Speaker 1 00:00:57 You are listening to right on radio on K AI, 90.3 FM and streaming live on the
[email protected]. I'm Eric on tonight's program. Josh talks with Sean Carroll about his latest book, the biggest ideas in the universe, the most trusted explainer of the most mindboggling concepts pulls back the veil of mystery that has too long cloaked, the most valuable building blocks of modern science. This book is an inspiring dazzling introduction into a way of seeing that will resonate across cultural and generational boundaries for many years to come.
Speaker 2 00:01:39 And I'm Dave and I would like to personally welcome Eric on behalf of the right on radio team and everyone at K F a I, this is his debut performance, nice job, Eric. And in the last part of this show, and last part of the hour, we will be featuring one of our legacy interviews tune in. As we do a deep dive into the archives and play an interview from the past, you won't wanna miss that all this and more. So stay tuned to write on radio.
Speaker 3 00:02:12 Most pop science, physics books, explore the topics in the field by official level, giving the reader, the impression the authors don't trust that the readers are willing to roll their sleeves and think through equations. On the other hand, there's countless lengthy tones that teach physics, but can be intimidating, dry, and highly complex. Sean Carroll's new book, the biggest ideas in the universe. The first in a three book series, discuss how space and time come together to form space time. Why calculus is fundamental to everything we understand about universe was escapes from black holes and so on. Sean Carol is the home of professor of natural philosophy at John Hopkins university. His research focuses on fundamental issues in quantum mechanics, gravitation, statistical mechanics, and cosmology. He has wine ranging interest, including philosophy, complexity, theory, and information, Sean car. Welcome back to right on radio.
Speaker 4 00:03:02 Thanks very much for having me
Speaker 3 00:03:04 Before we get into your book. Um, I, I wanted to ask about your title, the home of professor of natural philosophy, natural philosophy. Isn't a term you, you hear too often today referring to modern. What did you decide to go with this designation?
Speaker 4 00:03:17 Well, the first thing that happened was I became very interested in a certain kind of philosophy. I've been a physicist, my whole adult life, and I always had background interest in philosophy as well as other things. But what I learned over time is that there's this little subset of philosophers who are really just doing physics, but they're doing it in a way that would never get them hired in a physics department, right? So they become philosophy professors. They're asking about the fundamental nature of time or quantum mechanics or whatever. And I really, really sympathized with that kind of analysis. And it's, it's been a direction that I've been doing research in myself. The other thing is, you know, I, in, in accord with that, my own research projects have been changing and I became less and less of a comfortable fit in a conventional physics department. And Johns Hopkins basically made a job for me where I could do exactly what I wanna do. And I sort of have an office in the physics department and an office in the philosophy department. And best of all, I got to pick my own title. So I said, you know, half jokingly, can I call myself a, a professor of natural philosophy? Like Isaac Newton, would've done. And they were all in favor of it. They're like, yes, that's great. Let's do it.
Speaker 3 00:04:30 Yeah. I read that on your blog. So you make between the philosophy departments and physics departments at, at John Hopkins and you are teaching two classes this semester, one physics of democracy and an upper level course called philosophy of physics, amazing courses. I'm jealous of those students who get to have those, what are the topics you're discussing in those classes?
Speaker 4 00:04:50 So the physics of democracy is actually a physics course, not a philosophy course. And what we're doing is applying ideas from physics to think about democratic societies and voting and things like that. So a lot of it is basically the study of complexity combined with the study of voting and democratic decision making. So how do you get emergent behavior from individual behavior? This is a, a very common theme from physics all the way up to economics, right? Like Adam Smith famously tried to understand how the market could reach a sensible price for things not because of any central planner, but because of people doing their individual behaviors. And to me, democracy is the classic example of that, where you have a whole bunch of people, they vote, they do their individual thing, and the country comes to some conclusion because of that. But I don't think that people have really done the, the interesting work of directly applying physics ideas to that situation. So that's what we're trying to do. The other class on topics in the philosophy of physics is just a grab bag of my favorite questions in philosophy of physics, foundations of physics. Really. So we talk about the arrow of time. We talk about quantum mechanics and the measurement problem, and we talk about the multiverse and the principle and, you know, they're just some of the biggest, most fun ideas out there. So yeah, I think the class is enjoying that one.
