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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. In today’s episode I have a conversation with an old friend of mine, who happens to also be an enormously respected scientist and writer, Janna Levin. Like me, Janna maintains both an active research program, she’s a professor of Physics at Columbia University in Barnard 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 Janna 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. And 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.

0:00:58 SC: So we’ll talk a little bit about her research ’cause 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 happen. 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, I think you’re gonna enjoy this ride. Let’s go.

[music]

0:02:02 SC: Janna Levin, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:02:04 Janna Levin: Ah, thanks for having me.

0:02:05 SC: 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.

0:02:22 JL: Well, mostly, we usually talk about our meeting story. [chuckle]

0:02:27 SC: There’s that, yes you’re welcome to tell that, but…

0:02:29 JL: Which is, what were we on? We were on a… What were they called, tram? Tram?

0:02:33 SC: The T, the T is the subway.

0:02:35 JL: The T. Oh god so cute. In Boston it’s called the T.

0:02:37 SC: The red line, yeah.

0:02:38 JL: And I think I was reading Birrell and Davies Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime. As you do, as you do.

0:02:46 SC: Right, clearly. Trying to attract dudes. Yes [chuckle]

0:02:48 JL: During rush hour [laughter] And then this tall skinny dude is literally over me like, “Hey, I know Birrell and Davies, Quantum Fields in Curved Spacetime.” [laughter]

0:02:56 SC: No you’re leaving out the best part. I was with a guy I knew who was trying to hit on you.

0:03:01 JL: Oh yeah that’s right, that’s right.

0:03:02 SC: And I’m tried to save you by saying, “Wait aren’t you reading a book on Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime?”

[chuckle]

0:03:07 JL: So basically, yes you derailed… Yes.

0:03:10 SC: He was mad at me afterward, yeah.

0:03:12 JL: Was he? He should be, well no he shouldn’t be. I was not mad at you. [chuckle] So that’s… So that’s a benefit. And we’ve basically been friends since which is kind of hilarious.

0:03:21 SC: That’s right, it’s extremely hilarious. But you were…

0:03:23 JL: We studied a lot. We studied a lot together.

0:03:25 SC: There were a lot of problems sets.

0:03:27 JL: A lot of problems sets, a lot of…

0:03:28 SC: General relativity.

0:03:29 JL: Discussions about whether coffee should have milk in it or not. How much coffee should be drunk after midnight. [laughter]

0:03:34 SC: At 2:00 AM when you’re in the middle of a problem set, this is very important decision making.

0:03:37 JL: It’s crucial. So I would say that [chuckle] in terms of trajectory, I was definitely not that kid who thought I was gonna be a scientist. And I discovered it really late. I had really negative ideas about science and physics, in particular, which is really kind of hilarious in retrospect. [chuckle] It’s like my punishment in life was to become a physicist, and have to…

0:04:02 SC: That’s right.

0:04:03 JL: 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 kinda grew up together with that, learning that… Not like high school, college level, but like feeling it, using it.

0:04:42 SC: 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?

0:04:47 JL: Right, right, right. And we’re still asking the most naive questions then.

0:04:51 SC: I hope so, yeah.

0:04:52 JL: And it’s so sweet. So sweet.

[laughter]

0:04:55 SC: And a lot of people do something in grad school and then end up doing it for their lives, right?

0:05:00 JL: Yeah.

0:05:00 SC: Which is not exactly what you’ve done.

0:05:02 JL: No, that’s true.

0:05:05 SC: Tell us what science you did in grad school.

0:05:07 JL: Well, gosh. I was kinda lost in grad school to be honest, because I wasn’t at my happiest point. [chuckle] 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 know it’s not my best work. I think that a lot of that came later with sort of more fluency in lots of different subjects and less trying to prove something to somebody.

0:05:36 SC: Right.

0:05:36 JL: Graduate school was very much about making sure your professors thought a certain thing about you, so that you could go on…

0:05:43 SC: Yeah.

0:05:43 JL: And my most creative work, definitely came, I think, later when I felt less of that. Less constrained by what other people thought.

0:05:54 SC: And yeah, so you got into a whole bunch of interesting buzzwords stirred together with chaos theory, and topology, and cosmology and black holes.

0:06:02 JL: Still like all that stuff.

0:06:03 SC: Yeah, still like all that stuff.

[laughter]

0:06:05 SC: So what does it mean?

0:06:05 JL: It’s all good stuff.

0:06:05 SC: How does that come together to do science?

0:06:07 JL: 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 spacetime 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 about 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 spacetime. That’s where we were interested. And one of the most interesting questions was, chaos is usually defined as a loss of predictability over time, an exponential deviation over time, but you can’t define a singular time in relativity, that’s the whole point. So, suddenly you have this, “What does it mean to be chaotic? Are there unambiguous declarations?” And chaos really does mean that there are not functional solutions to… Sorry, my phone. [0:07:11] ____.

[laughter]

0:07:15 JL: God damn it. I thought I put it on silent. 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 spacetime.

0:07:36 SC: Well, This actually puzzled me about chaos, still always puzzles about chaos maybe because I learned relativity first. In relativity, time is up to you, you can choose time however you want.

0:07:49 JL: Right. Sure, so you could have a logarithmic time or something like that where the chaos goes away, technically…

0:07:53 SC: No, the other way around, I’m thinking if two things diverge only linearly with time, I’ll define time to be log time.

0:07:58 JL: Right, right, right.

[overlapping conversation]

0:08:00 JL: Exact… And make it exponential.

0:08:01 SC: So, did you succeed? Is there other ways of…

0:08:03 JL: Yeah, so 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. [chuckle] But surface-wise very large by having lots of fractal folds.

0:08:48 SC: Because the brain is a two-dimensional sheet crumpled up inside of our head.

0:08:50 JL: Exactly, 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 with gravity.

