Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Physicist and author, professor at Columbia, renowned for string theory and popularizing theoretical physics via bestselling books and lectures.
On the island
Eight records
Orchestra of St. Luke's (with John Lithgow, narrator)
It's a piece called Icarus at the Edge of Time. It's based on a story that I wrote about a boy who is, in some sense, a futuristic version of the original classic Greek myth of Icarus. He flies to a black hole, and he suffers a consequence that is dictated by Einstein's general theory of relativity. And Philip Glass wrote an orchestral score that is performed with a narrator who tells this story of a boy who is willing to challenge the might of a black hole.
So, this is a clip from a film called Rocking in the Rockies. And there's a scene in there where a harmonica band, the Coppy Barra Boys, is playing a quartet. And my dad is one of the members of that quartet. To see my dad in an earlier life, I think there's a tendency of kids to imagine that their parents' lives begin when they were born, right? And for me to see my dad out there in the world, you know, in his white dinner jacket, tuxedo, playing this piece, being slapstick, like his lip in one moment gets caught in the harmonica, and one of the other members of the band kind of smacks him in the back of the head to get his lip free and so forth. There's just a joy and simplicity of seeing my dad in the world in that way.
TurnaroundFavourite
Alan Greene (with Malvina Reynolds)
So this is a song called Turnaround that my dad composed the music for with Harry Belafonte and Malvina Reynolds. And it's a song that when I was growing up, I would hear on the radio. I would see on television. It was part of a Kodak commercial. I remember when I was quite young. To me, it really captures my childhood and it captures my dad in a way that really speaks to me of an earlier, simpler time. And that's in some sense what the song is about.
So this is an excerpt from a piece that I wrote, a stage work called Light Falls, Space, Time, and an Obsession of Einstein. And it traces Albert Einstein's journey toward the general theory of relativity, his own trajectory toward those ideas. And if people can feel the excitement of that journey, the drama of human discovery, I think their association with science would completely change. And that's what this piece is all about.
I encountered a performance of this when I was in college. It was a student performance. It wasn't a professional performance. It so struck me at a deep level, the sort of brooding nature, the longing nature of the piece that every so often would like burst forth into the light and then find its way back to the darkness. And when I heard that piece, I said to myself, I've got to one day be able to play this. Now I couldn't even play a scale. You know, my dad steered us all away from music because the life for him was so difficult. So I wasn't a kid who took up piano as a youngster. But when I heard this rhapsody, this Brahms rhapsody, I decided that I was going to learn at least enough piano to be able to play that piece one day.
So, the next is Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Judy Garland. The lyricist, Yip Harberg, had a great impact on me. He once said a long time ago, he said something like, I'll probably get it wrong, but he said, Words make you think a thought, music makes you feel a feeling, but songs, he said, make you feel a thought. And he said, To feel a thought is an artistic process. And that had such an impact on me because it permeated my whole perspective on how to be in the world.
So, A Million Dreams, the soundtrack from The Greatest Showman. And, you know, I don't want to sound like a Hallmark card here, but with all that we have gone through over the last year with this pernicious virus, you know, with my mom, I lost my mom to the virus. And I look at my kids and I just don't want them to lose the ability to dream, to dream of a better time, to dream of a moment when they will be out in the world living life fully. And this song in particular, I think, just captures that spirit beautifully.
I was writing a piece a couple years ago that was exploring on stage the journey from the Big Bang until the end when all there are are particles wafting through the darkness. And the question was, what performance piece would resonate with the ending of the universe? And so my wife suggested, Tracy Day suggested The Sound of Silence, but the Simon and Garfunkel rendition felt too sweet, too lyrical for this ending and another producer suggested the performance by David Draymond in Disturbed. And when I heard that, I was like, this is it, this is perfect. Because there's a railing against the darkness, there's a railing against the silence in his performance. The sensibility of, we do not want to go into the place of darkness with particles wafting through the void.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:04What's the attraction for you of a life spent at those kinds of outer extremes?
Well, it's always been the big questions that have captivated me, the questions that speak to the things that poets have wondered about through the ages. Why are we here? How did we get here? What is the nature of reality? And string theory, at least, has the potential to make headway on these questions, to realize, as you mentioned, the dream of Albert Einstein to put all of nature's forces, all matter together in a unified framework that might tell us what space is, tell us what time is, tell us why there is a universe at all. Now, those are big dreams, and we're not there yet, but you can see that those kinds of questions can certainly captivate one.
Presenter asks
3:07Why would you be thrilled if we could prove string theory wrong?
Because I'm only after the truth. I'm not trying to push any one particular theory. If we could prove that string theory is wrong, that would be spectacular. Because then we could put that theory to the side. We'd know it is not the right one and focus our efforts on something that might be the correct theory.
Presenter asks
10:41Why did you describe your father as quite a melancholy person?