Speaker 3 00:06:12 So those we'll get into a bit later in this discussion, but I, I wanna talk about your book now, let's talk about the biggest ideas in the universe. What was the impetus for writing this book?
Speaker 4 00:06:22 Well, sadly we had a pandemic <laugh> okay. And so when the pandemic hit and like many people, you know, I thought like, what can I do? I'm, I'm pretty useless. I'm a theoretical physicist. I'm not gonna cure COVID or build a vaccine or whatever, but maybe I can help keep people entertained. So, uh, I was inspired by a friend of mine, Lauren Gunderson, who was a playwright who started giving playwriting lessons on Facebook and said, I said, I can do that. I can teach people physics mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, on YouTube. So I made a series of videos. And what I realized along the way is that the thing that I can add, because there's plenty of resources out there for learning physics, either as a professional or as an amateur, but there is sort of this dichotomy, are you a professional or an amateur? If you're a professional, they assume you're gonna take years of physics courses as a student, and you're gonna do the homework sets and the final exams and so forth.
Speaker 4 00:07:13 And you're gonna learn all the math. If you're not a professional, then they assume that you're scared of math. You can't use it. Steven Hawking famously said, every equation you put in your book cuts your sales in half, but I don't think that that's right. And so what I thought was that we could teach the equations as long as we didn't worry about homework problems. As long as we didn't assume you were going to grow up to be a professional physicist and spend your life solving equations, we could just teach the ideas. We could teach you what the equations mean. And you could really understand the laws of physics at a much more deep, rigorous, fulfilling level than you get for most other physics books,
Speaker 3 00:07:55 You know, in your book. How, um, physics seems hard for a lot of people when it's actually quite easy compared to a lot of other sciences. I want you to unpack and talk about that
Speaker 4 00:08:05 For a second. <laugh> yeah. I mean, this is a point that Richard Feinman made and, and many other people have made physics is hard because physics is easy. But we mean by that is physics has this wonderful ability to take a complicated system and simplify it down to the point where you can really understand it, get an answer to that simple system and then add in the complications later, the classic example of this is Galileo thinking about how objects fall under the force of gravity, cuz you know, Aristotle, would've told you that a heavy object falls faster than a lighter one and that's empirically true. If you drop a hammer and a feather, the hammer will fall faster. But Galileo's genius was to say, that's not because of gravity. That's because of air resistance. The air resistance is a complication that is slowing down the feather.
Speaker 4 00:08:57 And in fact he said, if it weren't for air resistance, the feather and the hammer would fall at the same rate. I I'm picking those two things as an example, because famously the Apollo 15 astronauts actually did this experiment. They went outside the lunar module and dropped a hammer and a feather and you see them fall at the same rate. But at Galileo's time, what gave him the right to say, let's ignore air resistance. We weren't able to go to the moon back then. Right? I mean, why was he able to simplify the problem so severely and still yet get an interesting answer. And it's a feature of physics that the way we make progress is to simplify down to the essence and add the complications. Back in later, that's a method that might not work in biology or in economics or whatever, but in physics it really gets us very far. And it gets us so far that what we learn seems very intimidating in alien, whether it's quantum mechanics or relativity or whatever. So physics ends up seeming hard because it's so simple. We can actually make progress
Speaker 3 00:10:00 As an educator. What have you found to be a, a crucial concept in physics that people will struggle to understand unless they, they understand the equations behind the concept?
Speaker 4 00:10:11 Oh, you know, that's a great question, but there's, there's just almost cause there's too many answers. Let me, let me give you two quick answers that are sort of at different ends of the spectrum. One is conservation of energy. Okay. This is a pretty basic thing. I think people can understand it even without the equations, but when you see the expression for the potential energy, let's say of a ball rolling down a hill and also the kinetic energy of a ball rolling down a hill. And then you see them trade off against each other at the bottom of the hill, it's all kinetic energy cuz the ball's rolling very quickly at the top of the hill. The ball might be moving slowly, but it's all potential energy. And that fact that energy is conserved takes on a new richness and depth. If you can see it at work in the equations at the other end of the familiarity spectrum, there's the very idea of black holes, which is my favorite example because when Albert Einstein came up with his theory of general relativity in 1915, he wrote down an equation that he himself thought was so hard to solve.
