Janna Levin – författare

Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems sent shivers through Vienna’s intellectual circles and directly challenged Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dominant philosophy. Alan Turing’s mathematical genius helped him break the Nazi Enigma Code during WWII. Though they never met, their lives strangely mirrored one another—both were brilliant, and both met with tragic ends. Here, a mysterious narrator intertwines these parallel lives into a double helix of genius and anguish, wonderfully capturing not only two radiant, fragile minds but also the zeitgeist of the era.

Is the universe infinite, or is it just really big? Does nature abhor infinity? In startling and beautiful prose, Janna Levin''s diary of unsent letters to her mother describes what we know about the shape and extent of the universe, about its beginning and its end. She grants the uninitiated access to the astounding findings of contemporary theoretical physics and makes tangible the contours of space and time—those very real curves along which apples fall and planets orbit.Levin guides the reader through the observations and thought-experiments that have enabled physicists to begin charting the universe. She introduces the cosmic archaeology that makes sense of the pattern of hot spots left over from the big bang, a pursuit on the verge of discovering the shape of space itself. And she explains the topology and the geometry of the universe now coming into focus—a strange map of space full of black holes, chaotic flows, time warps, and invisible strings. Levin advances the controversial idea that this map is edgeless but finite—that the universe is huge but not unending—a radical revelation that would provide the ultimate twist to the Copernican revolution by locating our precise position in the cosmos.As she recounts our increasingly rewarding attempt to know the universe, Levin tells her personal story as a scientist isolated by her growing knowledge. This book is her remarkable effort to reach across the distance of that knowledge and share what she knows with family and friends—and with us. Highly personal and utterly original, this physicist’s diary is a breathtaking contemplation of our deep connection with the universe and our aspirations to comprehend it.

Brought to you by Penguin. ''Astrophysics at its sexiest ... packed with revelations ... hugely enjoyable'' Sunday TimesWhat would happen if you fell into a black hole?Black holes are the most extraordinary phenomenon in the universe, but they are a riddle that confounds our intuitions. Anything that enters them can never escape, and yet they contain nothing at all. They are bigger on the inside than the outside suggests. They are dark on the outside but not on the inside. They invert time into space and space into time. Black holes are found throughout the universe. They can be microscopic. They can be billions of times larger than our sun. Our solar system is currently orbiting a black hole 26,000 light years away at a speed of 200 km per second.In Black Hole Survival Guide physicist and novelist Janna Levin takes you on a journey into a black hole, explaining what would happen to you in there and why. In the process you''ll come to see how their mysteries contain answers to some of the most profound questions ever asked about the nature of our universe.© Janna Levin 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020