0:09:00 SC: And so what are you looking at in the black hole? You’re throwing a particle at it and seeing how it comes out?

0:09:05 JL: So we would throw… Yeah, 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 electro-magnetically repulsive, but they’re massive, so they’re gravitationally attractive. And you can tune it just on paper to be perfectly stable.

0:09:25 SC: These are not real experiments. These are thought experiments, yes.

0:09:26 JL: These are not real experiments, this 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.

0:10:00 SC: Right.

0:10:00 JL: And that’s classic fractal behavior, that you look closer and closer and you still can’t pinpoint what happens. ‘Cause a subtle, subtle dependence, and 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 Lyapunov exponent which is, measures in times.

0:10:21 SC: Tell us what that is…

0:10:22 JL: I know. Oh, Geez.

0:10:24 SC: You said it, sorry. [chuckle]

0:10:25 JL: No, it’s my fault. Oh my God, that was a really naughty. [laughter] So if it was just ordinary space we would say that the time scale over which there was a divergence of predictability was set by something called the Lyapunov exponent. But because of what you raised about the ambiguity of time and 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.

0:10:54 SC: Right, Okay good.

0:10:54 JL: And it was a combination of things like Lyapunov time scale and spatial time. Details don’t matter, but everybody would agree that the fractal was there.

0:11:06 SC: 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 calculate it.

0:11:17 JL: Yeah, physics is really hard in that way.

[laughter]

0:11:21 JL: Physics is nothing if not hard.

0:11:23 SC: Don’t tell the audience that, I’ve been telling them it’s very easy the whole time.

[laughter]

0:11:26 JL: 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, as you well know, in relativity you can’t say time is the same for all observers, you can’t say space is the same for all observers, but you can say that there’s a space time interval.

0:11:45 SC: Right.

0:11:45 JL: 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.

0:11:57 SC: And did this interest in the chaotic behavior, particles going around black holes, lead you later to think about real astrophysical black holes that are out there?

0:12:07 JL: It did. Oh my God. This crazy… 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 astro physically relevant.

0:12:24 SC: Right.

0:12:25 JL: Because there was something about it that just appealed to our taste.

0:12:29 SC: Yeah. So for the audience out there, there are astrophysicists who are, as I keep saying, relatively down to earth, despite doing astrophysics, right? 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.

0:12:46 JL: Yeah, and I think that there’s still that pull for me, but a part of as I started to sort of think about what’s your contribution and what comes back to you, I wanted to see something predicted and verified.

0:13:04 SC: Yeah, it’s about nature at the end of the day, right?

0:13:06 JL: It’s about nature at the end of day. This total… And I love to call it an unrequited love for nature.

[laughter]

0:13:13 JL: We love her, she does not love us back. [laughter]

0:13:15 SC: Very true.

0:13:16 JL: She is quite indifferent to us. [laughter]

0:13:17 SC: Very indifferent. Playing hard to get.

0:13:20 JL: 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, that would feel so good, it would be so fun, it would be very child-like fun.”

0:13:39 SC: Right.

0:13:40 JL: Just exploratory and then there’s the instant gratification. [chuckle]

0:13:43 SC: And they pay us to do this, and yeah.

0:13:46 JL: 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 electronic circuits and weird things like that.

0:14:16 SC: But wait a minute, I think that the typical person listening is going, “Now, electronic circuits I do build… “

0:14:21 JL: Yeah [chuckle]

0:14:22 SC: “In a little lab room and I put things together and a light bulb comes up, so how do I stick a wire into the black hole and light a light bulb or what happens?”

0:14:30 JL: 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 gonna 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 traced out for you, that you see it, that really looks like hair…

0:15:19 SC: Yeah.

0:15:19 JL: Coming out of the top of a head [chuckle], and then usually going into the chin.

[chuckle]

0:15:23 JL: So it’s a…

0:15:23 SC: Perfectly spherical head.

0:15:26 JL: It’s a… [chuckle] It’s a hair beard.

0:15:28 SC: And the Earth has such a magnetic field, neutron stars have very big magnetic fields, but black holes, no.

0:15:33 JL: Neutron stars, exactly. Black holes though 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 are 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.

0:16:18 SC: Just being stubborn.

0:16:19 JL: Just being stubborn. [chuckle] We’ve 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 know, I 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.

0:16:49 SC: Right.

0:16:49 JL: It doesn’t need to be plugged into a battery, or the wall or anything. So I create electricity by waving magnet.

0:16:55 SC: Because the magnetic field stretches away from the magnet. So, even though you don’t see it, there’s something stretching from the magnet to the light bulb.

0:17:02 JL: Yes. Varying magnetic fields create electric fields.

0:17:05 SC: It is not spooky action at a distance.

0:17:06 JL: 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. ‘Cause this is basically from like 1885.

[laughter]

0:17:26 SC: But there is so many things like that like, “Someone must have pointed this out therefore I won’t think about it.” Right? And then you lose the chance.

0:17:32 JL: 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 the magnetic field consistent with these certain circumstances.

0:17:48 SC: The stuff around it.

0:17:48 JL: Exactly. And charge, which we can get into later so… So that’s fun. I was drawing circuit diagrams for the biggest, most powerful batteries in the universe.

0:18:00 SC: Well, it seems like we’re just doing it for fun, but that’s where a lot of great science comes from, right? Why care about chaos and black holes or electric circuits and black holes? Part of the motivation might be not just…

0:18:11 JL: Fun.

0:18:11 SC: Well, this is going to lead us to the super secrets of the universe. It’s just kind of cool.

0:18:15 JL: It is cool, totally.

0:18:16 SC: And that’s were the super secrets sometimes get revealed.

0:18:19 JL: 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, doesn’t it make you feel glum or despair that the universe is this mathematical machine?

0:18:38 SC: You don’t see God there in the black hole, yeah.