Speaker 4 00:11:12 Nobody would ever do it. And then Amir, two years later, Carl Short shield who is a part-time soldier in the German army in world war I and his spare time learned general relativity and solve Einstein's equation. And Einstein was very impressed by this. He thought that was a great job. And implicit in that solution that short shield found was the idea of a black hole, but it was so alien and so weird that neither Schwart shield nor Einstein nor any of their contemporaries really understood what was going on. It wasn't until the 1950s and sixties, that physicists really appreciated that general relativity was predicting the existence of black holes. But as I like to say, the equations are much smarter than we are. The equations knew these things were there. It took us human beings decades to figure on, to figure it out.
Speaker 3 00:12:02 I, I think I read somewhere that Neil Degrass Tyson thought that Isaac Newton was the smartest person to ever walked the face of the earth. After reading through your section on classic classical mechanics, uh, I was curious if you had a similar thought or did you agree with him?
Speaker 4 00:12:17 I have no idea who the smartest person ever to walk to the face of the earth was how do we know it was not, you know, some person in, uh, what we now call New Mexico, you know, 300 years ago that we don't know what they did, right? There's just no way of knowing. I will agree that Isaac Newton was the most accomplished physicist of all time. Probably the most accomplished scientist. I mean, not only did he invent classical mechanics, which is really the paradigm for all of physics, uh, in subsequent generations, he also did the quantitative understanding of the law of gravity, right? The inverse square law that explains motions in the solar system, still what we use to get a rocket to the moon, still a Newtonian equations. And he invented the mathematics for it. He invented calculus, uh, live nets, also invented calculus after Newton did and independently, but Newton developed both the science and the calculus at the same time, which is just something that a modern scientist would have a lot of trouble doing.
Speaker 4 00:13:16 So I have no trouble. I mean, in fact, let me, let me back up Albert Einstein who maybe has, you know, good claim to being the second most accomplished physicist of all time, he wasn't even especially good at math. He was better than you or I, but by physics standards or by mathematician standards, he, it was a struggle for him. He was a much more insightful and intuitive physicist than anybody else alive. But whenever he had to learn new math, he had to have someone teach it to him. When Newton had to learn new math, he invented it. <laugh> and that's the difference between them.
Speaker 3 00:13:48 I a little further into this. So did Isaac Newton got, how did, do they resolve the issue in physics of breaking down time into its smallest possible units?
Speaker 4 00:14:02 Yeah. You know, that's a very good question. I, I will admit right off the bat. I don't know how they actually did it. It's a little bit of a mystery because back in those days in the 16 hundreds people, weren't very forthcoming about their works in progress. And in fact, I do tell the story in the book about how we finally got Isaac Newton to admit to us what he had done, because it was an amazing time. I mean, there were ideas all over the place. It was the Dawn of the age of reason, right? The Royal society of London had just been put together the idea of the coffee shop, where the great brains would come together and talk about big ideas was, was the new fad at the time. And a bunch of people in London, in the UK, uh, pretty famous names like Robert hook of hooks, law Edmond hall of Hall's comet, Christopher Ren, who designed St Paul's cathedral.
Speaker 4 00:14:53 Like they had a lot of the ideas and they would talk to each other and they were like, yes, gravity, inverse square law ellipses the whole bit. But none of them had the mathematical chops to really put it together. And they knew that the smart mathematician around was Isaac Newton, but he was up in Cambridge and he was kind of a, a loner, you know, a kind of, almost a hermit. And they finally nudged Hallie who was the youngest and most impressionable to go up and visit Newton and say like, could you do this calculation for us? And Newton says, oh yeah, I've already done it. <laugh> and he's like, well, could you tell us about it? Could you tell us and you know, spread the word. And eventually they got him to write his masterful book, the print IIA, mathematical, where he lays out calculus and motion and the solar system in the whole bit. But he was afraid to use calculus in that book. So it was so new and so dramatic and so weird at the time that he thought people wouldn't believe him. So he, he hid a lot of his reasoning behind other kinds of ways of talking about it. So honestly, I don't know what was going through Newton's mind when he invented calculus.
Speaker 3 00:16:01 There's a methodological principle. You, you bring with a book when you, when you discuss conservation laws that I wasn't familiar with, the spherical Cal philosophy, what is it? And what does this principle illustrate?
