 Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to this second communications forum event of the spring 2014 semester. My name is Noel Jackson. I'm an associate professor of literature and with Seth Mnookin, an associate director of the communications forum headed by David Thorburn. I want to call your attention to our third and final forum event of the semester. That's on the topic of online annotation, annotation of texts, movies, music, etc. Online annotation and the future of reading that will feature Win Kelly of the literature section, Kurt Fent, the director of MIT's Digital Humanities Lab, HyperStudio, and Jeremy Dean, the education czar of Rap Genius, the website and social media platform Rap Genius. His title is education czar. And I'll be moderating that discussion. Our moderator today who will be introducing our panelists and facilitating discussion today is Seth Mnookin. Seth is co-director of the communications forum and associate director of MIT's graduate program in science writing. His most recent book is The Panic Virus, the true story behind the vaccine autism controversy. It's my pleasure to welcome Seth and you all to the forum. Thank you so much. I'm going to introduce our two panelists and speaking personally this is incredibly exciting for me because these are two writers I've long admired for different reasons which I'll talk about. So first is our very own Alan Lightman who arrived at MIT in 1989 as the first professor in the history of the institute to have a joint appointment in the sciences and humanities. We were talking earlier about the specialization that occurs in science these days and talking about his scientific accomplishments which include the co-discovery, and correct me if I'm wrong here, of a structural instability in orbiting disks of matter called accretion disks that form around massive condensed objects such as black holes. Yes, he's also done work on gravitation theories and the fact that adding energy to thin hot gases causes their temperature to decrease rather than increase. I've been familiar with Alan's writing since I was in college and Einstein's Dreams came out and I still remember reading that in one night in my junior year of college. If you look at his bibliography it's a little bit overwhelming as a reader so it's hard to think of what it would be like as a writer. Some of his other books are Dance for Two, Book of Essays, The Discoveries, Great Breakthroughs in 20th Century Science, and then two books that we'll be discussing today, Mr. G, which is an account of creation as told by God, and Einstein's Dreams obviously. And his most recent book is The Accidental Universe. Hania Inajihara is a native of Hawaii. I've known Hania since we shared an office over a decade ago in a magazine called Drill's Content. The fact that she's still speaking to me is not because I was well behaved in that office and she should have all of your sympathies for going through that. The book that we're talking about of hers, The People in the Trees, is a book that she had been, unbeknownst to most of her friends, been working on for almost two decades. And over that time she has done a lot of other things. She started out as working in publicity, vintage, and riverhead books, then moved to magazines where I met her as a magazine editor, worked at Drill's Content, was the executive editor of Condé Nast Traveler, and has done a dizzying amount of travel writing reported from Mumbai, Laos, Bangkok, Siem Reap, Bhutan, Vienna. I'm just going to arbitrarily cut that off because there are many more countries. And we're here today talking about the representation of science in fiction. So I'm going to, as we talk about their books, I'm going to tell you a little bit about those books. And I'll start with The People in the Trees. This is a, actually instead of my starting, why don't you tell us what this is about, and your inspiration for writing it. So The People in the Trees is about a scientist in the 1950s, the early 1950s, named Norton Parana, who is a mediocre medical student and travels with an anthropologist, for whom he has a great deal of disdain, to a very tiny island called Ivu-Ivu in the South Pacific. And this island is known or suspected to have a lost tribe. And while they do in fact discover this lost tribe, the Stone Age tribe, what he actually discovers is this terrible secret that the tribe lives forever, basically. But as they live on and on and on, they become commensurably crazier and crazier and crazier, and they start slipping into delirium. When Norton returns back to the states, he starts adopting children from this tribe, and he ends up with about 50 of them. And then at the end of the book, there's this sort of spectacular moral failing that calls into question his accomplishments and makes, I think, I hope the readers wonder where the line is between a great man and a great scientist. And that's one of the things I wanted to discuss. So the characters based on a real life scientist who some of you may know, no other audiences know this, but you guys might, named Carlton Gajusek, who was a doctor who in the 1950s went to Papua New Guinea and spent a great deal of time among a tribe called the Foray. And the Foray had the South Foray. The South Foray had a disease that was besetting them called kuru, which means the shaking in their language, and they would shake and shake and shake, and then they would die. And so what Gajusek did was he discovered that this disease was caused by something called a slow-acting prion, which is a virus that can live in the body for decades before triggering to life, and then it's always fatal. So it's a relative of scrapy and mad cow disease and so on and so forth. And, you know, he returned to Bethesda where he had a lab at NIH and he started adopting these children. And in 1999, it was announced that there was an FBI sting because several of his sons had said that he had raped them. He pled guilty. He went to prison for, I think, 18 months. And when he got out, he moved to Norway where he lived out the rest of his days and he died in 2000. So I hope this isn't jumping the gun too much, but you know, my father was also a doctor at NIH and if you were in pediatrics or immunology or virology or any of those sort of related fields, sort of, you know, from the 80s on, the 70s on, you knew who he was and he was a star. I mean, he changed medical anthropology forever. He changed immunology forever. He changed so many huge parts of science and so I grew up hearing about him and talking about him the way, you know, that other families talk about Beyonce around the dinner table. And he was always present. And from when I was a very young kid, I knew that I would someday write about him. I needed him to die first and he did, agreeably. I know, thank God. But it was always a great subject for me. So the book is structured as his memoir, very heavily annotated by a sycophantic acolyte of his. And you also, I guess, had a connection with someone who could fit that role. Is that right? Yes, one of my relatives worked very closely with Godjosek on Hantavirus. So he spent a great deal of time in New Mexico and they co-authored a lot of papers. So it really was a family love affair with Godjosek, with the scientist. I remember going to my uncle's wedding and he was there with a couple of his adopted children. There were rumored to be cannibals, but the South Foray probably weren't. But I wanted to, you know, he is an unreliable narrator in this book, but I also wanted to riff on the tempest, you know, with the Godjosek character as a Prospero and the sycophantic associate as Ariel, who follows him and follows him and makes apologies for him until he can't any longer. So, and just so we can sort of establish a baseline here. So Alan, Einstein's Dreams is written as a series of dreams that Einstein had in 1905. Why don't you describe it and what you were trying to do there? Well, there's very little evidence that Einstein dreamed himself. And I think he has only two actual recorded dreams that were published in the 50s. That were published by some psychoanalytic journals and some New York psychiatrists immediately jumped on them. The dreams in Einstein's Dreams are all fictional. And in each dream Einstein imagines that time is behaving in a certain way. He's searching for his theory of time, which eventually became the theory of relativity. He's working in a patent office in Bern, Switzerland. All of that is true. And each dream world in which time is imagined in a certain way, for example, in one world time is circular so that all actions are repeated. In another dream world we lose our memory and so we have to carry along with us great heavy books that record all the things that we've done in our lives. These days it would probably be an iPad. And in each dream world I explore the human consequences of time behaved in that particular way. And I was influenced by the Italian writer Attalo Calvino, which I imagine some of you have read, who was a writer of the Fantastic. And he wrote a book called Invisible Cities, which was a fictional book about Marco Polo's travels, who came back and described his travels to Genghis Khan, because Khan wanted to know what his empire was like. And each of the short chapters in that book portrays some fantastic city. And the inhabitants of the city are described and there's something poignant about each community. So I wanted to do in time what Calvino had done in space. And I also wanted to explore the tension between the rational and the intuitive with Einstein representing our rational sides and dreams representing our, I won't quite use the word irrational, but our intuitive sides. And so that tension is young. Meaning that when Einstein, because there is one of these worlds that actually describes his special theory of relativity, but it describes it in a more intuitive way than in a rational way. It describes it in a fanciful way. Right. Yes. And I should mention that the dreams are staged within a setting in 1905 when Einstein is working in the Swiss Patent Office and he's not dreaming the whole time. They're waking interludes. Right. And which he talks to people, talks to his friends, goes fishing with his friends, interacts with the secretary in the office. But the waking interludes occupy a small part of his total mental life. But it's interesting. The waking interludes describe his interactions with Michel Bessot. Is it Michel? Yeah. Who was actually Einstein's confidant and his sounding board, essentially, for a lot of his theories. You describe the physical location where he was with a fair amount of detail. And I was curious about the interplay between a factual description of some of what was going on. And then these really very intense evocative imaginative flights of fancy. Did that ever feel like