Janna Levin Quotes & Sayings

There are faint stars in the night sky that you can see, but only if you look to the side of where they shine. They burn too weakly or are too far away to be seen directly, even if you stare. But you can see them out of the corner of your eye because the cells on the periphery of your retina are more sensitive to light. Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye. — Janna Levin

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

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

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

Somewhere in the universe two black holes collide - as heavy as stars, as small as cities, literally black (the complete absence of light) holes (empty hollows). Tethered by gravity, in their final seconds together the black holes course through thousands of revolutions about their eventual point of contact, churning up space and time until they crash and merge into one bigger black hole, an event more powerful than any since the origin of the universe, outputting more than a trillion times the power of a billion Suns. The black holes collide in complete darkness. None of the energy exploding from the collision comes out as light. No telescope will ever see the event. — Janna Levin

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. — Janna Levin

Black holes can bang against space-time as mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song. — Janna Levin

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. — Janna Levin

Forever is a very long time, especially the bit towards the end. — Janna Levin

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. — 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. — Janna Levin

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. — Janna Levin

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. — Janna Levin

Ambiguity is very interesting in writing; it's not very interesting in science. — Janna Levin

From a contradiction you may deduce everything — Janna Levin

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. — Janna Levin

Topology and number theory are my faves. — Janna Levin

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. — Janna Levin

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. — Janna Levin

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

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

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

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. — Janna Levin

The simpler the insight, the more profound the conclusion. — Janna Levin

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. — Janna Levin

Sam Harris fearlessly describes a moral and intellectual emergency precipitated by religious fantasies
misguided beliefs that create suffering, that rationalize violence, that have endangered our nation and our future. His argument for the morality, the honesty, and the humility of atheism is galvanizing. It is a relief that someone has spoken so frankly, with such passion yet such rationality. Now when the subject arises, as it inevitably does, I can simply say: Read Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation. — Janna Levin

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. — Janna Levin