- [Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen, Janna Levin.
(audience cheers)
(audience applauds)
- Einstein famously said,
"Only two things are infinite,
the universe and human stupidity,"
and then he added, "I'm not so sure about the universe."
(audience laughs)
And it's true that there's a realistic possibility
that the entire universe is finite,
it's mathematically and physically possible.
And there was a period in my time, in my research,
when I was obsessed with this idea.
I was fixated on the implications
that you could leave the Earth
and travel in a straight line to a distant galaxy
on the edge of the observable universe
and realize it was the Milky Way
that you had left behind you
and that the planet you landed on was the Earth.
And there was also weirder possibilities
that the Earth was reconnected like a Mobius strip,
that if you took a left-handed glove on that same trip,
it would come back right-handed.
And during this time,
the hazard for a scientist
working on something so esoteric
is the possibility that it just might not be true
or it might not be answerable.
And I felt myself kind of navigating this precipice
between discovery on the one side
and obscurity on the other side.
At the time, I was working at Berkeley
and living in San Francisco
and I would spend a lot of of time in the coffee shop
across the street from my apartment.
I was trying to find some kind of tangible connection
to a more earthbound reality.
And it was there that I met this guy named Warren.
Warren came charging past me the first day I saw him
and pinned me with his blue eyes and said,
"You are the astrophysicist", which I knew.
(audience laughs)
And then he had so much momentum
from having built up the nerve to say this to me.
He kept walking, he didn't wait for my response.
He goes right out the coffee shop
and down the street, you know?
And so it begins.
Warren is just everything I would never want in a man.
He can't drive, he's never had his name on a lease,
he's by his own confession, completely uneducated.
He's a self-professed obsessive compulsive.
He comes from a really tough part
of working class in Manchester.
He writes songs like, "Daddy was a drunk",
"Daddy was a singer",
"Daddy was a drunken singer
murdered in a flop house broken drunk."
You get the idea, it's not good.
So naturally, I'm completely smitten.
(audience laughs)
And he is mesmerizing.
You know, he has all this intensity,
all this energy and opinions, he's full of opinions.
He was going to start his own music station
called "Shut the Folk Up".
(audience laughs)
And I said, the gag is going to be
that nobody can understand his accent.
Nobody will understand a word he says, he'll just rant.
And the beauty of his accent, it was a Manchester accent,
but it did seem even more tangled than one would expect
just from that excuse.
It was quite (indistinct) and he would kind of talk so fast
that the words would just slam together.
It was really undecipherable, but when he sang,
this big, huge, beautiful warm tone just lifted out of him.
It was like this old-timey crooner,
this rare, crisp and clear sound.
So I used to tell him,
"If there's anything that's really urgent
that you need me to understand, just sing it to me, okay?"
So, Warren and I start seeing each other
and he never asks me about my work,
which is really quite a relief
from my own sort of mental world.
And it's like we're both in exile.
Warren's in exile from his actual country
and I was in a kind of mental exile
and he would obsess all day about music and melody.
and I would obsess all day about mathematics and numbers.
And it was like we were pulling so hard
in such opposite directions
that the tension kept both of us from floating away.
And after a few weeks of seeing each other,
Warren decides we should live together
and he's going to convince me
that I should let him move in, you know?
So, he gives me this argument
with some fairly inventive logic,
which I'm a little suspicious of and laden
with all kinds of Manchester slang I don't really follow,
but Warren can convince me of anything, just anything.
So, I relent and he says, "I'll be right back".
He's so excited.
He comes back in less than an hour and he's moved in.
He's carrying his guitar
and whatever he can carry on his back
'cause he has his philosophy,
"If you can't carry it, you can't own it".
Right?
So, he moves in with me and my parents are thrilled.
(audience laughs)
So, their recently PhD-conferred daughter,
you know, I have a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT,
is living with an illegal immigrant
who can't spell words like nonviable.
(audience laughs)
Unfeasible.
And, you know, I think even our friends are full of doubt,
so our good friend, the musician Sean Hayes,
is writing lyrics like,
"Let's just play this one out until it explodes
into a thousand tiny pieces.
What's your story, universe?
Your melody?
your numbers, your shapes, and your rhythms?"
"Warren, I hear this and we're pretty sure it's badass."
And I'm filled with doubt too.
I mean, this is a crazy situation, it's totally improbable.
And my fellowship is coming to an end
and the only other offers I have
are in England and Warren hates England.
I mean, he slumps when he describes the low hanging skies
and the black mark of his accent there
and the inescapability of his class.