there was a tension there? Well, I wanted to ground the book. The purpose of the interludes is to give the book a narrative structure. For all dream worlds, then you could interchange any three pages of the book for any other three pages. Right. And it would read the same. And so to give the... Only in one of those worlds, right? Where everything repeats. I think that was April, let's see. My favorite was May 11th, where the passage of time brings increasing order because you'd wake up and your desk would be messy and it would sort itself out and your calendar would work itself out. And that seemed absolutely brilliant to me, alas. And so those... The interludes giving it narrative structure because the relativity dream appears... I'm not sure if it's the exact center, but around the center of the book. Well, the joke there is that unless you're a physicist, the relativity dream is just as outlandish and fanciful as any of the other dream worlds. Because the actual theory of special relativity is pretty bizarre, even though it's been confirmed by experiment. So the theory of relativity... I'm not sure what the one sentence way to describe it would be, but essentially that you experience time differently according to how fast you're moving. But really, that's applicable when you're traveling at speeds at or near the speed of light, not if you're going 60 or 70 miles an hour. But in this dream world, when people become aware of this, everyone tries to move as fast as possible all the time. They put their houses on motors. A man or woman suddenly thrust into this world would have to dodge houses and buildings for all is in motion. And it is... I did... When I read it, I immediately recognized it and then also wondered if recognizing or not recognizing it would have any effect on how people read the book. You mean you recognize it as being a true description? I expected that most readers would not recognize it. And it didn't matter to me whether it was recognized or not. For the small number of readers who actually know the theory of relativity, it would be an extra little comic bit in the book, but otherwise... I enjoyed it and I didn't know it. Hanya, so you come from the humanities. You didn't study science. Such damning words now. Yeah, I'm sad but true. And yet your book is incredibly rich with not only scientific details, but a couple of things that I found to be very true to my own experience was the description of life in labs, which comes up a couple of times. And then there were all of these little touches. There's almost an aside at one point where you're talking about telomeres and you do that in a way that makes it very clear that you understand what you're talking about. Even though it has no effect on the reader or on the overall book. And did you feel some responsibility to accurately represent the science in this? Well, you know, it's much the way that this book is an homage to this sort of towering figure of my childhood. It's also an homage to the scenes of my childhood. You know, my father was a research physician for many years for some memorial stone catering and then he did mouse oncology at NIH. And so I remember some of my earliest memories are going to the mouse labs and to the dog labs and to the monkey labs at NIH and being allowed to wander around and look at the animals. You couldn't touch them, of course. But much in the way that the island that Perina visits and occupies sort of the middle half of the book is its own complete strange society with its own bylaws and its own types of personalities. So too is the life of a lab, its own strange culture that very few outsiders get to see. You know, and I remember just hearing stories about, you know, you have your own set of uniforms and decorations, you know, with the white coats and you have your own accessories. You know, the people on the island have their spears and, you know, a research scientist has his, you know, beakers and test tubes. And so I grew up very much in this environment where the flotsam of the lab was part of our regular life. You know, we had Bunsen beakers instead of, you know, wine jugs and that's how, you know, we had milk. And I remember when my parents used to heat pasta for us, they would do so in these Erlenmeyer flasks sometimes. You know, and so it was always around and the lab was really... Everyone's parents did that, right? Everyone's parents does that, yeah. But it was really a place of fun and I remember going there and my father always told me that there was one person in the lab and I don't know if this is still true, who's kind of an alcoholic and always is like making moonshine, you know, on the Bunsen burners. And so, you know, there was always someone there and he would bring home the hooch. So I wanted to sort of do a tip of the hat to this place where I had many happy childhood memories, kind of, you know, running up and down the halls of NIH and seeing all the animals that I didn't know were doomed at the time. But one of the most fun parts was researching. There's two sections in the lab. The first is set in the very late 40s before Parano goes to the island and the second is set at a mythical lab at Stanford after he comes back. And so I talked to my father about how a lab would have functioned specifically right after the years, right after the war. And one of the things I found most interesting is he was saying that back in those years, the sort of, you know, I think nowadays we kind of think people who work in labs, they're brilliant, they're sort of allowed to be social outcasts and he was saying that really wasn't the case in the late 40s. It was, you know, well brought up young men who, even though they might have been spectacularly bright, geniuses even, still had to play by the laws and this was true for Richard Feynman, it was true of Watson and Crick. You still had to put on your suit and tie, look presentable, make small talk and go to the lab. And so I really wanted to create a very specific world, the world of the late 40s post-op in Heimerwin. Science really changed. And yet you had people who kind of came from an older tradition of science and that sort of push and pull and Parano represents sort of a rebel within this world. He doesn't want to be in the lab. He doesn't just want to be doing what other people tell him to do. And labs are very closed, insular places. I mean, they're very territorial. They're very hostile to outsiders. And they, their very existence relies upon a certain interiority of logic and bylaws and that's also what I wanted to go out. So in a book where you really brilliantly create a whole series of islands, I'm sure there were a number of readers who at the end were convinced that this was a real set of islands. You describe the flora and the fauna with intense, very rich detail. You also use that type of detail in the labs. And I love, one of the footnotes here was, and part of the reason I loved it was because it sort of reached back, I think, unconsciously to 1905 is when you describe Parano's paper coming out in 1953, the same year as Watson and Crick's paper on DNA and how that was referred to as the Year of Miracles, which actually was, I think, the term that was used in 1905. It was actually, yeah, it was. And it was used again in 1953 about Watson and Crick. Right, only in nature, I think. Yeah, that counts though. But in what is clearly an entirely fictional world, why did you feel this compulsion to ground that part of the book in reality to faithfully and accurately represent the life of science and these sort of details? I mean, I think that even though most of us, or many of us sadly in this country, know very little about science and its practical applications, much less the figures who populated, it affects us tremendously in ways we don't know. I mean, one of the things I was interested in, this isn't exactly answering your question, was around the 1950s, science really became politicized. Again, it was after the bomb. It was when the fight for funding became that much more intense. It was when things became, although they always had, that much more territorial. It's when, I think, the sort of great divide between the people who practice science and the rest of us, the lay people of this country, sort of got deeper and wider. And I also wanted to sort of really document that moment, because the 1950s were a very strange period, not just for science, but for the arts and for literature as well. Okay, this is really going off point. But I often thought that in the 1950s, there was this brief span of years, maybe like let's say 51 through 54, in which kind of a very small... When I read this, I did feel like for several months, your strenuous efforts to get me to write a book about the art world in the 1950s all of a sudden made much more sense. Well, because I always thought that in this very small radius, you had the abstract expressionists in New York and the Beats and then the scientists in Cold Springs. And in a very small radius, all three of those fields were being completely remade and radicalized. And so I really did want to not only get the sciences right as I could, but also to sort of chart how science was changing, how it was splitting, I think, from mainstream culture and how it was... How technology had enabled it to move much faster than it ever had before. I mean, Norton is working in a time before virology was really a specialty. He was working in a time before there was genetic sequencing. And yet all of that was in the near future and so much was getting accomplished in terms of discoveries between sort of the late 40s and the early 60s in that decade. Can I just add a comment to your question about why Hanya would mention Watson and Crick and DNA and so on? I think that in a novel, you're creating a fictional world but you want your reader to believe that word. Right. And the more they believe it, the more affected they are emotionally. Right. If you can't relate to a character, if you can't relate to a place, then you don't incorporate that into your bloodstream. And so I think that by referring to real events that were happening in the 1950s, that Hanya makes the reader feel that the whole novel, the whole narrative is something that the reader should believe in as fantastic as it is. By that same, I completely agree with you. And in fact, it's one of the reasons that I found the degree of accuracy in describing the attitudes and approaches of science to be so interesting because I think she could have done that or one can do that in a way and maybe this is a good way to sort of open this up to one of the larger questions that we were talking about. One could do that in a way that is believable and emotionally resident and not accurate. Well, that gets back to your, an earlier thing you said, you were talking about Hanya's description of the telomeres which was scientifically accurate. And I think that you either asked the question or implied the question, was it necessary for her to give an accurate description of that bit of science since most telomeres have to do with the aging of cells? That's all that anybody needs to know about for this discussion. 