Speaker 4 00:16:15 Well, it comes from a bad joke. The physicists like to tell about themselves. So this poor dairy farmer who wanted to improve his dairy production. So he went to the local university and looked for a scientist and was unfortunate enough to bump into a physicist at theoretical physicist. And he said, how do I improve my dairy production of my farm? And the physic goes off, does some calculations and comes back and says, well, first assume a spherical cow. And the idea of the joke is that wouldn't really work. Cows are not spherical. And there aren't any cows that are anywhere close to spherical. If so, they're not gonna be producing a lot of milk, but it's an idea that in physics, it does work. The idea is take this messy, real world situation and idealize it as something which we can analyze perfectly. It's exactly what Galileo was doing with air resistance.
Speaker 4 00:17:03 He did it with many other kinds of systems. And so the idea in physics that you can simplify down to a system that is almost too good to be true and understand that system perfectly, the spherical cow or the toy model or whatever you wanna call it. And then you add back in the complications. So you say that, you know, the favorite example system that scientists always that physicists always point to is called the simple harmonic oscillator, a, a ball on a spring, just rocking back and forth or a pendulum rocking back and forth. This turns out to be a perfectly analyzable system. And one that appears approximately all over the place from real world pendulums or wristwatches or whatever, to the vibrating quantum fields in the standard model of particle physics. This spherical cow called the simple harmonic oscillator appears over and over and over again. And I don't think you have exactly that kind of paradigm in other sciences because in, you know, the human body, if you say, okay, I'm gonna explain to you how the lungs work, but I'm gonna imagine there's no such thing as the mouth or the heart or the brain or anything like that. You, you're not gonna get very far. All these things are interconnected in a very, very central way, but in physics you can sort of pick those connections apart and put them together later, which is why we're able to make such great progress.
Speaker 3 00:18:31 I wasn't familiar with a, with a framework you discussed in chapter two called the, the Placey and paradigm. How do physicists use this paradigm for understanding how things change?
Speaker 4 00:18:41 So pier Simone Lalo was a French, uh, mathematician and physicist around the year 1800. And the way that I think about it is even though Isaac Newton gave us Newtonian mechanics in the late 16, 16 hundreds, it really wasn't until Lela that we understood the implications of Newtonian mechanics in our bones. And what I mean by that is it was Lela who pointed out the very basic idea that if you knew, according to the rules of Anton mechanics, the position and the velocity of every particle of matter in the universe, and you knew Newton's laws and you had infinite calculational capacity. So he, he described it as a vast intellect that knows everything about the universe and has infinite calculational ability. Then you would be able to predict exactly what happens at every moment into the future. And at every moment into the past, you can also go backwards.
Speaker 4 00:19:39 This idea was later called Lelos Demonn, even though he didn't call it a Demonn. So what I call the Le Blasian paradigm is just this idea that the way we think about the progress of the universe is from moment to moment. So, in other words, if I know the universe, now I can predict what it will be one second from now, I don't need to separately know what happened before. Now, there is what I call conservation of information, all the information you need, need to know to predict the entire history of the universe is there at every moment and is preserved from moment to moment. That's the little posse in paradigm.
Speaker 3 00:20:17 One chapter I really enjoyed going through was space. You give definit a definition for space that changed how I think about it. The collection of all possible occasions of things. Can you talk about the history of thought defining space as being either a substance or relational?
Speaker 4 00:20:33 Yeah, I mean, this is one of the times in the book that I allow my, and I indulge myself a little bit with some philosophical talk because we didn't know what space was back then in the 16 hundreds, when Newton and live knits and all those folks were debating what physics should be. You know, it was all unsettled. It was all cutting edge stuff. So there was one idea that space is kind of a container, right? That when, when we look around and we see, oh, in my room right now, I have some books and I have a, a desk in front of me and a coffee mug and they're located in space. So the container idea is that space exists over and above the books and the desk and the coffee mug. And then those things have a, have a location within space. The relational idea says, roughly speaking, there isn't any such thing as space.
Speaker 4 00:21:21 All there is, is the mug and the desk and the books. And there is a relationship between them, which we summarize by acting as if there's something called space. That what space really is, is just the sum total of all of the distances between all of the objects in the universe. And so liveness for one person actually thought that that was the way to go. And Newton kind of won that battle and Einstein's point of view sort of emphasized and reinforced Newton's perspective. But honestly, we don't know the final answer. There are modern theories of quantum mechanics that say that maybe the relational point of view will ultimately win out,
Speaker 3 00:22:00 Ask you this time. As you explain, the book is essentially to our universe. Without time we wouldn't have motion, evolution and change a crucial part of the conceptual toolkit for modern business is the space time diagram. What is the space time diagram, and how is it useful?
