Janna Levin
Janna Levin, a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University, holds a BA in Physics and Astronomy with a concentration in Philosophy from Barnard College of Columbia University, and a PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her scientific research mainly centers around the Early Universe, Chaos, and Black Holes.
Dr. Levin's first book, "How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space," is a widely popular science book following her personal recollections, as well as scientific studies, in letter format. Her second book, "A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines" (Knopf, 2006), won the PEN/Bingham Fellowship for writers that "honors an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work... represents distinguished literary achievement..."
Dr. Levin also has written a series of essays to accompany exhibitions at galleries in England and been featured on several radio and television programs.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye.Adele never demands of him any actual conversation. She seems to understand that she is there to keep time and drown out the alarm of more individuated noises. The clink of a pin drop that can fray his nerves, the grinding of gravel beneath the weight of a man on the street, the spike of a dulled conversation as a couple pass beneath his window over Langegasse, the mounting pitch of the conspiratorial exchange as they approach.”
“from a contradiction you may deduce everything”