99% of the readers would never have heard of the telomere. You know, maybe the same fraction of readers who read the Tuesday Science Times would have heard of it, but otherwise most readers would not have heard it. So why is it important that she give an accurate description? And what I think is that readers have a sixth sense about the accuracy of factual material that they're reading. Even if they don't understand it, I think that if Hanya had made up something totally fictitious about the telomeres, you know, maybe they turned blue at the end of their life and sort of snip off a little bit, that I think that readers can tell, they can sniff it out when it's not real. And then that has the same effect of not having accurate historical markers that it takes you out of the fiction. You lose your credibility. Although by that I must not have a good sniff detector because one of the journals that Norton published was the Annals of Nutritional Epidemiology and I thought, yeah, that could be real and that is not real. But that's different than making up, you know, we know that the islands are made up and we know the name of the tribes are made up. But when it comes to a piece of science, that I think we do, and this holds for any technical subject, it could be the law, it could be anything where there's a technical factual background. I think readers can sniff out whether it's accurate and I think part of that sniffing comes from the tone of the writer, that if the writer has done enough research, and I'm talking about the fiction writer now, when the fiction writer has done enough research to really understand the material, there's a certain authority of tone that comes out in the writing that even the writer may not be aware of that will convince the reader that they've got it right and that this is something they should believe in by extension believe in the whole fictional world. And so that gets to why it would be in an author's self-interest to understand what they're writing about and describe it accurately. And this is something I'm curious to hear from both of you about. Is there outside of that self-interest, does someone writing fiction have any obligation to present aspects of their fictional world as they actually occur in real life? And specifically here about science, the three of us were talking earlier about scientific literacy, and one way we form impressions about the world is through art and films and books and literature. Is there any obligation on the part of authors and filmmakers and musicians to present the... Someone's disagreeing? To present those details accurately? Alan? I think there's no obligation whatsoever. I think if you're creating art, you have no obligations to anything. You want the reader to have a powerful emotional experience, and in any way that you can achieve that is okay. Now, if you're writing a piece of fiction about an historical character, let's say you wrote about the actual person, or I wrote about Einstein. Or Edmund Morris wrote about Mal Dreegan. And you're writing fiction. You have to take into account that there is a large body of knowledge about that person, and your readers will know that, and it's going to set up in a buzz in their head, and you're going to have to deal with that buzz. So if you write something that's patently untrue and clashes with the knowledge that the reader has in their head, then you're going to have to deal with that. And it may or may not impede your ability to have your reader accept this world that you're creating and be impacted by it. But other than that, I really don't think that an artist has an obligation to go by the facts. I don't know how other people feel about that. Well, Hanya, when you were putting this together, did the extent that you did ground this in facts and in details that were accurate descriptions of various realities, did you think that that was going to accomplish what Alan was talking about, that that was going to help give the readers a sense of veracity and sort of ground them in your work? Well, it's less that and I think less a question of obligation and more a question of, you know, when you read any novel or you see any work of fiction, whether it's a movie or even if it's a graphic novel or it takes a certain amount of suspension, you're buying into the life of this object. And, you know, if there's nothing to hold on to, the emotional stakes get lower. When you're working within the strictures of reality, even if it's a little bit of reality and, you know, there's some things here that are more probable than others, but I did want to keep the basic grounding of science as real as I could because if everything becomes, and this is the rap fairly or not on a lot of fantasy books and science fiction books, in a universe, a constructed universe in which everything is invented, it begins to feel more and more remote, you know, the emotion, the characters' emotions feel remote, the stakes feel lower because you think as a person you can't help but think that could never happen and it's too easy to dismiss. If you have a fictional book in which some things are, you can imagine it happening to you and all of us as readers. You're not a big science fiction fan, I'm guessing. I think it can be done very well, but I think it often gets very self-indulgent. You know, I think it often forgets the reader, and I have to be careful in this book as well because this is science fiction in ways as well. You start forgetting the reader and the reader's emotional response and you start kind of getting orgiastic with how much you can invent and it's really fun as a writer to do, but if you can't give the reader something to hold on to and relate to, you start losing the sort of emotional resonance, the, you know, the potential emotional resonance. When you're asking a reader, inviting a reader into a world that's partly real, that they can imagine happening to them, you know, that they can imagine living within, that they can see glints of truth in there every day in, then what happens to your characters and how that reality gets perverted in some cases becomes much more, it just, it makes a much greater impact, I think. I think of Franz Kafka's book Metamorphosis. Right. You know, where a guy wakes up and he's a bug. Well, you can't get any wilder than that, but everything in that book, besides that one thing, right, accords with our experience with the world. The characters are believable. The situation, you know, given that this is a cockroach. Yeah. But the surroundings, if he had just invented everything, then it would have been what Hanya said. Right. You know, where he lies, you know, beating his legs in the air is a scene of, you know, bourgeois, domestic, you know, you know, tranquillity. So he's got this society. Yeah. Correct. Right. Around the bug. Right. Yeah. Right. One thing that Hanya, I know you've been thinking about is the, I guess for lack of a better word, the scientific illiteracy that you see in the humanities a lot. Yeah. I mean, we were talking about this before, and Alan has some interesting thoughts on this that really kind of made me rethink it. But, you know, one of the things I did think about when writing this book, you know, I went to a very liberal liberal arts school, and it, I emerged. What's a very liberal? Well, there's no core. I mean, there's no core. So you didn't, you know, here at MIT, you don't have to take certain courses in the humanities. If you go to RISD even, you have to take certain English courses, history courses, and so on and so forth. But there are a lot of small colleges now, liberal arts colleges, where you don't have to take anything. And in fact, the last math or science course I took was, I was probably 16. And, you know, my father always says that, you know, I'm scientifically literate, and I have, you know, cultural gaps wide enough to drive an 18-wheeler through. And that's really true. I mean, you have sort of, I think- That's true of your father also. No. He doesn't think so. Well, he doesn't think so. Right. But I do think that one of the things that really struck me when I was writing this book is that, you know, a scientist today has, you know, two languages. They speak the language of the vernacular, you know. I mean, whatever society they happen to be living in and whatever language they happen to speak to their, you know, day-to-day, in their day-to-day life. And then they have the language of science, which is very, very different, you know. It's Latinate in lots of senses. It has its own, you know, it has its own vocabulary that, you know, that most of us wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of, certainly not me. And, you know, one of the things I was talking to Alan and to Seth about was, you know, 100 years ago this probably wouldn't have been the case. If you're a well-educated young man and you're probably a man, you know, you had basic grounding and botany, you know, in classics, in Greek and Latin, you know, in kind of a wide sort of what has been now changed by the liberal- by the contemporary liberal arts system. So I was really, writing this made me feel incredibly inadequate, which is a great thing to feel, actually, when you're writing a novel, because it really made me realize that there was a completely other, not just set of language that I had at my disposal, but a different way of thinking that, and that was the most interesting thing to do, was to try to think how would a scientist think and the way a scientist thinks is very different from how an artist thinks or how, you know, someone who isn't in the sciences at all thinks. And Alan, I'm curious about what you think about that idea of there being two languages. And it sounds like, Kanya, you're almost saying that the language that scientists speak to each other is incompatible with the vernacular of their society. I think so. I mean, I don't think the LA person would understand past a couple of sentences. So Alan, I'm curious as to your thoughts about that, because I think one of the things we try to do in the graduate program in science writing is prove on you wrong and show that you can translate the language of science into the vernacular in a way that is resonant and accurate and informative. Well, I do think that you can translate the language. But I think in terms of this split between the scientists types and the humanists and artist types, that I think that what's most important when trying to understand the other community is not the