Speaker 4 00:22:17 You know, it's a, it follows from this idea that sort of crept up on us between the 19th and 20th century. That space time, the combination of space and time is kind of like space <laugh>. So when you want to locate something in the universe, you might say where it is, but if you wanna locate an event, if you wanna say, I wanna meet you for dinner, you better tell me where in space and also when, right where in time. So there's some kind of analogy between space and time right there. And I can just draw that on a picture. You know, I can draw a picture of space and I can put coordinates on like the flat plane in front of me. I can say, here's the X axis, here's the Y axis. And I can tell you how to locate an object by giving you its locations along the X and Y axis.
Speaker 4 00:23:03 If you live in a city that has a grid structure, then you can just say, you know, the cross streets that locate any particular intersection, it's the same kind of idea. So on a space time diagram, you're doing the same thing, but instead of plotting X versus Y you're plotting time versus space. So you have time going vertically, usually in these diagrams space going horizontally. And you're admitting that we persist over time. So that rather than saying, I exist at one point in space, you're saying that at different moments in time, I might exist at different moments of space. And you trace out what is called a world line, describing your whole history in the universe.
Speaker 3 00:23:45 Not all physicians agree on how to define time. Can you talk about the different philosophical positions of viewing time?
Speaker 4 00:23:55 Well, you're right. That we don't agree on how to define it. And I think that that's, we actually, to be honest, I think that we overemphasize how mysterious is mysterious. It is. I would say that there are aspects and features of time that we don't understand very well, but I don't think it's very mysterious what it is. It's a part of space time. <laugh>, it's how we tell you what moment of time in the universe you are. It's part of how we locate yourself in the universe. It's exactly like space in that way. You know, it has different features of space, but it's the same kind of thing. So I don't think it's okay to think about time as any more mysterious than we think about space. If you think the space is mysterious, then you're, then you're in trouble. But, you know, time is the same kind of thing.
Speaker 4 00:24:42 The difference is the major difference is the time has a direction in a way that space does not. We, if we were out there in our space, suits flying far away in the vacuum matter space, there'd be no difference between up, down left, right forward backward, all the directions of space would appear the same to us, but there's obviously a, a direction to time. There's a difference between the past and the future. And so explaining that is a big task of physics. And we, we were part of the way there, but there's still some aspects we need to firm up.
Speaker 3 00:25:15 Um, I wanna ask you about that. You were talking about briefly, there's still a dispute about how to look at the general laws of physics. People are either follow being human or anti-human. I was curious if you could talk about that for a bit and were used to yourself on that spectrum.
Speaker 4 00:25:32 I can tell you might have some philosophical inclinations, cause you're picking out all the times in the book that I did, uh, indulge myself with the philosophy there. So, which is great, uh, because I do want to let people know that these ideas aren't settled yet, even though the ideas I talk about in this book are the true ones. The ones that will still be used a thousand years from now, that doesn't mean that we can predict how they will fit into a better understanding going forward. So the idea of humanism versus anti-human is the question of how do we conceive of what the laws of physics are. And it's very similar to the question of relational versus substantivalism for space, right? A substantivalist says that space is a thing and that objects have a location within it. A relational list says space is just a convenient way of summarizing everything we know about the distances between things, likewise for the laws of physics.
Speaker 4 00:26:31 And anti-human says laws of physics are real things. They have some oomph, some power, they generate motion in the universe from one moment to another, they have some generative force, whereas a human says, no, what exists is just the universe. It's just the collection of all things that happen. And the laws are just convenient ways of summarizing that collection of things that happen. So we notice that there are patterns in what happens, certain things happen and certain things don't and we call those the laws of physics. I'm more on the anti, sorry, I'm more on the human side of this debate. I tend to think that what exists is the real world and that laws of physics are convenient ways of talking about it. But I absolutely don't think that that particular debate is completely settled.
Speaker 3 00:27:23 What chapter was the most difficult for you to pull together in writing this book?
