, like all these pedagogical things you've written and have never seen the light of death. Right. They're in there. I mean, I think especially with good. and turning that there were better versions written. But, you know, Black Hole's started my thing. Yeah. I got a little jive. Me and Black Walls, we got something going on. So maybe I'll publish that one. But, you know, I have to say the most amazing thing about both Kip

and Ray is that on the day of the discovery, the day that the instruments about which I was writing and that they designed recorded the first sound of Black Halls colliding, by coincidence, I printed a draft, of the book, one for Ray and one for Kip, and sent it to them. And what was amazing is that neither of them told me not to say something. So, for instance, Kip took issue with certain things, but what he did, being the scientist all the way through to the very bitter end, presented me with all the evidence of the contrary argument, and I included the counter argument, but he never said take it out,

Right. Never said suppress it. Never said. He said instead, err also the counter argument. It's a true scientist. It's a true scientist. And Ray, too. Ray was like, I don't like it, but it's true. I don't like it, but it's true. Yeah. And he said, it's a shame. It's in the public record, but it doesn't have to be in your book. And that quote is in the book. Good. Good. And I'm sure he liked it more. Yeah. That's right. Having it be that way. Exactly. But again, so your third book was in yet another mode, right? You had the sort of memoir exposition first, and then you had a historical novel. And in this one, you're almost like the new journalist, right?

Like you were going and bedding yourself in the LIGO experiment, talking to people, I mean, recording conversations, I presume. Honestly, for the first six months, I didn't think to record because I'm not a journalist. Dummy. And then I was like, oh, Jesus, I got to start recording this stuff because I was transcribed. so frantically afterwards trying to remember exactly what was said that I did I did learn okay I got to start to record so yes now now I now I record my conversations yeah so what was what did you learn by that experience and what was it like to be a journalist you know it was really I quite enjoyed it I think it's like I have a lot of respect for experiments and I am notoriously not a lot of

allowed anywhere near a lab. I mean, I burn water. I burn boiling water frequently. So there's a sense in which I had a crush on the experiment, and it was just this total homage. It was this, it was this respect. And so the journalism was really pleasurable because it was just observing. And I just remember these funny observations, just watching so many of the experimentalists, It's a thousand-person team, and not all of them are on the ground, obviously, but there's no sense of strict hierarchy. It's as though everybody knew what to do, and they would move kind of, like I said slowly, like not space station slowly, but the sort of sense of it's just theirs.

And hundreds of people all knowing what to do, I mean, it's kind of mind-blowing, right? And that it's real. They built something real, based on things that we do on paper. And that connect just has my total admiration. It'll never stop surprising me. I know, my total admiration. And I think that one of the reasons

where I got along with the experimentalists so well is because that was so obvious on my face. That was just there. Such a fan girl. I know, I was like such a fan girl. But yeah, I mean, they did it. And your journalism wasn't just, you know, talking ahead interviews. You were there at the different places you visited, field work, etc.

Yeah, I mean, I really think I was trying to write that book like a novel. That was the target. The target was Ray is a character. Ray has lines. Ray says stuff, and it's Ray's dialogue, and that it could be fiction for as long as I can maintain it. It could literally have opened and read as Ray was a fictitious character with lines. And that came from Ray, that idea, because his speech is so spectacular. The rhythm of it, the cadence, the swearing.

I groomed a lot of the swearing out, which I, you know. The director's cut will come later. Yeah, the director's cut. And it just was, who am I? It was almost sub-journalism. I mean, I don't know. Who am I to tell this story? Right.

Ray tells his story. Kip told us. a story. Barry tells a story. Even Robbie Vote, who had a very dark relationship with Lago at the end, tells his story. And I don't interpret. I don't sit there and try to say what the truth is. And I simply convey as best that I can what they say. So it really should be like a novel, where there's not a narrator who declares to you what the truth is and what's real. But you get caught up in their characters and you decide for yourself. When you write a book like that, I mean, there's two sides, obviously, right?

There's your, you have some standards. You want to write a good book. You have a vision. But then there's an audience that reads it, right? So we get a feeling from what you're saying about how there's certain circumstances under which it's just the right thing to do, you know, to tell things in this narrative way rather than a straightforward, dryly pedagogical way. How does the audience receive it? Are they outraged that you're not just giving them the, you know, simple drawing? of a interferometer?

Yes, actually. Oh, my God, that's a good point. It's really funny. The biggest complaint I've ever gotten about this book is that it didn't have figures. And it was a really clear decision with Dan, my editor and I. We talked about it.

