Quotes from Janna Levin

I think there's a certain lyricism in the telling of a scientific story.

Now, our Sun will not collapse to a black hole. It's actually not massive enough.

I don't believe that math and nature respond to democracy. Just because very clever people have rejected the role of the infinite, their collective opinions, however weighty, won't persuade mother nature to alter her ways. Nature is never wrong.

from a contradiction you may deduce everything

His weakness in this game, and in life, is that he's never prepared for how others will act. They are predetermined but too complex to solve or predict, and there are rules that he is just no good at applying.

we are the product of this universe and I think it can be argued that the entire cosmic code is imprinted in us. Just as our genes carry the memory of our biological ancestors, our logic carries the memory of our cosmological ancestry. We are not just imposing human-centric notions on a cosmos independent of us. We are progeny of this cosmos and our ability to understand it is an inheritance.

To see some truths you must stand outside and look in.

As the blood poured from his tattered heart into the open air and his brain suffocated, all those incomplete thoughts of Wittgenstein decayed with the dying neurons. Neural connections in the gray matter storing memories and ideas in their ordered configurations fired across the gaps, last gaps of mental life. Thoughts on Truth and Will were erased as flesh sloshed soft and limp against alabaster, no more than rotting human fruit.

Black holes are a gift, both physically and theoretically. They are detectable on the farthest reaches of the observable universe. They anchor galaxies, providing a center for our own galactic pinwheel and possibly every other island of stars. And theoretically, they provide a laboratory for the exploration of the farthest reaches of the mind. Black holes are the ideal fantasy scape on which to play out thought experiments that target the core truths about the cosmos.

Sure one could argue the naturalist's case that the mind experiences an external reality in which it participates. But how can this account really satisfy us, Olga? One could equally well argue that all experiences is highly subjective, that the only thing we really have is the image, the smell, the taste, and all of our assertions about the universe are constructions of the human mind.

We are all caught in the stream of a complicated legacy - a proof of the limits of human reason, a proof of our boundlessness. A declaration that were were down here on this crowded, lonely planet, a declaration that we mattered, we living clumps of ash, that each of us was once somebody, that we strove for what we could never have, that we could admit as much. That was us - funny and lousy and great all at once.

imagine you are an astronaut alone in space. no planets in view. no spacecraft. no distant stars. no source of light. imagine the latent terror, the quiet of space, the strange sensation of floating, the unspeakable dark between wealth of stars.

Joe's scientific life is defined by these significant near misses… He was Shackleton many times, almost the first: almost the first to see the big bang, almost the first to patent the laser, almost the first to detect gravitational waves. Famous for nearly getting there.

A bare black hole is pure empty spacetime—no atoms, light, strings, or particles of any kind, dark or bright. It's empty space—or, in physics slang, the vacuum.

An idea sparked in the 1960s, a thought experiment, an amusing haiku, is now a thing of metal and glass.

The original architects of quantum mechanics insisted on this conservation as a philosophical principle worth respecting. They built quantum mechanics to operationally safeguard information.

He is still all potential. The potential to be great, the potential to be mad. He will achieve both magnificently.

Our propositions are true if they have the same structure as the world. Truth is a correspondence through structure.

This world extends beyond this room, Adele. There are the streets of Vienna and beyond that Europe and beyond that a globe in space in orbit around a star in a universe. But how do I know that for sure? I cannot see the globe spinning on its axis right now as I speak to you. How can I be sure? I can be sure because it's logical; the mathematics is sound and respected by the orbits of the planets. I can verify it's true, not by looking at it, but by thinking about it.

An experimental physics lab is probably unlike any other room you've been in before. The lighting is harsh, of course, aggressively bright and beyond the reach of aesthetic concerns. There are sounds of machines, a harmonic hum, sometimes just from fans on computer equipment as opposed to any motorized parts. There's never any bespoke sound absorbers, so the machines have a sonic clarity that seems intentional, cranked up for some postindustrial experimental orchestra.

At one apex is a paranoid lunatic, at another is a lonesome outcast: Kurt Gödel, the greatest logician of many centuries; and Alan Turing, the brilliant code breaker and mathematician.

I would say the connection between art and science is very tenuous for me. It's just that I'm interested in both. I don't think that my interest in art affects the kind of science that I do.

We have never observed infinity in nature. Whenever you have infinities in a theory, that's where the theory fails as a description of nature. And if space was born in the Big Bang, yet is infinite now, we are forced to believe that it's instantaneously, infinitely big. It seems absurd.

We have to wonder, if there is a multiverse, in some other patch of that multiverse are there creatures?