0:18:41 JL: I don’t know how you can walk away from this and not feel meaning.

0:18:44 SC: Right.

0:18:45 JL: 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. [chuckle]

0:19:01 SC: Yeah, and which is fine. There are no other reasons, right? That’s where the reasons come from.

[laughter]

0:19:05 JL: Exactly.

0:19:06 SC: And this is a great segue right into, what I mostly wanna 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 and you’ve written several books, a memoir, a novel, and a narrative history. So in every case, there’s a story going on. So it maybe… I don’t know whether you either wanna tell us about the first book or tell us about the underlying motivations throughout them.

0:19:38 JL: Yeah. I am… I’m super interested in structure in writing, and I think we are all taught to write very, very badly. [chuckle] And I was a philosophy student, four philosophers, and Sean this is also another conversation we have to get into later. I learned to write so badly and I saw it and I felt…

0:20:05 SC: Because of the philosophers, yeah.

0:20:05 JL: Because of the philosophers. I love philosophers.

0:20:06 SC: I’m sure the physicists would have taught you just as badly.

0:20:09 JL: Oh, my God. Even worse, even worse writing, passive construction and it was shown by and it is known that whatever, it’s terrible and… But I grew up loving books, and loving narrative and loving fiction. Not so much non-fiction, I’m actually not a huge non-fiction 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.

0:20:53 SC: You had that.

0:20:54 JL: Yeah, I kinda 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 straight forward, non-fiction expository math proof sort of discussion about what can be known and what can’t be known. The unknowability of certain mathematical facts.

0:21:17 SC: This is the book about Turing and Gödel.

0:21:19 JL: Yeah, Turing and Gödel 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 would 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.

0:21:51 SC: That formal system, yeah.

0:21:52 JL: 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 a narrative or by being something different.

0:22:03 SC: Right, once you say that of course, it has to be a novel, right?

0:22:07 JL: [chuckle] Exactly, so it became a novel with an unreliable narrator, who doesn’t know the truth, but is grasping for the truth and it was such a pleasure to write. It was such a pleasure once I… It 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.

0:22:30 SC: Is there something besides the obvious, that drew you to Turing and Gödel… Alan Turing, famous computer scientist and Kurt Gödel, famous mathematician, logician. 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.

[laughter]

0:22:46 JL: Okay, we’re gonna go out for drinks and I’ll read it to you.

[laughter]

0:22:48 SC: Did they… Yeah. Well download the audio book right now. Were they close? Did they hang?

0:22:55 JL: No, they never met.

0:22:56 SC: They never met. ‘Cause it’s like who would’ve guessed that you wrote a novel about them.

0:23:01 JL: But they knew each other, they were very influenced by each other.

0:23:01 SC: How do they fit together?

0:23:01 JL: I think, oh wow that’s a good question, Sean. Because I think the way that… People rarely ask me that because they don’t fit together that well, except for cumulatively their proof is about limitations on what we can know. But I think I was fascinated by the fact that Turing became such a cool-hearted atheist and that Gödel continued to believe in an afterlife where he would be reincarnated, and find a more platonic existence in a pure mathematical state. Like, 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.

0:23:49 SC: Why don’t we… Why don’t we just be very straight forward, ’cause I’m realizing you and I know who these people are, but maybe not everyone does.

0:23:55 JL: Yeah, that’s fair enough.

0:23:55 SC: Who is Alan Turing?

0:23:56 JL: Like I said, Alan Turing became very famous as a very young mathematician for realizing that there were some numbers that were un-computable meaning literally, if you tried to mechanized thought and so here he invented the computer, so this is why Alan Turning 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.

0:24:28 SC: Yeah.

0:24:29 JL: 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.

0:24:57 SC: Right.

0:24:57 JL: So let’s say I have a number 0.123579, it goes on and on for infinity. The code to generate that number is exactly as long as the number.

0:25:06 SC: Right.

0:25:07 JL: No shorter, which is not true of the number two or three and fours, we can write a very short code.

0:25:12 SC: Well, the number two it is true.

[laughter]

0:25:15 JL: The number… It’s two plus two is five, right? It’s Orwell.

[laughter]

0:25:20 SC: But the square root of two…

0:25:22 JL: Yes, the square root of two is actually in… It’s an irrational number, but it is computable in a very short code.

0:25:28 SC: Exactly.

0:25:28 JL: 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.

0:26:04 SC: Yeah, most numbers.

0:26:05 JL: 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 some sense. So, this belief that everything can be rational and noble, and suddenly, there’s this kick in the teeth.

0:26:27 SC: 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, that had this program…

0:26:39 JL: Hilbert.

0:26:39 SC: We’re gonna set out some axioms, we’re gonna prove every true thing.

0:26:42 JL: Totally. So here comes…

0:26:44 SC: It’s not gonna happen.

0:26:46 JL: Total… [laughter] 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. And yet is…

0:27:02 SC: Breaking codes.

0:27:04 JL: Breaking codes. And yet, is convicted of homosexuality and given hormone treatments, which leave him 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, was 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. ‘Cause Turing does invent the computer in this indirect way, because he started… What he’s really thinking about is mechanizing thought.

0:27:48 SC: Yep.

0:27:49 JL: 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 that think.”

[laughter]

0:28:06 JL: 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 catchup with Turing ever since.

0:28:21 SC: Right, yeah. And meanwhile, Austrian logician Kurt Gödel, was he from Austria or Germany?

0:28:30 JL: Gödel, yeah. Gosh, Austrian. Gödel…

0:28:36 SC: Home of any number of famous, brilliant, crazy people really.

0:28:38 JL: I think I have a little bit of a thing for crazy, brilliant people.

[laughter]

0:28:43 SC: You should move to Austria.

[laughter]

0:28:46 JL: I do pretty well in New York.

0:28:47 SC: Yeah, okay.