If it's really a novel in that spirit, you don't put pictures in. And so can it be conjured up solely with the words? And I think that because people anticipated a nonfiction book, they demanded figures. It was literally the only complaint

of consisting. does we got it? And, you know, and I think we made the right call, but I get that it was uncomfortable. And it's mostly because of expectations, right? It's not that it didn't work. It's just that I wanted or expected something else. These books have figures. Right. Why doesn't your book have figures? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, and I would say that, mostly, I feel people really got it. I mean, the figures aside, I get that. It's hard to visualize, so I appreciate that. There are novels that can put figures in because they're doing the opposite. They're playing with that. Yeah, playing against type. Like Dave Eggers plays against type and puts figures in his books. I get it, totally. So this was a call.

But most people, I feel, really got it. They got that it was a climbing Mount Everest story. They got that it was sort of a tragedy comedy in Sun Sense. Occasionally would be totally misunderstood. Like somebody would be like, oh, if only you had known they succeeded, you would have written a book about it. Oh, my God, that's so bad. You did not like that.

You didn't get it. And that happens. That's okay. And we shouldn't pass by this without, you know, expressing our mutual admiration for the exquisiteness that is the LIGO experiment. It is. The fact they did this, I remember, you know, inviting people to give talks just 10 years ago. And they would give talks on here's LIGO, here's the update, here's what we want to do.

And the audience members who are, you know, physics faculty professors were like shaking their heads that you'll never do that. Yeah, it's not. going to happen. They literally thought they, the proverbial they, we won't, you know, we won't implicate people because it was fair. It was actually fair to be critical of it. Not just a few, you know, crotchety people. It was a lot of people.

Really smart, really insightful, really thoughtful people had every reason to believe it would fail. And that's not the interesting story. I don't know what is. Right. Right. So, but they did measure the, vibration of a, what is it, the mirror is at 40 kilograms, Jesus, I should not have to read my own book.

She's book. I can recommend a good book. By less than one 10,000th the width of a proton over four kilometers. And what a stunning technological. Had it failed. If it had failed, it would have failed because nature didn't provide. And like we've already established, nature doesn't love us back. Nature isn't trying to make us feel good. This is one of the rare cases where we sort of got lucky, right? I mean, we were certainly very hopeful to define something,

but the things that LIGO found were a little bit bigger and more spectacular than we'd expected. Oh, yeah. I love that. I love that out of the gate, black holes. And the reason why I called the book Black Hole Blows was because Ray said to me in August, right before the discovery, obviously, neither of us knew, if we don't detect black holes, this thing is a failure. And that is also Ray at his most honest.

Because he could have been a politician and said, well, as long as we succeeded technologically and as long as we detect neutron stars, or whatever, you know, but he didn't. He was so honest to the end. If we do not detect black holes, his thing is a failure. So I was like, oh, black hole blues. So for those of us who haven't read the book yet, I did read the book.

For those of you out there in Podcast Land, how many years of his career was Ray Weiss working on LIGO? Probably 50. I would say 50. So he was a young man at MIT who also succeeded on other fronts, but mostly because they told him you're not going to get tenure, working on this crap. And they literally, he was building an instrument that was like a meter and a half.

Got to start somewhere. Yeah. On your table. And this ram shackle structure on a table. The instrument's now four kilometers long. So he realized. And a billion dollars. And a billion dollars.

That a meter and a half wasn't going to cut it. But at the time he was working on this little demo prototype. His colleagues were saying things like, I could do better looking out the window. They were like, if the sun blew up, you wouldn't hear it with this instrument. He was like, it's true. The song blew up I wouldn't hear it with this instrument. It's like, I'd do better looking out the window. Journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

So that's discouraging. And what you've got to love about Ray is that he said, okay, I'm going to spend three years doing an industry study to determine if it's feasible, how big, how expensive, what the technological cost and requirements will. be to make this instrument. So this is 50 years of his life. I mean, 50 years of his life. And you have to remember, and a lot of people think the instrument turned on and was immediately successful. In the year 2000, it was running while those black holes that were detected in 2015 were colliding. You know, they were orbiting each other. And it was still too quiet for that very sophisticated

instrument between 2000 and 2015 to detect anything. Silence. And the gravitational waves were there and they were washing over the earth. and they could not be measured. And so to be able to move to phase two, the advanced machine, and turn it on, and to say two weeks before the detection, you know, this could fail. And my understanding is that from the talks I heard, some people say that they heard different things, but I heard talks saying that that is exactly what they expected. I mean, I heard talks saying, in other words, when we turn on LIGO, we probably won't see anything.