vocabulary, because I think that's sort of a trivial superficial level. I think it's learning how to think the way the other community thinks. And Kanya mentioned that one of the pleasures of writing the book was to learn how scientists think. And I believe that the world, a lot of this separation of the sciences and the humanities has been caused by the specialization of the world we live in. In the sciences or just in general? In general. In general. And that specialization has had a lot of good consequences. It's allowed us to go very deeply in certain fields. But what it has lost is the ability to think in different ways. And in our educational system, I believe what's most important for students is not to learn all the terms in botany or geology or so on, but to learn how scientists think. And the flips out of that at a place like MIT, which is technically oriented, although we have very good humanities, is to learn how humanists think about the world. And just to give one very, very simple example of what I mean. In the sciences, we are generally taught to think about problems and formulate problems in terms of questions with answers. That at any given moment in time, a scientist is working on a problem that he or she feels has an answer to it. It might take five years, it might take ten years, it might take a lifetime, but you believe that there is an answer to the problem and there's actually a name for it. It's called the well-posed problem. And most scientists in graduate school are taught about the well-posed problem. In the humanities and arts, there frequently aren't answers to the questions. In fact, it's frequently the case that the question is more interesting than the answer. And frequently the answer doesn't exist at all. The answer is almost beside the point. The answer is beside the point. If you ask a question like what is the nature of God or would we be happier if we lived to be a thousand years old? Those are extremely interesting questions that don't have definite answers, but yet they stimulate us, they provoke our imagination, they're very enriching. And so this is just one small example of the difference in the ways that scientists and artists would approach the world. And is that kind of difference that should be conveyed in education? It's interesting. In some ways, all 30 different dreams in here are posing questions without clear answers. I guess with the exception of possibly one of them. And I was struck by how many times in here the result of a world where time is circular or people's lives exist in a day or is either ecstatic or beyond despondent, or both as you move through the dream. Was that a conscious effort to sort of not put well-posed problems in here? Yes. Can I ask you a question? So Alan, I wanted to know because you are on both sides of both worlds. Can you train someone who's fundamentally a humanist or has been raised as a humanist to think like a scientist and vice versa, that's part one. And part two, when you're teaching writing to people who are fundamentally scientifically minded, do they approach it differently? Well, I think that you can teach people how to think in two different ways. That's the answer to the first question. And the writing students that I've had in MIT have, I think, exhibited their MIT-ness. And MIT students are very original and they're irreverent. And that irreverence goes along with their originality. And it's a lovely quality. And so those are the particular joys and challenges that I've had teaching MIT students creative writing. I was teaching a fiction writing course some years ago at MIT. And we were talking about creating tension in a story. And I said that often the place or the circumstances that raise the tension of the story. And I said, for example, it would be very, very hard to write a short story that was set at a bowling alley. And so the very next assignment, a student turned in this wonderful story that was set at a bowling alley. It was just a fabulous story. And I was so pleased to see this. You know, the other lesson is never believe the teacher says. Are you fundamentally drawn more to one way of one type of person than the other? I don't think so. I remember when I was here, two of my very good high school friends went to MIT. So I spent a lot of time on the campus when I was in college. And they were all interviewing. They're all course six majors. They're all EE students. And it was senior year. It was graduation time. They're all going on to interviews. And I asked them what kind of questions do you get asked? And you know, when you're going up for a job in publishing, they ask you questions like, you know, like what's your favorite Wharton book? So they asked them, apparently one of the questions was they had a lot of math problems. They had a lot of word problems. And one of them was, why are manhole covers round? And I just, you know, I had no idea. And my friend's like, come on. It's so easy. It's so logical. I thought, I said, well, long ago, Mammoths roamed the earth. And they left these sort of impressions. No, so they won't fall down the hole. So the covers won't fall down the hole. Yeah. Right, right. But you know, but it's such a different way of thinking that when I can be exposed to that, it feels like a revelation. It feels like you're getting to unlock a key to some other vast part of the universe that you don't naturally see. Hania, I'm going to give you, I think, a not well posed problem or question. And that's, I'm curious about whether you think science is a moral endeavor. Because there were a couple of moments, there were several moments where Norton seemed very acutely to be aware of the impact that he was having on this society. Right. And a couple of times when it seemed that he felt horrible about that. Right. And then other times when he said, it's not my fault. I was just doing what any scientist would do. You know, you have to follow wherever the question leads you. Right. And so I'm curious about your thoughts on that. Well, I don't think that, I think that the difference between a research scientist and a clinician are vast. You know, if a research scientist is more of a philosopher, I think a clinician is more of a priest. You know, by which I mean, so I saw my own father go from being a research scientist to being someone who worked with patients. And the change was quite great. And he started off, when he was a research scientist, he was only interested in the virus. The sickness was what interested him the most. You know, it was, he had awe, as Norton does, for how, I mean, when doctors talk about a beautiful virus, you know what that means. It's beautiful in its construction. It's beautiful in how quickly it can demolish a being. It's, they talk about it. They're tremendously valid. Yeah, they talk about it with a sort of reverence. When you become a doctor, you can't think like that. You know, the person, you're obligated by your oath and by, you know, by your position to take care of the patient in front of you. You can't go around fetishizing the virus that's ruining someone. So I do, so I do, but I think, I guess I was saying, research scientists, I don't think should, and by and large, do, trouble themselves with questions of morality. That's for bioethicists. But should, should research scientists think through the possible consequences of their research? I think they have to. And, you know, what's interesting now is, you know, now we're at a stage technologically where we can do almost anything, and it's only the imposition of, well, a lot of things, like pluripotency, you know, which is something that I'm really interested in, which, you know, I mean, not to be incredibly reductive, but it just means that you can grow something, you know, not out of a stem cell, but you can manipulate a cell to regenerate itself and to basically Benjamin Button itself. So when in an age when more technology is available to enable us to do more things than ever before in the history of mankind, it's the imposition of ethics, you know, as a society and hopefully one can separate it from the cause of religion that slows science down. And, you know, maybe that's a necessary thing. When science is outpacing the sort of ethics and morals that we've invented for ourselves as a society, I think it's sometimes not a bad thing. And if scientists won't monitor themselves, then someone monitors it for them. And, you know, to think of science, something devoid from politics is obviously a fiction. I mean, when you look at things like Tuskegee, I mean, and some of the other kind of great, shameful, you know, medical experiments that have gone awry in the last 40 or 50 years, you know, you see that, that it's, to talk about it as something that's removed from, you know, from racial and cultural politics is, I think, a fiction. Does that answer your question or no? No. But that's okay. Yeah, that's all right. Alan, one thing I wanted to make sure I asked you about is the Uncited Streams ends, not with one of these dreams, but with an epilogue, that I think takes place maybe a day before the theory of revatility was actually published. Is that right? Or two days before? Well, what was the date of it? Well, the last dream was June 29th. I think it was June 30th. Or was it July 30th? Let me see, hang on. Yeah, I think it was July. It might have been, yeah. If you think it was July, I'm going to go with you. But, so, and the epilogue is Einstein giving this manuscript to his secretary. She's going to type it up. And he is, it almost seems despondent at the end. So he had a well-posed problem that he answered successfully. Revolutionized not only physics, but really how we think about the world. And the last couple of lines are he feels empty. He has no interest in reviewing patents or talking to Besso or thinking of physics. He feels empty and he stares without interest at the tiny black speck and the alps. And I was curious what you were trying to say there. Well, I think it's always a dangerous business when a writer interprets their work. Looking at the character, I believe that he felt empty because he had just gone through this incredible creative thrashing around. And then he was spent in a sort of like the way you feel after a wild love-making session. You are spent. But satiated. I mean, no, I'm not. Speak for yourself. That assumes a lot. But you've emptied out everything that was in you. Right. You miss it. It's no longer happening. You know, it's true that there's a celebration when you achieve some accomplishment. But a moment afterwards, you realize that it's past. Right. And then you have to deal with the rest of your life. He did okay. He didn't know that back then, though. He did okay with the rest of his life. I think it's the feeling of being spent. Did you feel that way in your own scientific