[laughter]

0:28:51 JL: Gödel was so fascinating, ’cause 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, he just…

0:29:19 SC: But that it can be done.

0:29:20 JL: He just wants a proof that it can be done. And everyone expects that this is true. Why wouldn’t you expect this is true? So Gödel is the one who deals the first blow before Turing. Turing’s really influenced by Gödel’s work, even though they never met. And Gödel 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…

0:29:46 SC: True facts.

0:29:47 JL: True facts.

0:29:48 SC: Well, at least… What is the technical statement, that either the formal system is inconsistent…

0:29:54 JL: That’s true, yeah.

0:29:55 SC: Or there are true facts that can’t be proven?

0:29:56 JL: 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.

[laughter]

0:30:15 JL: That’s much worse.

0:30:15 SC: I wouldn’t put it past those mathematicians. They come up with all sorts of crazy ideas.

0:30:19 JL: Yeah. And so, Gödel initiated that blow, but he was a strange character. He was very isolated and very withdrawn and had strange ideas about the afterlife and…

0:30:36 JL: 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, [chuckle] 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.

[laughter]

0:31:00 SC: Yeah, he was a little crazy, Gödel, 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?

0:31:10 JL: Yes.

0:31:10 SC: Something true about the universe that we can never grasp.

0:31:13 JL: Yes, what Gödel did and actually… Oh, Sean we should talk about this later.

[laughter]

0:31:19 JL: What Gödel did, which was so clever was he constructed a sentence, which basically says this true statement can never be proven. 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. Which is true.

0:31:55 SC: If it were provable it would have to be incorrect, because the statement said it’s unprovable. Yeah.

0:32:00 JL: Now, it is possible that you try to construct such a sentence and you cannot mathematize it and you don’t prove anything. But he, mathematized it perfectly and there it was.

0:32:09 SC: And ever since then, every mathematician who’s been trying to prove things and getting stuck is always wondering, “Is this one of the things that is not provable?”

0:32:13 JL: Is this unprovable?

0:32:15 SC: Yeah, it’s rarely true.

0:32:17 JL: So I know, I’m sure you get asked this a lot too, which is, “Oh, don’t you think that’s something we’ll 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 in Turing and Gödel, then we keep trying.

0:32:31 SC: And then, so you’re… 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?

0:32:42 JL: I think just ’cause I failed so badly at telling it as non-fiction, it just wasn’t working, it wasn’t… It wasn’t interesting, it didn’t… It would have not reached… I just feel like sometimes we experience an element of truth in the solar plexus, 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 Gödel’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.

0:33:23 SC: Right.

0:33:23 JL: 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. [laughter]

0:33:34 SC: Okay, but just between us, that was an extremely elegant and compelling rational… Rationale for why we should… But did you have that before you wrote the novel or did this come up after you wrote it?

0:33:45 JL: Oh I had… No, again, I only had it after I failed at writing the non-fiction first.

[laughter]

0:33:49 SC: No, but before you wrote the novel version did you say like, “Oh, maybe I need to step out of the system?”

0:33:54 JL: Yeah, but…

0:33:54 SC: Okay.

0:33:55 JL: By then, by then, by the time that I had given way, most of… So, I’ve written three books and almost every one, I write the wrong book first, and I bomb out and then I figure out what the right book is to write.

0:34:07 SC: It’s your process.

0:34:07 JL: It’s my process. So I, definitely… 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 gonna try this,” and a lot of it is just worrying you don’t have permission. We’re all sort of like that a little bit. Do I have permission to do this? Am I gonna get slammed by my colleagues? Is my editor gonna be furious? Is my agent gonna kill me? So I have to… I’ve overcome all.

[laughter]

0:34:41 SC: Any one of which is perfectly, reasonably implausible, right? I mean, these things happen.

0:34:44 JL: They all… They all basically showed up at my door with torches.

0:34:46 SC: Yes.

[laughter]

0:34:48 JL: But even my last book, the third book was the same way, I kept trying to do the right thing, to do what was expected of me and failing. And then just, you have this terrible moment where you decide, okay, what’s worse.

[laughter]

0:35:04 JL: A bad book?

0:35:05 SC: Right.

0:35:05 JL: Or getting some flack from… And 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.

0:35:17 SC: Yeah, well but you had this previous experience. You’d already written one book and that book, “How the Universe Got Its Spots”, I have said it before and I’ll happily say it on tape, was one of my favorite books of all time.

0:35:28 JL: Oh I love that.

0:35:29 SC: And it’s a combination of narrative, your personal narrative, right?

0:35:34 JL: Yeah.

0:35:34 SC: 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.

0:35:43 JL: Mm-hmm. That book was definitely written because I thought we would never know the answer scientifically, and so you know, again…

0:35:50 SC: The answer to?

0:35:52 JL: 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.

0:36:02 SC: It’s a big question.

0:36:02 JL: It’s a great question. Did I… I honestly at no point, working on it scientifically, did I think it was gonna be answered observationally soon…

0:36:12 SC: Because what year are we talking here, that you’re writing?

0:36:14 JL: Oh man, it’s like 15 years ago, probably like…

0:36:19 SC: Early 2000s. Yeah.

0:36:19 JL: Little after the turn of, the early 2000s. And honestly, it’s probably never a question we’re gonna 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 gonna 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 cannon, right? So basically, could these be wasted years ’cause I was fantasizing about something real scientifically, but not necessarily measurable?

0:37:08 SC: But this was a special case, it wasn’t intrinsically un-measurable, there were, for certain answers we could have measured it, like if the universe had been small and topologically interesting. And if not…

0:37:17 JL: Right. But if you had put a gun to my head I would have said it’s not that small.

[laughter]

0:37:21 SC: Yeah, and you would have been right. You would have survived.

0:37:23 JL: And I would have been right.

0:37:24 SC: Yes.

