Janna Levin

“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.”

“The Earth isn't an infinite sheet that carries on for ever, but it doesn't have an edge, either. It's compact and connected.”

“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 can bang against space-time as mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song.”

“I'd like to convince you that the universe has a soundtrack and that soundtrack is played on space itself, because space can wobble like a drum.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Ambiguity is very interesting in writing; it's not very interesting in science.”

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