Let's say somebody said that they had a belief system in which it was simply

positive that carbon came out of, I don't know, a blue sky one day. That wouldn't

make me feel any more meaning about who I was in the world. It feels much richer

to me to imagine that a cold empty cosmos collapses with stars and stars burn

and shine and they make carbon in the cores and then they throw them out again

and that carbon collects and forms another planet, another star and you know

acids evolve and then human beings arise. I mean that's to me a really beautiful

narrative.

Gen. 11 is a theoretical physicist who studies the shape of the universe and

whether it is finite or infinite and she's a physicist who's also explored her

science by way of a novel of ideas. Her novel a madman dreams of churring

machines centers on the lives and ideas of two pivotal 20th century mathematicians

Kurt Gurdell and Alan churring. Churring is known as the father of modern

computing. Gurdell shook the worlds of mathematics, philosophy and logic showing

that some mathematical truths can never be proven. Both pushed at boundaries where

mathematics presses on grand questions of meaning and purpose. Such questions

helped create the technologies that are now changing our sense of what it

means to be human. I'm Chris to tip it and this is on being.

Gen. 11 is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College. I interviewed

her in 2007 after the release of her novel. Many people talk about childhood as

a time when we all start to ask for the first time we ask these great

existential questions like how did how did this all happen how did we get here

...