work? Yeah, I think that... Well, I mean, you hope that your batteries will be recharged after a certain period of time. And I'm sure that you hope that you write another novel. Okay. Thanks. All right. We'll end the one after that. No more. But of course, you hope that you'll have another creative period that you'll be inspired again. But at the moment, you're just feeling exhausted, spent, depleted. And that's what I was trying to describe there. Is that, in your own life, is that feeling similar when you finish a book and when you finish working on a problem? Yeah. All right. Well, I mean, it happens to Parana, too, when he comes back. I mean, I think research scientists... There's a great... I mean, he describes as trying to adopt all these kids as, you know, he's looking for something to complete him. Right. But also, you know... I'm gonna interrupt you for a second. Thanks. One of my favorite descriptions is when he describes is just because it captures him in a way that is so acute and powerful. He describes his collecting of children as a tick. Right. Which I both kind of got to his lack of humanity and what he was trying to do there. But I was going to say, I mean, I think that research scientists in particular can dedicate a lifetime to a certain problem. When you saw... And in this case, you know, he's an adventurer. I mean, he's an intellectual and medical adventurer. And there is an incredible letdown when you solve a problem, especially when it's all consuming as this problem was for him. I might not be able to... Okay. Yeah, here it is. So, what does he say? So, shall I tell you... This is Norton speaking. You can... Do you want to read it? No, that's all right. Okay. Shall I tell you how I always looked for those two boys? And he's talking here about boys that he saw decades earlier on the island. Right. And he's now an older man. Now men, now undoubtedly with boys of their own who were lost to me. The one from Aina. Aina? Yeah. And the one who would lean against me and doze and how I searched and hoped for something of them and every child I collected. How I wanted to see the same steadiness in their eyes. Shall I tell you how with each new child I acquired, I would irrationally think this is the one, this is the one who will make me happy. This is the one who will complete my life. This is the one who will be able to repay me for years of looking. That last line, this is the one who will be able to repay me for years of looking. Was that referring to his looking for these two boys that he had seen decades earlier, or his years of looking for this truth about the islands? I imagine it as looking for the two boys that he lost contact with. And one of the great things about creating this character was he's very stunted in obvious ways. I didn't want to put a label on it or attribute it to pathology. But the way he thinks is often convenient for his own ends. But I also, in this, there's sort of a guileless cluelessness there that's kind of heartbreaking. So even as he does end up doing terrible things, I think he does them out of a genuine, sort of naivete, but a complete lack of knowledge of what it is to be a human. And it's in statements like this that I think he betrays that. So it's not, right, you don't see him as a psychopath. No. All right, we're about halfway through. I could go on talking to them for a long time about this, but why don't we open it up to questions from all of you? Don't be shy. There are two microphones. I'll keep going. How long does this go for? I think we have the room for eight hours. It goes until a little bit after seven. Okay. Yeah, come up to the mic. If you could, just because we're recording it, introduce yourself. They love you. Can you hear me? Yes. My name is Angela Herring. I'm actually a science writer at Northeastern University, and a lot of what I do is about getting things accurate and portraying them correctly. And when thinking about writing fiction about science, especially in one project that I'm thinking about, where I have to create, so it's a character that would, like in this fictional world, have won a Nobel. That requires some pretty significant science, but I'm struggling with whether it can't be real science because this person didn't exist, and I can't step on the toes of what really did happen. So I'm just, it's a technical question, I guess, how do you deal with things like that? Well, Hania, I mean, you actually got with that exact situation, right? Right, because, you know, because Norton is meant to be a Nobel winner. As Gajusek was. As Gajusek was, yeah. So I wish I actually had put in more science. It just structurally didn't quite work. I think that there's a couple of different ways, from purely technical perspective as a writer, that you can go. I mean, I think you can do it without any science at all. I mean, I think that it's still as a resonant, I think there are other ways besides the props of a lab or an experiment or so on that you can convey, as Alan was saying, through a mode of thinking, you can convey that someone is a scientist and that they do think in a very different way. So I don't think you actually need, if this is answering your question, to necessarily have it be peopled with, you know, figures of science or so on and so forth, although I think that makes Richard more interesting read than having someone who's purely in his or her head. One of the things I really did want to do with this, and it just didn't work out for various reasons, because you showed the Nobel ceremony, and I knew someone whose father had won and so I actually had a lot of background on it and that I thought kind of would have been a great scene, but in the end it was sort of self-indulgence so I cut it out. There's a lot of things you can do with science in a novel and the bigger question I think is deciding what to leave out because it just becomes too much. I think that what you should do if you want some plausible scientific discovery, but a fictitious one, is first of all, decide what field of science you want your protagonist to be. Let's just say chemistry. Okay. Well then, you're at MIT, so go talk to some chemists, some professional chemists, and ask them what are people studying at the forefronts of their field? Where is the forefront of the field? And learn, talk to them enough so that you get some intuitive idea about where the forefronts are. And then you can just ask one of these people what would be a plausible important discovery that is not going to happen before my book is published. Right. Or you could take a moment that was, you know, one of the characters of science I'm interested in is Rosalind Franklin, who worked on the DNA, mapping the double-holictical nature of DNA with Watson and Crick, and kind of got left behind by the tides of history. I mean, the other thing you could do is visit a very iconic discovery and sort of think, well, what if it veered off? What's the untold story kind of behind the story we know? You know, what's the sort of the footnote to that discovery? And could there be something in there? And so do you think there's a history of the actual science? I mean, I think there's a lot of false starts and stops and red herrings in any major discovery. You know, I mean, there's people who are just this close and didn't quite publish in time, or they didn't quite make it in time, where they were, you know, a couple of ticks off. Were you ever talking about an alternative history? Or like kind of someone who nearly made it but didn't quite make it to the finish line because it was flawed. Are you thinking about what if the Nazis won World War II? No, I'm thinking about more about someone like who was a minor character in a big discovery. And so fictionalize their account right, right, right, right. Mary Fuller from Literature. So I was really interested by what you were saying, Alan, about the way that the different ways in which scientists and humanists think. And of course, you're very well positioned to sort of speak authoritatively about that. And so I started immediately writing it down, you know, that scientists tend to think or train to think in terms of questions that have answers and that such questions are well posed and that humanists tend to think in terms of questions that don't really have answers and that good questions, interesting questions are valid in themselves and worth asking. And I was, just as I was sort of resonating with that a lot and also thinking about, well, I'll get to that in a minute, then I started thinking, well, wait a minute, is that actually how I think as a humanist? Right, and I'm not sure that it is how I think. Right, and you can start with a question like, you know, what is God like? And that's a very big question, and so it's unanswerable. You know, I can't write an article about it. I'm not sure I can have a conversation about it very readily. That question has to be tamed, right, so that you can, it has to be reduced to a form that you can talk about. You know, when I write a research paper I'm thinking about, sometimes I'm thinking about, well, I have this evidence, what question does it answer? But sometimes I'm thinking about, I have this big question, what part of it can I answer with the evidence that I have? Right, and so I think that we do to some extent, at least some humanists are thinking in terms of forming questions so that they're answerable. Right, and so I wonder if there are other ways of characterizing the difference, you know? And I think also that scientists, it's my sense anyway, that scientists are working with at least some questions in mind that are too big to be answerable yet. Like, where did the universe come from? You know, I think that's kind of what Alan Gooth has been working on, but you know, we haven't gotten to the, quite to the answer of that question, right, we've gotten to sort of questions that are part of that. And so, you know, I guess I want to push that whole thing a little bit further. And the other thing that I wanted to say is that some of, to me, one of the most exciting things about being at MIT is getting to have those conversations with people, not just in my discipline, but between disciplines and between schools and between those big sort of camps of humanists and scientists. I've taught with scientists and had great, how do we create more of those opportunities? You know, I had a freshman advising seminar where somebody in physics came in and explained the science behind the most recent Nobel in physics in terms that were comprehensible to students that had taken 801, and to me. Right, and that was fantastic. Sometimes there are the Killian, you know, lectures that can be pitched at a level where you kind of get it. Sometimes not. Sometimes you see the senior administration sitting in the front row and going like, I don't