[laughter]

0:37:24 JL: I mean, there was no part of me that was pushing, it as this is gonna be my big mark in life but it was just the beauty also and the fascination of the… Talk about narrative, the idea that if light wraps around the universe, I can look far enough away and far enough into the past that I could see myself or the Milky Way or I could see Sean and I studying for Physics.

0:37:50 SC: And that’s how the universe got its spots, literally.

0:37:52 JL: That is literally how the universe got its spots.

0:37:54 SC: 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?

0:38:06 JL: 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 “right” to write a book at that point. We come from a field where you can write a book when you’re coming down from the mountain with the tablet.

0:38:27 SC: Right. Do your thing first.

0:38:28 JL: Do your thing first.

0:38:29 SC: Do your real work.

0:38:30 JL: Come back as a Professor Emeritus and declare the results. And this was much more, “Hey, we are never gonna 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 in 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 and that it’s not…

0:39:02 SC: So, it was therapy writing this book?

[laughter]

0:39:05 JL: Well, it was definitely, like Physics is about not knowing 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 traveling all the time and separated from your closests and your dearests. 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.

0:39:38 SC: The fact that it was in process was a feature, not a bug?

0:39:40 JL: Exactly.

0:39:41 SC: In progress.

0:39:41 JL: Yeah, yeah.

0:39:43 SC: 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?

0:39:52 JL: You know, I think I was disciplining myself not to sound, 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’s somebody I respect but is not a physicist, that it was a way for me to be respectful to my audience, not authoritative.

0:40:20 SC: Right.

0:40:21 JL: Exactly. And 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 just say, ‘I’m writing this to her.'”

0:40:42 SC: Do you… Make the subtext text. Yes.

0:40:43 JL: Yes. Just do it. Just be blunt. And I think it really helped me find the voice for a first book especially where voices… You struggle to find voice.

0:40:54 SC: Yeah, and even when books are written not by famous scientists but by journalists or whoever, they generally wait until the result is in hand.

0:41:02 JL: Right.

0:41:02 SC: And so there is this idea of a rational reconstruction. We tell the story how it makes sense, not how it happened.

0:41:09 JL: Right okay.

0:41:10 SC: And you got to tell the story in all the messiness. ‘Cause there’s so many mistakes you make and blind alleys you go down.

0:41:15 JL: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Actually, the last book was so much about that, so it’s really funny ’cause Rai 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…

[laughter]

0:41:32 JL: He kept saying, “So what are you gonna do about the book?”

0:41:34 SC: The book, you don’t wanna write it. Yeah.

0:41:35 JL: “What are you gonna do by the way?” And I was like, “Oh my God, Rai I would love to write that the book was about not knowing. You know the tension, the anxiety, the reality of failure like looming palpably.

0:41:48 SC: So the book was about gravitational waves, the search… It was originally about the search for gravitational waves.

0:41:52 JL: It was about the… It was originally about The search for gravitational waves.

0:41:54 SC: Then turned into the story of the discovery of gravitational waves.

0:41:56 JL: Well, only an epilogue.

0:41:56 SC: Only in the epilogue.

0:41:58 JL: And again, there’s no way I would have… I could never, had I known about their discovery… I mean, I’m not sure I could have maintained that sense of the tension, and the anxiety and all of that stuff, them climbing Mount Everest aspect of that story. I don’t know if I could have reproduced if I had known it succeeded.

0:42:16 SC: Right.

0:42:17 JL: So it was so great to write it, not knowing if they were gonna succeed, that the failure was real and looming as a real possibility.

0:42:24 SC: But again, you threw away tens of thousands of words.

0:42:27 JL: Yeah.

[laughter]

0:42:27 SC: How was the book different in the first conception?

0:42:31 JL: I had a lot more stuff about physics, I had a lot more pedagogical 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 Rai and Kip.

0:42:53 SC: It never goes away.

0:42:54 JL: And I love these guys, they were really important people to me. They’re statesmen of the field. And Kip especially, I became very close with Rai 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.

0:43:21 SC: Because there is dirty laundry in the LIGO story right?

0:43:24 JL: There is. There is.

0:43:24 SC: It’s not all peaches and cream.

0:43:25 JL: 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 ’cause I knew I was doing it, but I wasn’t sure if other people would notice.

0:43:37 SC: You hoped they wouldn’t.

0:43:39 JL: Right. And Dan was like, “What is this shit?” He was like, “Stop pulling your punches.”

0:43:44 SC: That’s why we still need editors, anyway.

0:43:46 JL: And in literally 24 hours, I threw away half the book, and it was so easy to disconnect ’cause it just didn’t belong there. It was like literally like two disconnected pieces jammed together and I took one and I threw it away, and there was the book.

0:43:58 SC: But it sounds like someday in the future, there’s gonna be 1000-page…

0:44:02 JL: Yeah. Exposition of black holes.

0:44:04 SC: Experts… Well, and Cantor’s diagonalization theorem of infinity.

0:44:07 JL: Right exactly.

0:44:09 SC: Like all these pedagogical things you’ve written and they’ve never seen the light of day.

0:44:11 JL: Right. They’re in there, I think, especially with Gödel and Turing, that there were better versions written but you know, black holes is sort of my thing.

0:44:17 SC: Yeah.

0:44:18 JL: I got… I got a little jive for me and black holes, we got something going on. Assuming I’d go and publish that one.

0:44:23 SC: That would be good.

0:44:24 JL: But you know I have to say the most amazing thing about both Kip and Rai 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 holes colliding, by coincidence, I printed a draft of the book, one for Rai 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.” Never said, “Suppress it,” never said. He said instead, “Air also the counter argument.”

0:45:19 SC: It’s a true scientist.

0:45:19 JL: It’s a true scientist. And Rai too. Rai was like, “I don’t like it but it’s true.”