But he says, "Baby, you know,
I'll follow you anywhere, even to England",
as though like I'm bringing him
to the acid marshes of hell, right?
But he makes himself feel better
by convincing me we have to sell all our stuff
cause you can't own what you can't carry.
So, he convinces me before we go to England,
we have to sell everything.
So, we're sitting on the steps of our apartment
and I watch stuff that I've been carting around
my entire life just disappear.
And people come in and out of the coffee shop to talk to us
and people come by and say like,
"So you're the astrologer?"
And I say,
(audience laughs)
"Well, no, I'm more like an astronomer."
And they ask me about how is it possible
that the universe is finite?
And I explained how Warren and I
could go on this trip from San Francisco to London.
And if we kept going in as straight a line as possible,
we'd eventually come back to San Francisco again
where we started because the Earth is compact
and connected and finite
and maybe the whole universe is like that.
And Warren and I make this slip,
you know, his left hand and my right hand.
And we board a plane to the UK and it does suck.
It does suck.
We have this very difficult wandering path,
but finally I land a fantastic fellowship at Cambridge.
It's beautiful, but not before we spend a few weeks
in a coin-operated bedsit outside of Brighton actually.
And if you run out of pound coins,
your electricity goes off and the lights go out.
And we often ran out of pound coins.
And towards the end we were so despondent,
we would just sit in the dark
and I could hear though not see Warren say things like,
"At least I don't have to look at the woodchip wallpaper",
which for some reason really depressed him,
this very English quality of the woodchip wallpaper.
But eventually, we get to Cambridge
and my work takes this beautiful turn.
I start on black holes, these supermassive dead stars,
tens of kilometers across,
spinning hundreds of times a second,
ripping through space at the speed of light.
This is very concrete compared to my previous research.
So, I'm excited about the direction my work's turning in.
I'm in Hawkins Group in Cambridge, which is very exciting,
but he doesn't pay me any attention at all.
But I'm invited by Nobel laureates
to Trinity College for dinner.
And I get to watch this sort of ceremony
of dinner at this old beautiful college
from the privileged perch of high table.
And meanwhile, Warren's down the road
in another college washing the dishes
because it was the only job he could get.
And as things go on,
we both start to retreat into our mental world.
It's me, my math and Warren his melody,
but it's like we're not really keeping each other
from floating away so much anymore.
Eventually, it starts to rain and it rains forever.
You know, Woody Allen said,
"Forever is a very long time,
especially the bit towards the end",
(audience laughs)
and a rainy winter in Cambridge is a very long time.
Warren picks up the mandolin,
he starts playing these Americana, Bluegrass tunes
over and over again.
(Janna hums)
And it's like this manic soundtrack
to our mounting insanity.
And eventually we explode.
It takes about six months of that relentless rain
and we explode and it's over.
And all we see is how improbable we are, you know?
We see that we're nonviable and unfeasible
which by the way, Warren can spell those words by then.
And we both leave.
We both decide, "We're leaving",
and we pack up everything we have.
Each of us just what we can carry.
We end up leaving Cambridge,
we end up in a bus terminal in London,
clutching each other
and I'm waiting for Warren to convince me
'cause he can always convince me
that we can do the impossible.
But it's like the light's gone out in his eyes
and I just disappear into London and he just disappears
and the silence is total.
A graduate student of mine recently said to me,
"The emotional dimension is the least interesting part
of the human experience".
And I know scientists are odd, but I agree.
I was like, "Yeah, I know what you mean".
And so, it's difficult for me to recount
how dark those nights were.
Even in my worst moments,
I knew that my despair was just sort of not interesting
and I needed to get back to mathematics and the universe
and this connection because in its sheer magnitude,
it would diminish the sort of importance
of my personal trials.
So, I searched all over London until I found
a perfect warehouse to move into 'cause I wanted to connect
with a kind of more earthbound reality
while I was doing my research and I found the perfect place.
It had broken windows and shutters and nothing.
It was dead empty, no bathroom, nothing, it was empty.
And I had the windows replaced
and I had a bathroom installed
and my unit became the kind of soul or heart
of this artists' community building
on the east end of London along the canals.
And not least which 'cause I had the sense
to install a shower and a bathroom.
So, I had a great community around me
and I started a new life there
and I started to write a book.
I got a book deal and it was a book
about whether or not the universe was finite.
And it was a diary,
was as much about the terror as a scientist
of working on that really frightening divide
between discovery and total oblivion.
