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Author: Janna Levin
Quotes of Author: Janna Levin

Janna Levin _ A Madman Dreams of Turing
That is this world. Figures of flesh and figures of air. It is unruly how they mingle and in fairness, Adele, in fairness, it is not always so easy to distinguish what is real from what is not. But beyond this world is another." With this his goggles steamed and his own eyes stormed with salty pebbles that beaded on his lashes. "There is another world of pure logic. There are no particles or grit or dirt or poison. There are perfect triangles, π, the number one, and it's impossible to confuse the real with the imagined. I get there through diligent introspection. I know this world, Adele. I know it through direct experience. I can go there any minute of any day by thinking. My mind touches it, this flawless reality incapable of deception.
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Janna Levin _ A Madman Dreams of Turing
This world extends beyond this room, Adele. There are the streets of Vienna and beyond that Europe and beyond that a globe in space in orbit around a star in a universe. But how do I know that for sure? I cannot see the globe spinning on its axis right now as I speak to you. How can I be sure? I can be sure because it's logical; the mathematics is sound and respected by the orbits of the planets. I can verify it's true, not by looking at it, but by thinking about it.
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Janna Levin _ A Madman Dreams of Turing
Our propositions are true if they have the same structure as the world. Truth is a correspondence through structure.
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Janna Levin _ Black Hole Blues and Other
In the far future, which promises to be vastly longer than our past {like a googolplex of years to our future versus 13.8 billion years to our past}, all of the stars in the universe will have run out of fuel. Those that can will collapse to black holes; eventually everything will fall into stellar-mass black holes, and those black holes will fall into supermassive black holes, and then all of the black holes in the universe will eventually vaporize into Hawking radiation. This will take a very long time. {"Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end."} All of the Hawking radiation will dissipate in an ever-expanding cosmos, unable to fill the swelling void, and the light in the universe will go out. Eventually, ever particle will find itself alone, no bright sky above, no luminous solar systems below. For now, we're here and the skies are bright, if somewhat quite. The gamble is that the skies aren't silent.
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Janna Levin _ Black Hole Blues and Other
Joe's scientific life is defined by these significant near misses… He was Shackleton many times, almost the first: almost the first to see the big bang, almost the first to patent the laser, almost the first to detect gravitational waves. Famous for nearly getting there.
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Janna Levin _ Black Hole Blues and Other
An idea sparked in the 1960s, a thought experiment, an amusing haiku, is now a thing of metal and glass.
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Janna Levin _ Black Hole Blues and Other
Somewhere in the universe two black holes collide - as heavy as stars, as small as cities, literally black {the complete absence of light} holes {empty hollows}. Tethered by gravity, in their final seconds together the black holes course through thousands of revolutions about their eventual point of contact, churning up space and time until they crash and merge into one bigger black hole, an event more powerful than any since the origin of the universe, outputting more than a trillion times the power of a billion Suns. The black holes collide in complete darkness. None of the energy exploding from the collision comes out as light. No telescope will ever see the event.
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Janna Levin _ A Madman Dreams of Turing
We are all caught in the stream of a complicated legacy - a proof of the limits of human reason, a proof of our boundlessness. A declaration that were were down here on this crowded, lonely planet, a declaration that we mattered, we living clumps of ash, that each of us was once somebody, that we strove for what we could never have, that we could admit as much. That was us - funny and lousy and great all at once.
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Janna Levin _ A Madman Dreams of Turing
Sure one could argue the naturalist's case that the mind experiences an external reality in which it participates. But how can this account really satisfy us, Olga? One could equally well argue that all experiences is highly subjective, that the only thing we really have is the image, the smell, the taste, and all of our assertions about the universe are constructions of the human mind.
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Janna Levin _ A Madman Dreams of Turing
To see some truths you must stand outside and look in.
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Janna Levin _ A Madman Dreams of Turing
Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye.Adele never demands of him any actual conversation. She seems to understand that she is there to keep time and drown out the alarm of more individuated noises. The clink of a pin drop that can fray his nerves, the grinding of gravel beneath the weight of a man on the street, the spike of a dulled conversation as a couple pass beneath his window over Langegasse, the mounting pitch of the conspiratorial exchange as they approach.
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Janna Levin _ A Madman Dreams of Turing
As the blood poured from his tattered heart into the open air and his brain suffocated, all those incomplete thoughts of Wittgenstein decayed with the dying neurons. Neural connections in the gray matter storing memories and ideas in their ordered configurations fired across the gaps, last gaps of mental life. Thoughts on Truth and Will were erased as flesh sloshed soft and limp against alabaster, no more than rotting human fruit.
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