[laughter]

0:45:25 JL: My favourite quote, “I don’t like it, but it’s true.” 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.

[laughter]

0:45:35 SC: Good, good. And I’m sure he liked it more.

0:45:36 JL: And he approved the quote. Yeah. [laughter] Exactly.

0:45:38 SC: That’s right. Having it be that way.

0:45:40 JL: Exactly.

0:45:41 SC: But again… So, your third book was in yet another mode, right? You had this 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 are going embedding yourself in the LIGO experiment, talking to people, take… Recording conversations, I presume?

0:45:58 JL: Yeah. That was in… I honestly, for the first six months, I didn’t think to record ’cause I’m not a journalist.

[laughter]

0:46:04 JL: Dummy. And then I was like, “Oh, Jesus. I gotta start recording this stuff.” Because I was transcribing so frantically afterwards, trying to remember exactly what was said. That I did… I did learn, “Okay, I gotta start to record.” So, yes. Now, I record my conversations. [chuckle]

0:46:20 SC: Yeah. And so, what was… What did you learned by that experience and what was it like to be a journalist?

0:46:27 JL: 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 allowed anywhere near a lab. I mean, I burn water.

[laughter]

0:46:44 JL: I burn boiling water frequently. So, there’s a sense in which like, I had a crush on the experiment and it was just this total homage. 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 1000-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 this sort of sense of it’s just theirs. And hundreds of people, all knowing what to do. It’s kind of mind-blowing, right?

0:47:35 SC: Yeah.

0:47:35 JL: And that it’s real. They built something real based on things that we do on paper and that connects and just it has my total admiration.

0:47:48 SC: It’ll never stop surprising me, but you know.

0:47:50 JL: I mean, you know. Like total admiration. And I think that one of the reasons why I got along with the experimentalists so well is ’cause that was so obvious on my face that I was just… I was just there.

[laughter]

0:48:00 SC: Such a fan-girl.

0:48:01 JL: I know. I was like, such a fan-girl. [laughter] But, yeah. They did it.

0:48:09 SC: And your journalism wasn’t just talking-head interviews. You were there at the different places you visited, field work, et cetera.

0:48:16 JL: Yeah. I really think I was trying to write that book like a novel, that was the target. The target was Rai as a character. Rai has lines, Rai says stuff, and it’s Rai’s dialogue. And that it could be fiction, for as long as I can maintain it. It could literally have opened and read as though Rai was a fictitious character with lines. And that came from Rai, that idea because his speech is so spectacular. The rhythm of it, [chuckle] the cadence, the swearing. [chuckle] I groomed a lot of the swearing out, which I…

0:48:51 SC: Oh well. The director’s cut will come later. Yeah.

[laughter]

0:48:54 JL: 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 their story? Rai tells his story, Kip tells his story, Barry tells his story, even Robbie Vogt, who had a very dark relationship with LIGO 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 the characters and you decide for yourself.

0:49:37 SC: When you write a book like that… I mean, there’s two sides obviously, right? There’s your… You have some standards.

[chuckle]

0:49:44 SC: You wanna write a good book, you have a vision. But then, there’s an audience that reads it. 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, to tell things in this narrative way rather than a straightforward, guidely pedagogical way. How does the audience receive it? Are they outraged that you’re not just giving them the simple drawing of the interferometer?

0:50:07 JL: Yes, actually. Oh, my God. That’s a good point. It’s really funny. The biggest complain 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 non-fiction book, they demanded figures. It was literally the only complain I’ve consistently gotten.

[laughter]

0:50:39 JL: And I think we made the right call, but I get that it was uncomfortable.

0:50:43 SC: And it’s mostly because of expectations, right? It’s not that it didn’t work, it’s just that I wanted or… They expected something else.

0:50:47 JL: Right. These books have figures. Why doesn’t your book have figures? And I would say that some… 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.

0:51:09 SC: Yeah. Playing against type.

0:51:09 JL: Like Dave Eggers plays against type and puts figures in his books. I get it, totally. So, this was a call but that… 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 tragic comedy in some sense, [chuckle] Occasionally it 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.” And it’s like, “Oh my God. That’s so… “

0:51:38 SC: Yeah you know you didn’t get it.

0:51:39 JL: That you did not… That you didn’t get it, and that happens, that’s okay.

0:51:44 SC: And we shouldn’t pass by this without expressing our mutual admiration for the exquisiteness that is the LIGO experiment.

0:51:50 JL: It is.

0:51:50 SC: The fact they did this, I remember 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 wanna do. And the audience members who were physics faculty professors were like shaking their heads like, “You’ll never do that.”

0:52:06 JL: Yeah. It’s not gonna happen. [laughter] They’d literally thought they… The proverbial they we won’t… We won’t implicate people ’cause it was fair, it was actually fair to be critical of it.

0:52:17 SC: Yeah it was not… Not just a few crotchety people.

0:52:19 JL: No, no, no. These were…

0:52:21 SC: There’s a lot of people.

0:52:22 JL: Really smart, really insightful, really thoughtful people had every reason to believe it would fail. And if that’s not the interesting story, I don’t know what is. But they did measure the vibration of a… What is it? The mirrors, at 40 kilograms, Jesus I should know that, I have to read my own book.

0:52:44 SC: You should read this book. I can recommend a good book.

0:52:47 JL: And this is what happens. [laughter] By less than 1/10000th the width of a proton over four kilometers. What a stunning technological team…

0:52:54 SC: And they’ve done it several times now.

0:52:54 JL: Had it failed. If it had failed, it would have failed ’cause nature didn’t provide. And like we’ve already established nature doesn’t love us back.

0:53:02 SC: No.

0:53:02 JL: Nature isn’t trying to make us feel good.

0:53:04 SC: This is one of the rare cases where we sort of got lucky, right?

0:53:07 JL: Yeah.