But when we turn on advanced LIGO, we probably will. That's true. Yes. You know, kudos to the National Science Foundation and the government for saying, we're going to give you a billion dollars to build something that won't see anything, right? Yeah, absolutely. First generation machine, Kip and Ray and Barry were all really clear that they weren't guaranteeing a detection. Maybe if they were extremely lucky. But they absolutely were saying we fully anticipate having to go to a second generation to advanced Lago before we'll make a detection. So it's possible that you have written more.

narratively oriented science physics books than any other person? I don't know. I don't know. There's probably people in there who do. Does it include people who don't publish? Well, there is that. I get a lot of letters. What?

So do I, yeah. I think we should start a Facebook page for all the people who write us letters. Just to point them in that direction. But you know the classic story, right? I think I heard it attributed to John Wheeler where he would get letters from different crackpots and then he would put them in contact with each other. And he'd say, oh, you should talk to this guy. But both of them would come back and saying, why did you point me to him?

He's a crackpot. Crackpots. Crackpottness is not transitive, right? Like, they think that everyone else is also a crackpot. Except that. Priceless. It doesn't work. Anyway, so do we learn something about the efficacy of this kind of way of talking about science? Is there something we get at?

I mean, science is done by human beings. It's true, but it's a cliche but true. And you could have written books about, you know, street builders or something like that, right? I, no, that's a, sorry, I want you to finish your thought. I mean, yes, do we learn something specific about the way science is done that is different and interesting by telling the stories as stories per se? I mean, to my mind, yes. And I think that I love the abstraction of science.

I love it. It's what moved me. When I was frustrated that people were still trying to figure out what Emmanuel Kant meant, it drove me insane because it can't be locked in one human's mind. It has to be shareable. And there is something about math and physics that is transcendent. It belongs to all of us. Nobody is saying, what did Einstein mean?

Nobody learns relativity by reading Einstein's papers, right? Right. You'd learn it because we all own it. As soon as he gave it to us, it's a gift. It's ours. It's 100% ours. We can use it like a hammer. Right.

And there's something about that that just broke my heart when I discovered that. When I realized what physics really was, when I got away from this negative, foolish stereotype of reciting facts. when I realized, oh, my God, this is a tool that's been given to me, and it belongs to everybody. And I think that there's something about that that speaks to our humanity. We inherited these concepts, these abilities, because we're evolutionarily involved under forces dictated by physics,

you know, it's in our minds. It's such a wonderful thing. And so I think that to dispel the sense of this, is solely about facts and to realize that this is very much about humanity and something shared and something, you know, that could unite us. And there was this moment when they announced the discovery of the gravitational wave detection. And I know it was hard to understand that people weren't really sure what it was. But honestly, I'm sure you had a similar experience. It was like the whole world paused. Yeah. I was doing interviews with, you know, remotely with Qatar, you know.

Cutter. I apologize. My pronunciation. I'm instinctively on Qatar. You know, that's amazing. It was like this moment where we all realized for a second we're under the same sky. Yeah. I mean, I wrote a book about the Higgs boson, which is the other discovery of that magnitude we've had in the last 10 years, right? And it's an international team of people working together in exquisite harmony. I think people should think about the Nobel Peace Prize for these experiments. because they really are internationally, transcendent, culturally, racially, religiously, transcended experiments that involve the whole world working together on some completely benign yet fascinating. I mean, what could be more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize and something like that? Well, I had this quote. I actually sadly forget who was from, but in my book, if the United Nations worked as well as Atlas and CDF collaborations at CERN, we would have World Peace.

Yes, exactly. And then the irony during my interview with Al Jazeera TV was that they were about to ask me and they prepped me. They were like, we're going to ask you a question about what this means for humanity. So it's about to say something rousing about how we're all under the same sky and a universe. And then they're like, I'm sorry, we have to take a break for the war in Iraq. And I was like, oh, the skies will still be there tomorrow. But the present does intrude itself sometimes. I mean, it's interesting. I forgot to say, this is just coming back to something earlier, but this idea of being a journalist and going in there and doing interviews, because you said you enjoyed it, maybe, so I didn't when I wrote the Higgs-Boson book. Yes, you were very journalistic in that book, too.

I was, and I didn't like it. You didn't like it. I mean, I'm married to one of the world's great science journalists, so I know how it's done well. Jennifer, we let's. And I just, it's not me, right? And so I said, like, you know, interviewing is not for me. And I say this as I'm interviewing you for the podcast.

