27 | Janna Levin on Black Holes, Chaos, and the Narrative of Science

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll

Physics, Science

4.7 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2018

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Minescape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:04.6	And today's episode I have a conversation with an old friend of mine who
0:08.1	happens to also be an enormously respected scientist and writer, Jan 11.
0:12.8	Like me, Jan
0:14.0	maintains both an active research program. She's a professor of physics at
0:18.2	Columbia University in Bernard College where she thinks about black holes and
0:21.8	cosmology and astrophysics in various ways, but also a broader effort to
0:26.8	interact with other disciplines and with the general public. But we choose
0:30.4	slightly different ways of going about that broader impact kind of sector of our
0:35.2	efforts. In particular, what Jan has done is mastered a way of writing about
0:40.0	science that is fundamentally narrative in focus and tone. Her books that
0:45.9	explain science to a broader public really read like novels. And in fact, one of
0:50.1	them is basically a novel. She mixes the human side of science with the actual
0:55.2	research being done better than anyone else that I know. So we'll talk a little
0:58.8	bit about her research because that's always you know where things come from in
1:02.0	some sense. But mostly about the book she's written and why she chooses to write
1:06.0	about science in this way. Her most recent book, which I recommend that you read,
1:10.1	is called Black Hole Blues and it's about the discovery of gravitational waves,
1:14.1	the building of the LIGO observatory and all the effort that went into that
1:18.4	over the years. So this conversation serves as an interesting companion piece to
1:23.1	my conversation with Kip Thorn from just a couple of episodes ago. As Kip was
1:27.5	there, he was one of the people who was interviewed by Jan for his efforts in
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Sean Carroll, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Sean Carroll and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.