0:53:09 SC: We were certainly very hopeful to find something, but the things that LIGO found were a little bit bigger and more spectacular than we had expected.

0:53:15 JL: Oh yeah, I love that. I love that out of the gate, black holes. And the reason why I called the book “Black Hole Blues” was ’cause Rai 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 Rai at his most honest ’cause 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,” blah, blah, but he didn’t, he was so honest to the end. “If we do not detect black holes, this thing is a failure.” So I was like, “Ooh Black Hole Blues.”

0:53:47 SC: 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 Rai Weiss working on LIGO?

0:53:56 JL: 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 gonna get tenure working on this crap,” and they literally, he was building an instrument, that was like a meter-and-a-half in this like…

0:54:12 SC: Gotta start on your lab.

0:54:14 JL: Gotta start somewhere.

0:54:14 SC: Yeah on your table.

0:54:15 JL: In this ramshackle structure on a table, the instrument’s now four kilometers long, so he realized… [chuckle]

0:54:22 SC: And a billion dollars.

0:54:23 JL: And a billion dollars, that a meter-and-a-half wasn’t gonna 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.” [laughter] They were like, “If the sun blew up, you wouldn’t… You wouldn’t hear it with this instrument.” And he was like, “It’s true. If the sun blew up I wouldn’t hear it with this instrument.” He’s like, “I’d do better looking out the window.”

0:54:45 SC: Journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

0:54:48 JL: So, that’s discouraging. And what you’ve got to love about Rai, is that he said, “Okay, I’m gonna 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 it was immediately successful well. In the year 2000, it was running, while those black holes that were detected in 2015 were colliding, 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, “This could fail.” [laughter]

0:55:47 SC: 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 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.”

0:56:02 JL: That’s true. Yes.

0:56:04 SC: Kudos to the National Science Foundation and the government for saying we are gonna give you a billion dollars to build something that won’t see anything, right?

0:56:10 JL: Yeah, absolutely. First generation machine, Kip and Rai 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 LIGO before we’ll make a detection.”

0:56:30 SC: So it’s possible that you have written more narratively oriented science physics books than any other person?

0:56:38 JL: [laughter] I don’t know.

0:56:39 SC: I don’t know. I don’t know who…

0:56:40 JL: There’s probably people out there who do. Does it include people who don’t publish? [laughter]

0:56:44 SC: Yeah. Well there is that.

[laughter]

0:56:46 JL: I get a lot of letters.

0:56:48 SC: What the heck, so do I.

0:56:50 JL: I think we should start a Facebook page.

0:56:52 SC: For…

0:56:52 JL: For all the people who write us letters.

0:56:54 SC: Just to point them in that direction.

0:56:55 JL: Yes.

0:56:55 SC: 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.

0:57:06 JL: Oh, my God, brilliant.

0:57:07 SC: And he would say, “Oh you should talk to this guy.” And then… But both of them would come back and saying, “Why did you point me to him? He’s a crackpot.”

[laughter]

0:57:13 SC: Crackpot-ness is not transitive right? Like they think that everyone else is also a crackpot except them.

0:57:20 JL: Priceless.

0:57:21 SC: It doesn’t work. Anyway, did we learn something about the efficacy of this kind of way of talking about science, is there something we get at… Science is done by human beings. It’s true, but it’s a cliche, but true.

0:57:34 JL: Yeah.

0:57:35 SC: And you could write… You could have written books about street builders or something like that.

0:57:43 JL: Yeah… I no that’s a… Sorry I want you to finish your thought ’cause I think it’s an interesting question.

0:57:48 SC: Do we learn something specific about the way that science is done that is different and interesting by telling the stories as stories per se?

0:57:55 JL: 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 Immanuel Kant meant. It drove me insane. Because it can’t be locked in one human’s mind, it has to be shareable and there was something about math and physics that is transcendent, it belongs to all of us. Nobody is saying, “What did Einstein mean?”

0:58:33 SC: Nobody learns relativity by reading Einstein’s papers, right?

0:58:35 JL: Right. You learn it because we all own it. As soon as he gave it to us, it’s a gift, it’s ours, it’s a 100% ours. We can use it like a hammer. 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 stereo… 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 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 and 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.

0:59:52 SC: Yeah.

0:59:52 JL: I was on… I was doing interviews with… Remotely with Qatar, you know, Qatar.

0:59:57 SC: Qatar.

0:59:58 JL: I apologize for my pronunciation. I’ve instinctively [1:00:01] ____ Qatar. That’s amazing. It was like there’s a moment where we all realized for a second, we’re under the same sky.

1:00:11 SC: Yeah, yeah, I wrote a book about the Higgs boson which is the other…

1:00:15 JL: Exactly.

1:00:16 SC: Discovery of that magnitude we’ve had in the last 10 years.

1:00:19 JL: Exactly.

1:00:19 SC: It’s an international team of people working together in exquisite harmony.

1:00:24 JL: 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… What could be more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, than something like that?

1:00:45 SC: Well, I had this quote, I’ve actually… Sadly forget who it’s from but in my book, “If the United Nations worked as well as ATLAS and CDF collaborations at CERN, we would have world peace.”

1:00:57 JL: 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 gonna ask you a question about what this means for humanity.” I had to say something rousing [laughter] about how we’re all under the same sky and the universe. And then they were like, “I’m sorry we have to take a break for the war in Iraq.”

[laughter]

1:01:18 JL: And I was like, “Oh, damn it.”

1:01:19 SC: Well, the skies will still be there tomorrow, but the present does intrude itself sometimes.

1:01:25 JL: Yeah.

1:01:26 SC: I think 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, ’cause you said you enjoyed it, maybe I didn’t. When I wrote the Higgs boson book.

1:01:38 JL: Yes you were very journalistic in that book too.

1:01:40 SC: I was and I didn’t like it.

1:01:41 JL: You didn’t like it.