And it became a parallel story about Warren,
about the unraveling of an obsessive-compulsive mind.
And I think, if I'm honest,
it was also a way of still hanging on to him, you know?
And this book kind of came out of me fully formed.
It took one year, it just was out.
When the book was finished, I delivered it to my publisher
and in part fueled by the London gloom
and in part fueled by nostalgia,
I decided I wanted to go back to San Francisco
just to recuperate,
just to go back to where the book actually starts
when we sell all our stuff
on the steps in San Francisco.
And I go back to California
and I take these beautiful walks in the city.
San Francisco is so beautiful.
And I find myself despite myself,
'cause I tell myself not to do it,
walking past my old neighborhood.
And I end up going past my old coffee shop
and I'm going like 3 miles an hour.
You know, there's like 5,000 feet in a mile
and there's like 3,600 seconds in an hour.
So I'm going about 4.5 feet, I figure, per second.
It takes me about 2 seconds
to go past this coffee shop window.
And in that time, because I'm looking at my building,
my old apartment full of sentiment,
what I don't realize is on the other side of that window
inside the coffee shop is Warren,
who after I left him in London bus terminal,
had gone back to California, come back to London,
gone to France, come back to London,
and just recently returned to San Francisco,
gotten a job in the coffee shop
where he was regaling the patrons
with stories about his travels.
He was so uprooted,
but the light was like back on in his eyes.
And as he's turning around to deliver a coffee,
he lifts his head to see me in those 2 seconds,
walk past the frame of the window
and he shouts, "It's self-service".
So, he stumbles out of the coffee shop,
(audience laughs)
People are grabbing muffins and coffee.
So like, "Warren what's up?"
And he's trying to get out of the coffee shop,
he's banging his head on the glass door,
he's trying to grab onto the handle of the door,
he keeps banging his head.
It's like a bird trying to get out the window.
(audience laughs)
And all of a sudden, announced by the banging on the door,
it swings open and deposits Warren in front of me.
And you know, you often think like,
"What am I going to say when I bump into my ex?"
But it's just like this electric moment between us.
We just laugh, there's just a swell of warmth,
and we laugh that we're back where we started
on this very spot in San Francisco.
And I just try to give him the essential data,
I'm living in London Fields.
And he tells me, "I've moved on to the block"
he lived on when he was 19 and squatting in London.
Out of the whole city of London,
and he recognizes the names of all the locals
I can rattle off.
And by the end of the conversation, he's saying,
"I'm coming with you back to London, aren't I?"
And I'm thinking, "Are you out of your mind?"
I mean, what woman in her right mind
is going to let this lunatic come back to London with her?
There is no way.
About a year later, we're married.
(audience laughs)
(audience applauds)
Our rings, which were made by a friend of ours
are stamped with the words, the lyrics, melody and numbers,
shapes and rhythms with no small dose of irony and defiance.
About a year after that, we're having a baby
and we're laughing at how improbable this kid is
and how unlikely he's going to be,
and we have no idea.
When this kid is born, he is so beautiful.
And after he is born,
a young resident comes charging into my hospital room
and he's beaming, he's so excited.
And I'm thinking, "He sees how beautiful this boy is",
but he's carrying an X-ray,
which he slaps on the wall
or on the window rather of my hospital room,
so the light can come through and I can see it better,
but I still don't know what I'm looking at.
And he says, "Your son's heart is on the right side".
He doesn't mean the correct side,
he doesn't mean the left side,
he means my son's heart is on the right side.
And all I can think in this terrifying moment is get Warren.
And he says, "Your son has Dextrocardia with situs inversus,
all his organs are on the opposite side."
And I say, "Get Warren".
And he tells me he's so excited because he's never thought
he'd ever see anything like this.
To his knowledge,
nobody in the hospital has seen it in real life.
And he's describing studies for me
that are made up of 12 cases 'cause the numbers are so rare.
And Warren's there and he's saying
in that rough, raw, beautiful accent,
what only he can convince me of, the totally impossible.
He's saying, "He's perfect".
And our now 8-year-old son
is a perfectly formed mirror image
of the more conventional human anatomy
and a very rare and unlikely alignment.
It's as though Warren and I took
our left-handed code on a Mobius strip around the universe
and brought back this right-handed boy, you know?
And that boy, as intense and spirited as his father,
is like a living testament
to the incredibly improbable trip that we're on.
Thank you.
(audience cheers)
(audience applauds)
- [Announcer] Janna Levin.
(audience applauds)