Speaker 4 00:27:29 I think that no one will be surprised that that that's a sort of a tie between chapter seven and chapter eight, where I discuss non and geometry and then general relativity. This is, you know, to pick up the book at all is a bit of a, an act of faith because there are a lot of equations in it, but what you pretty quickly realize is the, the equations aren't that bad. You know, you you've been lied to your whole life. These equations are easier to understand than you think. But then when we get to non-nuclear and geometry, you're like, oh no, wait, maybe it is. <laugh> kind of hard to understand. It's a different level of abstraction. And I do think that they're absolutely readable and understandable. I, I wouldn't have written the book otherwise, but I, but they're discussing ideas that are pretty far away from our everyday experience. It's not that the ideas are intrinsically harder. It's just that our intuition hasn't equipped us with the ability to readily grasp them. So I did as, but I tried as very, very hard to make these ideas palatable and as quickly and, and painlessly as possible. And I think that it, it, it works quite well as long as you're willing to put up with it, as long as you're willing to go along for the ride and the payoff of doing that is enormous.
Speaker 3 00:28:45 And my last question for you, Sean, I mentioned earlier that this book was the first part in trilogy. What are the next two books in the series? And when do you expect they'll be available for purchase?
Speaker 4 00:28:55 So book two will be called quantum and fields. And we'll talk about quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, particle physics, the best current understanding we have of the fundamental laws of nature and book three will be on complexity and emergence. So that's the non fundamental laws of nature. The emergent laws that we have when many, many moving parts come together to make a complex system, whether it's the universe or a box of gas will dig further into entropy and thermodynamics and information theory and things like that, but also into how complex systems are different than simple ones and how you get scaling laws and hierarchical behavior and things like that. If all goes well, they will all appear at each fall. So the next book will appear in fall 2023. The book after that in fall 2024,
Speaker 3 00:29:45 I'll be looking forward to both of those coming out. This has been my time talking with Sean Carol, by his book, the biggest ideas in universe space, time and motion. Sean, thanks much for being here on, right on radio.
Speaker 4 00:29:56 Thanks very much for having me Josh.
Speaker 3 00:29:58 Now this,
Speaker 5 00:30:29 This is from a, a section, uh, about the, the story of Charlie Africa. Kuang who was killed by police on March 21, uh, March 1st, 2015, open your eyes, darkness. A luxury afforded the man who owns two tents. One popped right inside the other, no streetlight filtering in no headlights, rising long tent walls, just dark. You could be anywhere your father's house before Dawn and Cameroon Paris or pretend it's Berlin. You know, it's America stretch. You wanna run the canyon, your long legs, starting up the Ridge out of the haze until you reach the great Vista LA the city beneath you. You'll close your eyes and feel the sun on your skin. And in your mind, a movie will roll the film of all that is yet to come. You've always been gifted like this granted stories and the power to believe them and mercy. You think mercy, you thank you.
Speaker 5 00:31:27 God, open your eyes March 1st, 2015 Sunday, you need to call her your sister lean. The other half of who you are fondly. You texted her last night. Every day you text her. I'll call you tomorrow. URA my heart. My dear darkness, silence earplugs. You don't hear the street begin to breathe. The tent people and the blanket people, the single room occupancy people coming out for prayer and breakfast at the missions to stay awake all night, dancing in place for 24 hours, tweaking people, the flat out face down sidewalk. People. The cornermen are pissed. The foot of the two story glass cross that drew you to pitch your tent on this corner. Sunday, skid row, Los Angeles, America. This is where you are on a mattress in a tent on the sidewalk. You flick on your flashlight, taped to the tents, walls, or photographs of Africa. You've got from magazines and a picture of Beyonce.
Speaker 5 00:32:24 Isn't that a woman stretch. You're going nowhere today, but your body remains strong muscle at the shoulder, tapered at the waist, a 43 year old man, still elegantly drawn tall, beautiful black king says your friend, moon child. Some days you actually feel like one. When the chemistry is right, crystal raising you up, spice shifting you sideways. When you feel like you can vision your way home across the ocean, right through the front door of your father's house in ALUA zip, open the tents, smell the street, zoom into the right now, right here, crouching on your milk crate in front of the tents and staring down at the sidewalk. You sweep and sweep until you break the broom. And then how can you keep it clean, tall, beautiful black king, not this morning. So you take up the play. Make Beth you've been studying, learning lines, reading them aloud.