Well, my dad was a composer. He was a vocal coach. He was himself a singer. But his heart was really in the music that he created. And look, being a composer is difficult, right? I mean, few composers really move the world. And my dad wrote wonderful music, wonderful pieces, but very little of it saw the light of day. Very little of it got out there in the world in a significant way. And that definitely was a source of sadness for my father that permeated his being.
The keepsakes
The book
Robert Nozick
I want to have an analytic argument and discussion about the big problems of free will and morality and all that important matter.
The luxury
the world's largest particle collider
I felt like [slippers] was not maximally using the opportunity. So instead, I'm going to take the world's largest particle collider.
Presenter asks
11:34How did your father fire your imagination?
At about four or five years old, he taught me the basics of arithmetic and got me excited about it. And I would ask him to set me multiplication problems. And sometimes I'd spend a Saturday afternoon multiplying like 30-digit numbers by 30-digit numbers. I'd piece together these big pieces of construction paper. I'd tape them together. And I'd spend the day just multiplying these numbers together just for the fun and interest of doing something that no one had done before. Of course, it wasn't interesting. That's why no one had done it before for most people. But for me, there is a sense of going into the unknown. By virtue of this little piece of mathematics that my dad had taught me. So that to me was really the beginning.
Presenter asks
24:23Why do you say free will doesn't exist?
When you realize that according to fundamental physics, we are all just collections of particles, big bags of stuff, and those particles are fully governed by the laws of physics without any opportunity for any of us to intercede in how those particles move. And then when you realize that our decisions and our actions are just the motion of particles inside of our brains, inside of our bodies, well, we can't control that. By what force would we control that? It is the laws of physics acting themselves out on body and brain that determines what we do and the decisions that we make.
Presenter asks
28:35How close did you get to finding meaning in your most recent book?
It's a journey that's taken me to a place that's not particularly original, but I feel like I've gotten there on a novel trajectory. Mindfulness teachers, philosophers, sages across the ages have all said, hey, you need to focus on the moment. And I've come back to that by virtue of realizing that when you look at the far future of the universe, everything that we value, it all goes away. The second law of thermodynamics, the increase of entropy, shows us that stars ultimately, they dissolve, planets dissolve, matter itself will likely dissolve into a spray of particles that will just waft through the cosmos. So it focuses you on this moment and it gives at least me a sense of gratitude, a sense of reverence for being part of creation at all.
“Well, it's always been the big questions that have captivated me, the questions that speak to the things that poets have wondered about through the ages. Why are we here? How did we get here? What is the nature of reality? And string theory, at least, has the potential to make headway on these questions, to realize, as you mentioned, the dream of Albert Einstein to put all of nature's forces, all matter together in a unified framework that might tell us what space is, tell us what time is, tell us why there is a universe at all. Now, those are big dreams, and we're not there yet, but you can see that those kinds of questions can certainly captivate one.”
“At about four or five years old, he taught me the basics of arithmetic and got me excited about it. And I would ask him to set me multiplication problems. And sometimes I'd spend a Saturday afternoon multiplying like 30-digit numbers by 30-digit numbers. I'd piece together these big pieces of construction paper. I'd tape them together. And I'd spend the day just multiplying these numbers together just for the fun and interest of doing something that no one had done before. Of course, it wasn't interesting. That's why no one had done it before for most people. But for me, there is a sense of going into the unknown. By virtue of this little piece of mathematics that my dad had taught me. So that to me was really the beginning.”
“There's nothing like it. It gives you uh uh chills. It gives you a sense of communion with the cosmos that perhaps nobody else else communed in that way before. But I should also say there's anxiety. That comes with it. The discovery that you mentioned about the terrors in the fabric of space, I was working on that with a colleague. This was back in the 90s. And we submitted the paper electronically at about midnight. So excited. And we started, you know, we drove away and we're chatting. And then we said, but hang on a second. Did we double-check that? And we're like, oh my God. So we ran back, drove back to the office. We retracted the paper from the electronic archive. We did the cal it was correct, right? But that kind of anxiety suffuses these kinds of results.”
“When you realize that according to fundamental physics, we are all just collections of particles, big bags of stuff, and those particles are fully governed by the laws of physics without any opportunity for any of us to intercede in how those particles move. And then when you realize that our decisions and our actions are just the motion of particles inside of our brains, inside of our bodies, well, we can't control that. By what force would we control that? It is the laws of physics acting themselves out on body and brain that determines what we do and the decisions that we make.”
“I think it's utterly essential. You know, when I grew up, In Manhattan, a clear night full of stars would mean that there were five points of light that you could see up in the darkness, right? And now, out there in the country, you look up and you see what our forebears saw. And it feels to me, I mean, I don't have any data on this, but intuitively it feels to me that if every single person on planet Earth were to experience that dark night full of stars, we would be able to transcend the everyday. We'd be able to deal with problems in a different way. I'm not saying that's the silver bullet that would solve everything, but that sense of connection to the Earth, that sense of connection to the wider universe, it would allow us to put things in context. And I think that is a tremendous loss that so many people live in cities and don't have the connection to nature, don't have the connection to the stars.”