know what that was about, kind of. And so it's both a question of occasions when science gets communicated to non, non sort of people not in that specific discipline in ways that they can engage with, and also just sort of occasions on this campus. How do we create occasions for more of those conversations? Okay, well let me answer the address, the first thing you said. I think that the second set of issues of how can we have more forms for communication, I think that everybody, Seth and other people can speak to that. Alan Goothe and other cosmologists are not trying to solve the big question, where did the universe come from, or what is the universe? What we do is we break big problems into smaller problems that are well-posed problems and have definite answers. When Alan Goothe discovered the inflationary universe theory, he was working on a very well-defined, specific problem. How many magnetic units called monopoles were produced by grand unified theories, which are particular kinds of theories that combine all the forces? It was a very specific problem with a well-defined answer, and it was out of that that the inflationary universe model came from, and that's the way we work in science. We take large problems and we break them into smaller problems until we come to problems that have been sufficiently reduced that we believe there's a well-defined answer We don't know exactly where that's going to lead, but we know there's a well-defined answer to that problem. Now, looking at the humanities, and you mentioned that you have evidence and you want to find what kinds of questions that evidence is related to, and you mentioned the nature of God. What is the nature of God? So let's just stick with that as an example, which I think everybody would agree is a question that probably lies in the humanities, philosophy, theology, and so on. For me, the most powerful study of the nature of God is the work that William James did, the great Harvard philosopher and psychologist, which I think is called the Varieties of Religious Experience, and I think everyone would agree that William James was a humanist, and what he did in that study is he, I'm sure that some of you are familiar with it, that he talked to a lot of different people about their transcendent experiences, highly personal experiences in which they felt connected to God, and of course he had other historical stuff on religions and so on, kind of mundane material, but the most original and powerful material in that book is the recorded experiences that people have, almost acting like an anthropologist, of articulating the transcendent experiences they had. Now, that is evidence of a certain kind. To me, that's evidence that a humanist would do something with. It doesn't answer the question, what is God, or what is the nature of God, but what it does is it partly helps us understand what is the human experience of God, and it's related to the big question, but it's not related in the same way as if I say, how many seconds does it take a ball to fall to the ground, hit the floor if I drop it from the height of three meters? You don't get an answer, 1.8 seconds, you don't get an answer like that. So I think that that is the difference, that you don't have these quantifiable, science has these questions that can be quantified, that can be studied, that can be answered outside of the human body, where the methodology and the reproducibility and the instruments that are used for the measurements occur outside of the human body. I think that ultimately, and I think you're much more of a card-carrying humanist than I am, that everything in the humanities and the arts is rooted within the human body and the human mind. And so when you find evidence in the humanities or when you apply findings to interesting questions in the humanities, you are in part, maybe in large part, talking about the personal experience with the world. It's a huge field. I wonder also if one of the distinctions is that in science, you're looking for answers that are reproducible regardless of who's asking the question at a given time. There's no reliance on the asker. And in the humanities, that's not always true. I would agree with you that that can be true sometimes, that there are questions in the humanities. And I think that that was one of the things you were saying, that there are questions in the humanities that you can ask where there is a right and wrong answer. But there are also interpretive questions that only exist in the province of the humanities and don't exist in the province of science where there can be many correct interpretations and interpretations that are built on evidence or maybe not many correct interpretations, but many equally valid ways to view a particular problem. I also think for artists in particular, whether you're a visual artist or a filmmaker, I don't want to make a distinction. That was something that Mary was talking about, a distinction between artists and the humanities. But I'm just going to talk about artists. That was one of the things, when you started talking, I began thinking that maybe the distinction was more between science and art and science and humanities. But I don't think it necessarily is. Well, no, it was going to say, I mean, fundamentally the business of art, if it can be called a business, is about humans. And it's the same maybe dozen questions that have been asked since time began. What is love? Is there God? Why does the world exist? Why am I alive? Who is Taylor Swift? Who is that? Exactly. But the same dozen or so questions in every culture and every society, each of them answers them their own way and then the answers get ridden over. I mean, it's the palimpsus and it keeps rewriting itself again and again and again. And that is the wonderful part of art and it's what makes it eternal. And also, it's a question for which there will never be an answer. David, yeah, just come up to the mic. I got the next. I'm not sure we flatter the humanities in this discussion, but I won't pursue it further except to suggest that there's a classic way of thinking about the humanities as interpretive disciplines to distinguish them from the empirical disciplines of the sciences. And there are, of course, problems of overlap and shared behavior. But there are such complex issues involved in that large question that I'll back away from it and live with what's already been said with the proviso that it's something we should explore much more deeply to be fully serious about. The humanities deserves, I think, a bit more complex account of the kinds of truths it offers. But I wanted to ask both Alan and Hanya an easier question, although one that fascinates me. I'd like you to talk a little bit about other books that incorporate scientific materials that you admire, that you think highly of, or even ones that you think ill of that are particularly negative examples that might also illuminate your sense of when science in fiction really is compelling and really works. That's a great question. Yeah, it's a good one. I want to ask you that, too. That's a nice way of passing it back. Thanks. Thank you. I mean, I'm happy to go first, but... Well, I think some other writers who do very well with putting science and fiction. Richard Powers is one. Rebecca Goldstein, who was going to be here. I could... Do you want to name... There's not a lot of that. I mean, frankly... Allegra Goodman's... I was going to mention Allegra Goodman. was more with the culture of science, but I thought I dealt with that incredibly well. I was going to say Margaret Atwood, apparently. You know, she takes kind of the germ of the real and the near future, and sort of goes nuts within that framework. And it's a really colorful result, and I think she does a really nice job with it, actually. And it's clearly researched it. Andrea Barrett is somebody else. But there aren't a lot of people who are doing this. I mean, we're distinguishing science and fiction from science fiction here. Right, yeah, right. Although you could... I mean, the answer could include science fiction also. But it doesn't need to not include science fiction. Well... In fact, maybe you could address how slippery that distinction is, because I was looking at science fiction anyway. Right. Even though it's also a magnificent dance of college. Yeah, I mean, that's a... I mean, the distinction I would make about science fiction versus fiction, and I think the line is very blurry and it bleeds a lot, I think science fiction books or what we call the genre of science fiction are more interested in the creation of the world, whereas fiction books about science are interested in people. That's what I would think. I mean, they're interested in the philosophy of why people act the way they do versus fantasy books of science fiction. I'm not sure I would agree with... Do you read a lot of science fiction? I have, you know, and that's why the line is so blurry and some people do it better than others. But some people, I think, again, really get caught up in the creation of the fake universe and neglect the people. Right. You know, and that's why it's called genre and not... Better or worse, not given its full due sometimes. Right. I mean, in some ways, if you think about science fiction as something interested in the creation of a different world, all fiction would fall into that in some regards. Except I think in a novel for it to be emotionally resonant, you have to, at its heart, believe in the people, the character struggles and the character struggles have to feel unique to themselves within the book, but also ask greater questions, those same dozen or so questions that all art asks. What I would say with just an elaboration of what Hanya said is that I think that, for me, the distinguishing feature of science fiction and I agree that it's a blurry line is that in science fiction, the writer is focusing more on the technology and on the science. Right. And what we call straight fiction is more on the people. Right. So there are some science fiction writers who create very good characters. Right. And those, you know, Ursula Guine, we can take a few others, who move the genre closer to mainline fiction because they really are interested in the human condition and portray that very well. Right. But there are a lot of people, you know, that we would consider very great science fiction writers like Larry Niven, who most, his characters are sort of two-dimensional. Right. You don't read him for his great characters. You read him for the imagination and the technology and the science. Yeah. I just read a book called The City in the City, The City and the City by China Mayville, which I think would pretty universally be described as science fiction, but is a description of two cities which exist in the same physical place. And if you