6 Quotes & Sayings By Janna Levin

Janna Levin is an award-winning science writer, bestselling author, and professor at Barnard College. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Scientific American, and other publications. Her nonfiction book about science and science fiction (The Black Hole of Jupiter) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; it was also named one of the ten best science books of 2009 by NPR's All Things Considered. Her follow-up book (The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic) is forthcoming in 2015 on the history of plague in the seventeenth century Read more

1
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
2
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
3
An idea sparked in the 1960s, a thought experiment, an amusing haiku, is now a thing of metal and glass. Janna Levin
4
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. Janna Levin
5
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