Speaker 5 00:33:13 Come ceiling night. The street throbbing gospel booming from this Mika's corner store. Radio's rolling by in wheelchairs. I'm a, I can't read this on the radio. <laugh> uh, so many ancient songs, public enemy NWA and older music music from the listeners last good days. The dramatics, Marvin gay voices that balloon into the evening. The police in the mission workers and the drivebys snapping pictures from automobile windows. Think skid row gets worse at night, but they're wrong. It gets better. The cool airts down the fumes, the tense rise you read out loud, loud. Maybe it's a chemistry end of the month. Mud dried up everybody's stashed. Dwindling are gone. No spice left to continue. Just the crystal rising in your Gorge. I have almost forgot the taste of fears he read. At certain times, your friend, your friend Juju ju will say willing himself sober so he can tell your story.
Speaker 5 00:34:09 Crash on the couch at the back of msika store sweating. Even in the a midnight show, he'd start around seven, reach straight through to nine 30. Not always out loud, but that Saturday night am I disturbing you? You asked Juju his 10 next to yours beneath the big tree. Juju says, no. He loves to listen. He says, he knows what you're reading says. He remembers it from high school years ago. The very play says, it's beautiful to play your voice the way you read you sound like Africa says Juju. That's what they call you here. Africa. You've never told anyone your real name. That's for home for your father's house, to which you will return. You read tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow <laugh> brother. Judy says, I love you.
Speaker 6 00:34:55 <laugh> wow, that was Jeff Charlotte. And you were listening to him reading from his newest book, this brilliant darkness, a book of strangers. Jeff's an associate professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth, and also the best selling author of the family, which has just been made into a Netflix documentary series C street and sweet heaven. When I die is workers earned numerous awards, including the national magazine award and the outspoken award. That was extremely powerful. Bit of reading. Jeff, even though it was on the radio <laugh> you had to, you had to suppress a couple of words there.
Speaker 5 00:35:34 I, I did, I did this. I, you know, I never write in the second person. That's, you know, when you address you and, uh, I was especially wary of doing so with this story about an unarmed black man, whose whose real name was Charlie Lindo, clang mm-hmm <affirmative>, who was killed, who was held down by, uh, police officers, unarmed held down pin to the sidewalk and shot six times killed by a contact shot straight through the heart. But as I spent time talking to his family, talking to his friends, for some reason that addressed seemed appropriate and, and they felt it was appropriate too. Just at a moment to ask us to, to, to really try and feel Charlie's humanity. Yeah. And as well, I think,
Speaker 6 00:36:20 Well, I, I love the second person. I find it very effective in, in, especially here, but how odd that, um, you and I would get talking, and this, this book very much is about using Facebook and Facebook connections and you and I talk a lot on Facebook and, uh, found out about your book on there, that your publishers didn't send me this one. She sent me them before, but, uh, I found out about it in Facebook and we got talking and here you are on, right on radio tonight, right after we've had a situation here where the city nearly burnt down. And it's quite ironic working on that particular issue in your book, um, about a killing that happened in, you know, five years ago, I suppose that must be sucking up all the air for this book at the moment, that issue.
Speaker 5 00:37:04 I mean, uh, you know, I published this book in, in, in February. I, I worked on this book for many years. It's a Charlie's story, it's the heart of it, but it's a story of many people, including my own, worked on it for many years, published it in February. And, uh, I was one of the lucky ones. I got a little bit of a book tour before the pandemic shut thing down. And, and, and I have mostly, I've done, I've done. I'm so grateful to you, Ian. And, and to those who, who invite me on. But, uh, I think there's, uh, we're at a moment right now where conversation is so broad that most writers, I know, feel a little uncomfortable saying, Hey, look at my new book, uh, yeah. At this moment,
Speaker 6 00:37:44 That is right.
Speaker 5 00:37:44 There's so much urgent news that we also must absorb, but I think we have to, you know, I, at least I can speak for myself. I benefit from doing both from reading the longer form work, the work that's been building for a long time and following the news urgently and trying to understand the world around
Speaker 6 00:38:02 Me. Well, we've had the same, uh, feelings from several authors in the last few, few weeks, especially, um, you know, feeling very perturbed about where they sit with all this. Um, but let's just, let's just focus on the book. And, uh, it's a, it's a brilliant book, 116 pictures in it, which you've mostly, I, I think all of them are from your iPhone. Is that correct?