acknowledge the other city in any way, you have breached and then you go into a sort of netherworld jail. But that's very much, it focuses on the emotional lives of one or two characters in what I thought was a really profound way, so I might be thinking a lot about that. But, honey, related to that, you know, you are writing about a race, or what do you call them, a race of people that live in these islands, that live for three or 400 years. So would you describe this, or has your book been described as a work of science fiction? No, it hasn't, actually. And is that something that you've... I mean, you said that you're... that this is... that you could almost think of it as fiction fiction. Yeah, I think it walks the line. I mean, ultimately, though, it was less about the science and it was more about... it was more a character study, I felt. Yeah. No, I mean, I never felt it while reading that, but I wouldn't be offended if someone called it science fiction. Right. Yeah. My name is Lily. I work in public radio, and I mostly work with scientific content. And so I deal with my fair share of non-fiction science writing, but the thing that always makes it interesting is how people relate to the storytelling. And so I want to go back to the point about how people relate to the characters on an emotional level and the emotional reality overall with how they deal with that and why that makes it more engaging for readers or any audience, depending on the medium. And so to cite one example, I was speaking to a scientist and astrophysicist who works for NASA Goddard Center earlier today, and she was saying that it wasn't the science that really attracted her to the field. Originally, it was the drama. Like, whether it's stars exploding or if it's like a scientist who spends his entire life working on one question and then finally sees it come to fruition and finds the answer. So I'm wondering from a writerly perspective, where do you find the drama in your characters and the stories that you endeavor to tell and then the ones that you're planning to tell? I guess that's the broader question. Well, I mean, I think damaged people are always the most interesting, you know. I mean, in this book, I mean, the thing about... That's why she wanted to work with me. Right. No, I learned that from working with Seth. I mean, you know, I mean, damaged people... And again, I think that one of the... I hate it when people say, oh, well, Norton, the character in this book is a psychopath. I mean, once you start as a writer, as a reader, sort of sticking diagnoses on your characters, they're very easy to dismiss that way. The real question is, can you make a character who's damaged and often abhorrent really resonate with the reader? Can you win the reader's sympathy? So that... You know, in the second book that I'm working on, it's about a character who fundamentally never gets better, and that's what I wanted to start with. Someone who, over the course of this book, and it's a very long book, learns things and changes and grows and develops, but fundamentally never changes. And could that be an interesting sort of... Could that hold a reader's attention for that long? Because, I mean, ultimately, you know, as I think we've all been saying in different ways, all novels are... You know, whether they have a cast of animals or whether they have actual people are about, you know, people and the human condition, and that's it. I mean, the one kind of person you never, I think, want to write is someone who... You always want to write someone who's incredibly flawed versus someone who's likable. And I know that's treading into the likability kind of debate, which has been going on quite a bit after Claire Massoud's book, but I personally think likable... Claire Massoud's book. I mean, you know, likable characters are boring to spend time around. Although, I mean, one of the real challenges I think you set up for yourself with this book is a character who's so unsympathetic. But I think he's pitiable, too. Okay, yeah. I didn't piti him much. Yeah, I don't think I did either. I did. I mean, I would want to have dinner with him, and, you know, he's a damaged, interesting character. And Alan, it's actually... It's an interesting question, and I was thinking about that a little bit in relation to both some of Rebecca's books and specifically Einstein's Dreams, because I did find this very dramatic and very... I guess I would use the word thrilling in that both times that I've read it found myself very much wanting to come back to it and to find out what happened next, even though there are no characters in the sort of traditional way that we would think about characters. So was that something that you thought about, or did the drama sort of...? No, I did think about it, and that's why I had a story arc. I'm getting to your question from Public Radio that I think that we're storytellers. We love stories. I think stories is how we make sense of this strange world that we find ourselves in. We tell stories to ourselves. Sometimes we make up stories about who we are. We make up stories about people around us. And so I think that for an article or a book, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, to have an arc of a story is what is going to most interest the reader, even if the reader is not consciously aware of that. And in my little book, Einstein's Dreams, the reason why I put in the interludes was to give a narrative arc. At the very beginning of the book, Einstein is sleepless. He's been up with his dreams as the book continues at certain points. There are waking interludes where he's talking to his friend Michelle Besso about this theory of time that he's working on. And then at the very end of the book, he's finished his work on the theory. And so as fanciful as the book is, it has that narrative arc. And so I do think that all people or all science writers, whether they're writing fiction or nonfiction, they should look for this story. And usually stories involve people, almost always. And that's why people may always make a good anchor for a story about science. I mean most of the long science pieces in the New Yorker, for example, have major characters in them. And you're getting partly, in addition to whatever science there is, you're getting the narrative of that person. There's a beginning and a middle and an end. And I think that that's as simple as it sounds. I think that that's critical towards engaging the reader. So the follow-up question was, is it difficult to, when you're doing research for your stories that are science fiction, when you're looking at so many factual things to kind of maintain the scientific integrity of the research, how difficult is it to draw the actual story out of it, to find the characters and to kind of find the beginning and the middle and the end? Well, I mean I did have to change details when the science didn't line up in this. I mean, there are just things that seemed, I mean there are lots of readjustments, but the character never fundamentally changed, his quest never fundamentally changed, how I knew he was going to fail never fundamentally changed. The fictional character? Yeah, but based on the research I did, I did have to change a lot of details and it did affect and shape. I moved the book back in time a little bit so he could hit that 1953 Watson and Crick discovery. I did a lot of adjustments, but it didn't fundamentally change the story or the character, which had already been said. I'm curious about what type of adjustments you did. I mean besides moving it around in time, what were the types of things that... It was originally much more historically based, it was much more about Kuru, it was much more about Gajisek and for various reasons, not least of which were legal reasons, I had to change all of that. Mary? So I have a science writing question this time and, you know, Alan you were saying just now that something about, you know, tell a story and stories have people. And this is something I've been thinking about a lot lately because I work on exploration and a lot of the, you know, some of the exploration that goes on now and that will go on in the future, you can actually have human presence, right? And so the Explorers Club now has members who are sort of NASA scientists who are sitting in mission control. And so I wonder about, you know, how can we tell those stories? Are there science stories that can be told without sort of human presence or without, you know, the personified human surrogate, right, of the sort of the robot or the Mars rover who's so cute and who's personified and has its Twitter feed and so on and so forth. Is there a narrative strategy that doesn't involve people? And I don't know the answer. I'm really curious. Great question. Well the fact that you don't know the answer means this is a good humanities question. That's a good pivot. Well, I think it's harder to do if there are no people, but it's not necessarily impossible. If the scientific discovery has, I mean everything happens in time, right? There's a past and a present. And if there's a scientific discovery that was made, it wasn't made all at once. There was maybe some initial, you know, there were previous discoveries that that discovery depended upon. Were you talking about, you said, was it NASA? Was it... We're talking about exploration. Exploration of what? Of very territory spaces. Science is done outside of the lab. Okay, science outside of the lab. Well, there has to be, the person, the initiation of that discovery of that exploration was for a reason. Somebody wanted to know something. There must have been some previous exploration that started the one that you're interested in. So I would say that if you're going to leave people out, that the story is in the chronological sequence of steps that led up to the particular exploration that you're interested in. The chronological steps of the exploration itself. That that has a chronological narrative that might partly replace having a human being who's the witness of all of this or the participant of it. But maybe you don't agree. You know, as I meditate on this, I think about, you know, sort of say, popular support for missions, right? And are people more interested when there's a person there who's personally at risk? I think about the Shackleton story and how popular it is. I think about David Mendel's work about the need to have humans on a moon mission, right? And do people care in the same way, you know, without there's that... I mean, I think, of course, you're absolutely right that for any story about the scientific discovery, that there has to be human involvement, you know. That's... And you can sort of widen the chronological frame so that that becomes very clear. But, you know, I'm thinking just about sort of popular interest in kinds