So what happened? What went terribly wrong? Because we're chatting. Well, no, the difference was then I wrote the big picture, and again, I interviewed people, but I wasn't looking for anecdotes and stories. I was trying to figure out what they were thinking, right? So I talked to philosophers and biologists and whatever, and that I loved. Right. So, like, I mean, you're much better than I am at caring about the human stories. I remember he's specifically telling me, I'm never going to be the one to describe the beard on his face. And I have one line about Robbie Vogt, which is one of my favorite lines on the book, if I'm allowed to say that about my own. book, I don't know if that sounds bad, but about how he looked at me through wilted orchids, because his eyes, he had this,

it was literally like wilted orchids. You know, I do like that. Yeah, no, exactly. You have to do what you're good at, and I recognize my inability. I remember we had this conversation. It's so fascinating. Yeah. And maybe the other aspect of journalism I wouldn't enjoy as much, which is really how journalism is written for papers.

No, it's more Tom Wolfe, you know, Hunter S. Thompson, Right. Yes, exactly. I'm long form. Lord knows, I'm not glad about it. It would be so fun to be short form and whip stuff out, but I can't do it. Even some of my writer friends, I amaze them by saying I enjoy writing books. I'm like, give me 100,000 words ahead of me at my happiest. Yeah, I mean, because it takes me a while to do the whole structure and think about what the different architecture of a new book is going to be, and I'm always lost in it, and it takes me that long to do it. That's how long it takes me. But I want to give you a chance before we go to plug your big ongoing, I don't want to call it a new project, but you're here in New York and you have this amazing public event series that you're doing out there in Brooklyn, out there in the suburbs. I love it. Tell us what it is.

Where we are now, we're up at Columbia and Barnard, and I call this upstate Manhattan. Here we are, Jenna, yeah. In the parks. And a sweet hour away, which we can take a ferry to from Warnardt, and I'm. Street is Pioneerics, which is a cultural center in Red Hook. Red Hook is slightly inaccessible because it actually, the ground cannot support a subway system. So you have to get there by boat or foot or bus. But it is also a kind of pristine part of New York City because of it. And my dear, dear, dear friend, Dustin Yellen started Pioneerworks there. He bought this old Ironworks factory.

from 1850s and renovated it to become a cultural center. And the founding artistic director is Gabriel Florence, who's just been incredibly visionary and aggressive and interesting and unafraid. And so it started mostly as an art center. Pioneer works. Yeah, pioneer works. And we brought science in there. Now we have a science, very strong science presence.

In some sense, our science events, are the biggest events we do. We do not fully understand our audience, but they come out for it. And you've been to one of my, you were in one of my events, which was such a pleasure. People love it. People love science presented in an accessible way.

They do. And you're doing it in a particular way, but it's certainly very accessible. Yeah, I think what we're doing, which I'm trying to understand retroactively, is that people feel like the scientists are coming to their house. Okay, so it's free, open to the public, and it's very much in this cultural community.

Senator that's open and welcome and people hang out in the garden and they stay late and they talk and there's booze. And there's booze and there's food and there's, you know, we do pop-up exhibits. A friend of him I was like, I was in the longest beer line and I got to the front and it was a genetics experiment. Bonus. Yeah, exactly. So, so some things making people feel like it's theirs. Instead of beer, not that.

Yes, no, there's, right. We didn't give them genetically modified beer. They were in the wrong line. So I think that, right, people want it to feel like it's theirs. And so we talk at a really high level. We do not. And as you know, from our event, I don't prep people in part because I don't want them to have lectures. And I don't want them to.

Yes, no PowerPoint or anything like that. And sometimes we have to stop. You know, Frank Wilcheck won the Nobel Prize, who's a good friend of both of ours who came from MIT to give a talk. It's something like, well, as you all know, the Hicksville breaks the electric symmetry. And I was like, Frank.

Can't do that. No, but it's okay. So we stop and we translate. But we let Frank talk as Frank talks. But it's a great, I never heard that idea that part of the charm is the scientist coming to our house, right? I mean, it's another twist on the idea

of telling the human side, telling the stories, bring people into our house. And I think that, you know, Actually, and this podcast is also in the service of the same ideal, that there shouldn't be a dividing line between science and other parts of human intellectual life, whether it's philosophy or economics or whatever. And so this is definitely contributing to that.

Oh, thank you for saying that because that's probably the most important philosophy behind pioneer works. We don't come out of the womb as scientists or artists. We come out as both and all things. Every child palpates the world. Every child puts things in their mouth and tries to figure out what it is. And every child develops their own sense of time and space. There's a forward and a backward.

I mean, this is fascinating revelations that children aren't taught, but they discover. And every child is an artist. And I don't want to bring scientists to go be artists professionally. I'm not into that. And I don't bring artists to come and be, you know, I actually don't like the sci-art mix. But what I do love is just human beings rubbing elbows and feeling that they live in a bigger world and feeling less isolated. Can't think of a better place to end. Janelle, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

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