1:01:42 SC: I mean I’m married to one of the world’s great science journalists so I know how it’s done well.

1:01:44 JL: Yes. Jennifer Ouellette.

1:01:46 SC: And I just… It’s not me, right?

1:01:49 JL: Yeah.

1:01:49 SC: And so I said interviewing is not for me and I say this as I’m interviewing you for the podcast so what happened? What went terribly wrong?

1:01:56 JL: ‘Cause we’re chatting.

1:01:57 SC: 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. So I talked to philosophers and biologists and whatever and that I loved, right?

1:02:11 JL: Right.

1:02:12 SC: So you’re much better than I am at caring about the human stories. [laughter]

1:02:15 JL: I tell you. I remember you specifically telling me I’m never gonna be the one to describe the beard on his face. And I had 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. I do like that.

1:02:39 SC: Yeah. No, exactly. You have to do what you’re good at and I recognized my inability…

1:02:42 JL: Yeah, right. I remember we had this conversation. It’s so fascinating.

1:02:45 SC: Yeah.

1:02:46 JL: And maybe the other aspect of journalism I wouldn’t enjoy as much which is really how journalism is written for papers.

1:02:52 SC: No. It’s more Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson kind of…

1:02:56 JL: Right. Yes, exactly [laughter] I’m a long form.

1:03:01 SC: There you are.

1:03:01 JL: Lord knows, I’m not glad about it. It would be so fun to be short form and whip…

1:03:04 SC: Can’t do it.

1:03:04 JL: Stuff out, but I can’t do it. I’m long form.

1:03:06 SC: Even some of my writer friends, I amazed them by saying I enjoy writing books. I’m like, “Give me a 100,000 words ahead of me, I’m at my happiest.”

1:03:14 JL: That is… Yeah. I mean ’cause it takes me a while to do the whole structure and think about what the different architecture of the new book is gonna be. And I’m always lost in it and it takes me that long to do it. That’s how long it takes me.

1:03:26 SC: But I wanna give you a chance before we go to plug your big ongoing… I don’t wanna 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.

1:03:40 JL: Yeah. I love it [laughter]

1:03:41 SC: Tell us what it is.

1:03:43 JL: Where we are now, we’re up at Columbia and Barnard and I call this upstate Manhattan [laughter]

1:03:48 SC: Here we are. Janna and I, yeah.

1:03:50 JL: In the parks and a sweet hour away which we can take a ferry to from Wall Street is Pioneer Works which is a cultural center in Red Hook. Red Hook is slightly inaccessible because it actually… The ground cannot support a subway system. So [laughter].. 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 Yellin, started Pioneer Works there. He bought this old iron works factory from 1850s and renovated it to become a cultural center. And the founding artistic director is Gabriel Florenz who’s just been incredibly visionary and aggressive and interesting and unafraid. And so it started mostly as an art center.

1:04:46 SC: Pioneer Works.

1:04:48 JL: 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 have… We do not fully understand our audience, but they come out for it. And you’ve been… You’ve been to one of my… You were in one of my events.

1:05:05 SC: I was.

1:05:06 JL: Which was such a pleasure.

1:05:07 SC: Look, people love it, people love science presented in an accessible way.

1:05:08 JL: People love it. They do.

1:05:11 SC: And you’re doing it in a particular way, but it’s certainly very accessible.

1:05:13 JL: Yeah, I think what we’re doing which I’m trying to understand retroactively is 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 center that’s open and welcome and people hang out in the garden and they stay late and they talk.

1:05:31 SC: And there’s booze.

1:05:31 JL: And there’s booze and there’s food [laughter] We do pop-up exhibits. A friend of my was like, “I was in the longest beer line and I got to the front and it was a genetics experiment.”

[laughter]

1:05:43 SC: Bonus.

1:05:43 JL: Yeah. Exactly. So, some things making people feel like it’s theirs.

1:05:48 SC: To be fair, instead of beer, not that the… Of where the beer was coming from.

1:05:50 JL: Yes. Now they’d… Right. We didn’t give them genetically modified beer.

1:05:52 SC: They were in the wrong line. Okay. Good.

[chuckle]

1:05:55 JL: They were in the wrong line. So, I think that right people… People want it to feel like it’s theirs. And so we talk at a really high level. We do not…

1:06:07 SC: Oh yeah.

1:06:07 JL: 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…

1:06:16 SC: Yes. No PowerPoint or anything like that.

1:06:18 JL: No PowerPoint, nothing like that. And sometimes we have to stop. Frank Wilczek, won the Nobel Prize, who’s a good friend of both of ours, who came from MIT to give a talk, said something like, “Well, as you all know.” [chuckle] The Higgs field, bricks [1:06:34] ____…

1:06:34 SC: Famous last words.

1:06:35 JL: And I was like, “Frank.”

1:06:36 SC: You can’t do that.

1:06:37 JL: No, but it’s okay. So, we stop. And we translate.

1:06:40 SC: Right.

1:06:40 JL: But we let Frank talk as Frank talks.

1:06:42 SC: But it’s a great… I never heard that idea that part of the charm is the scientist coming to our house. It’s another… Another twist on the idea of telling the human side, telling the stories, bringing people into our house. And I think that 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…

1:07:04 JL: That’s right. Totally.

1:07:05 SC: Life whether it’s philosophy, or economics, or whatever. And so, this is definitely contributing to that.

1:07:10 JL: Oh thank you for saying that ’cause 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 then 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. These are fascinating revelations that children aren’t taught. But they discover. And every child is an artist. And I don’t wanna bring scientists to go be artists professionally. I’m not into that. And I don’t bring artists to come be… 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.

1:08:01 SC: I can’t think of a better place to end.

1:08:03 JL: Oh lovely.

1:08:04 SC: Janna Levin, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

1:08:05 JL: Thanks Sean, fun as always.

[music]