of... You know, again, my paradigm comes out of thinking about exploration. Just think about how you maintain interest in things that don't have that hook of human presence. But anyway, there are other people that want to ask questions. So I'll just leave it at that. My name is Phil McKenna. I'm a freelance writer. Hanya, I had a question for you about what you just said about having to change things for legal reasons. I write nonfiction, and to me, I guess I have this naive sense of what it would be like to write fiction where you won't have to worry about any legal issues because it's all fiction. Could you tell me a bit more about that? Sure. I mean, as I said, it was a good thing. Part of the reason this did take me so long I mean, most of it was just laziness. But also, I needed Carlton to die. I mean, I could never have published this book. He's not so well known that it wouldn't have been sticky to publish it during God, Jesus' lifetime. So he was conveniently dead. That was the first thing. And then the publisher will read it and come up with tons and tons of questions and start freaking out. The thing they freaked out about the most was there's some disparaging things said about Merck, Lilly, and Pfizer. And the lawyer said, well, we really can't say things. And I said, well, we said bad things about NIH. And they said, oh, well, that's the government. You can say anything about them. But so there's this lot of back and forth. Like, do we know what about poor Merck? What about poor Pfizer? What about poor Lilly? You said that they're kidnapping people from this fictional island and they're drugging them and killing them. And I said to the lawyer, well, clearly that's not the case. And she's like, well, I don't know. They're very litigious. In the end, they let it go. But there's a lot of hand wringing, worrying, and so on. The thing they didn't bring up, which I thought was interesting, is I've never, and I kind of wonder if this will someday happen. Carlton's children are still alive, including the sons who accused him. And sometimes people ask, have you heard from them? And I haven't. But this is sort of off track. I was also worried about hearing from Carlton's supporters, of which there are many. And a relative of mine worked with Godji Sek for a long time. And spending his sabbatical year visiting some of his former fellow research assistants who worked with him in Godji Sek's lab. He was in Poland for a while. Then he was in Korea. And now he's in Japan. And because Godji Sek runs such a big lab for such a long time, there are many, many of these former students of his spread all around across the world. So he was in Poland. And one of Godji Sek's former research associates, who's now a really big deal there, said he read the book. And he said, thank you so much for the wonderful and flattering description of Godji Sek. And he thought it was really kind of a heartwarming and accurate depiction. So I guess there's that problem off the table. And if Pfizer and Lilly ever get around to reading it, we'll see what they say. But yeah. But it was much more legally thorny than I thought. Did the legal team recommend just creating names? Yeah. And I didn't want to do that. Because part of this office is also about the rise of big pharma, at least in a small way. And I wanted to really keep their names in. Yeah. Yeah. So one of my MIT classmates turned out to be one of the main proponents of cold fusion. So I wonder if you have any comments on fiction in science. I'm not going to touch that. I know me neither. But good delivery. OK, yeah. Let's see. I wanted to make sure that we got to at least one more thing of the many things I wanted to touch on. Oh, Alan. One of the things we were talking about earlier is the question of whether science, or you raised the question of whether science is a legitimate subject for art. And how to handle science as an artist. And the more I thought about it, I'm not entirely sure I am clear on what you're saying there. And that your own career would seem to answer that. Well, I think that anything is a legitimate subject for art. And I think the only issue for me and how you handle it is that you should, if you're making art, and let's just say we're talking about films, theater and books and novels for the moment, that you don't want your work to be didactic. Because if it is, then your reader will be jerked out of the imaginary world that you're creating. They will lose the emotional resonance. And the ballgame is over. So I think there are plenty of places, avenues for teaching science. You know, there's NOVA, there's The New York Times, there's plenty of wonderful popular science books. But I don't think that the novels or the place to teach science, I think you can have plenty of science in a novel. But once you slip into the lecture mode, where the reader feels like they're getting a lesson, then they will disengage. So do you feel that science, that the intention of art should not be to teach science, or that regardless of the intention, you should not be teaching science? Well, the intention of art can be whatever it wants to be. I think that if you use a novel to teach science, it's like using a screwdriver to hammer a nail. You know, you're using a tool that's not well suited for the task. And I think that the great power of fiction, which it often has that nonfiction doesn't have, is it provides an emotional experience for the reader that is different from reading a fact article. I'm trying to think of a way to extend the analogy, and I'm not sure I can, but, and this is probably a whole other topic of conversation, but, you know, we spoke beforehand and we've touched on here the extent to which science is not taught these days across the board and passed a certain level in the level of scientific illiteracy. And because of that, even though it might not be the best tool, I wonder if there are situations in which it could be a more effective tool for a specific audience. I was trying to figure out a way to talk about screwdrivers and hammers, and I couldn't come up with one, but that's probably a whole other conversation. Yeah. My name is Peter Walch. My question is, to what extent is the distinction between science and art and humanities and everything else something of fairly recent creation? For example, Johannes Kepler essentially thought what he was doing in astronomy was theology. He was describing the nature of God. And Leonardo in his notebooks, you know, this, he's not saying on this page I'm a scientist, on this page I'm an artist, it's a continuous flow. And in fact, in the Middle Ages, theology was considered the highest science. So to what extent is this separation of science from other modes of thought, other types of discourse, a creation of, say, the 20th century academic specialization of scientific and government institutions and other things where they're really the purpose is to separate scientific thinking from any other modes of thought? Well, the quadrivium and the trivium, which were talked back in the Middle Ages, did have very clear distinctions between the different subjects. You know, Latin and mathematics were separate subjects. And I think that if you had talked to Leonardo da Vinci, that he would have known the difference between his, you know, calculations of the Boolean force of something submerged in water and his drawings of things. And Kepler, for Kepler, even though he realized that he was, he believed that he was proving the existence of God or whatever, he knew that he was dealing with mathematical calculations. He was making use of detailed observations that were outside of his body. Yes, but what I'm saying is I'm not sure that Kepler in particular was making that kind of distinction. I don't think he had the idea that because I'm doing a scientific calculation, it's very different from what I'm doing as a religious believer. And similarly, I don't think reading Leonardo's notebooks that he thought that what he was doing in observing human figures was different from what he saw was doing when he was observing fluid dynamics. You know, to me in reading him and reading, especially the Renaissance humanists, they were seeing it as this continuous flow without making that distinction. And the mathematics, you know, you think of someone like Isaac Newton, he was obsessed with very complicated questions of Unitarianism, with alchemy, with all sorts of things we would not consider to be scientific in that sense. And I also don't think he was making the distinction between this kind of objective, cool science and his kind of obsessiveness with these, especially alchemy and other subjects. So I'm just really asking the question is, is this something we're projecting back on the history of science rather than something that has always been true? Well, do we have any historians of science? I was going to say, that could be a well-placed question. There are people at MIT who would get very good answers. Well, of theories. I mean, you know, you could say that since the Victorian age, it's been more and more of a separation, and certainly as countries have secularized further and further. But, yeah, it is a fascinating question. It's a great question. Part of this is coming out of an argument I had recently, which is, it's not really a scientific argument, but it's a popular argument that religious belief is incompatible with doing good science. And if you look at the history of science, you have to say, no, it's not incompatible because Galileo and Kepler and so forth were religious believers. And Gregor Mendel and so on. And I've read recently several articles, oh, isn't it too bad that Gregor Mendel was a monk because it screwed up the science, which is not how I read the narrative at all. So this is just a question. I think historically it certainly is true that in the course of society, science had a very different role. It wasn't necessarily seen as totally separate from all the other modes of thought. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I mean, I think that's true, but again, I'm not a historian of science. I mean, there are clearly Francis Collins, who heads the NIH, is a very fervent believer and has actually written books about his religious beliefs and how that squares with his science. But not being a historian of science, it's not a question I or I think either of you can answer. The only thing I would say is that I think the, and this is an agreement with your point, I think the specialization of knowledge, which has been taking place for a long time, has served to separate the disciplines more than they were in the past. And that specialization has both good sides to it and bad sides to it. And it's true in the humanities too, that specialization. In everything. In everything, yeah. The specialization in everything.