Speaker 5 00:38:25 They are. So the, the, the book began, uh, years ago. Uh, I was, I, I write a lot of magazine stories and I was, uh, I, I live in, uh, Vermont, a very small town area. So sometimes you like to work late at night at the time I had insomnia couldn't work. So the only place to go late at night around where I live was at dunking donuts. And I'm sitting in the dunking donuts <laugh> and I notice the, the night baker is wearing this t-shirt with this very broke skull on it, which, you know, if you've ever been to a dunk and donut, you can imagine a, a big skull is not the logo <laugh>. And, and I get to talking to him, it's his last night of work. He's quitting the job. He hates the job. He hates the night shift and, uh, we just gets to talking and he is, you know, it's those, those kind of, kind of candid conversations he sometimes have at night.
Speaker 5 00:39:13 And he's a little tear tattooed beneath his eye that, and I asked him what it's for. And it's for his son who, who died as an infant. And, uh, I asked, I, I asked if I could take his picture. I, with my phone, just the same camera we have in our pocket. And he said, yes. And I wrote a little store and I posted on Instagram and I hashtag it night shift. And then I hit the hashtag who else is awake at night? Well, thousands and thousands of people. So, and that's where the book really began. And I, I started taking the, the photographs became, I I've always been very engaged with photography, but I, I, I didn't think of myself as photographer, but I like many journalists always take pictures as notes and suddenly those notes became the story itself. And so, uh, I moved back and forth between image and text, sometimes telling the story with a sentence sometimes, uh, with a picture.
Speaker 6 00:40:04 And sometimes there's a picture and then, you know, quite a long, short story length or article length piece as well, which is it's broken up. Um, it's almost like a Missy, which is, I don't think we, we use that word very much anymore, but you know what I mean by that, right?
Speaker 5 00:40:20 Yeah. Yeah. I do. I love that. I hadn't, I hadn't thought of that. It is, it's a book of fragments, so it's, uh, I ended up, it sort of documents two years of my life, essentially that began my early forties. Uh, my father with whom I was very close. I'd had a heart attack and Vermont, he lived in upstate New York. I would drive back and forth across the mountains. And I, I was in Sonia. I had a lot of things. I, I, I was having a hard time processing all the stories I'd collected as a writer over the years. And so I would start taking, just talking to people and asking if I could take their picture and writing these, these short kind of prose poems a little bit that were made up of their language. They started assembling and, and taking on their own form.
Speaker 5 00:41:05 Some of them took serial forms. So, uh, the, I say, Charlie Kuang is the heart of the book. And there's another sort of very long passage about a woman named Mary maser, an older woman, uh, pretty severe mental health issues who lived in a what's called a transient or a welfare motel. And, uh, ended up telling her story over many pictures and many stories. Um, and, and then thinking about how do all these fit together, how does this become an effect it's sort of a memoir told through other people's lives is how I, I, I began to think of it and, and that gave it, its organizing principle. As I wrote the last sentence of the book or what I thought was the last sentence, uh, when I was 44 and I pushed literally, I mean, this was, uh, I don't mean this in a sort of conflation symmetry.
Speaker 5 00:41:53 I, I wrote, I said, that's it, that's the last sentence I pushed myself back from the table. It was two years after my father's heart attack. And I felt a pressure in my chest and it was my heart attack <laugh> and uh, you, no one wants a heart attack, but, uh, you know, I had to say, even by the time I was in the hospital, I didn't know if I was gonna make it through the night, but I was joking with a friend. I'm like, well, if I make it, this book's gonna have incredible symmetry. It,
Speaker 6 00:42:18 It, and it does. I mean, that's an amazing thing. I was going to ask you, you, you, how you came up with the unity, you know, you know, whatever it is that holds all this together and on a kind of psychological level, it's the heart attacks, the heart attack of dad and then the heart attack of you and two years later. And, um, I I'm, I'm always aware of that because that's laid out very early in the book and, and you, you know, I'm getting the sense of a, of a kind of search, a kind of lost in the night. I kept thinking, I kept sort of hearing a, a kind of Jo Charles, Balki a kind of Anthem, almost music created from the, these collages. And it, it, it really caught my attention very early on. And I, I loved that about it and took me back to, you know, Richard Brogan and, um, was that fly fishing in America and some of those, yeah. Wisconsin death trip. And then some of those books about dead bodies, you know, when they put the narrative of the dead person into it.
Speaker 5 00:43:19 Well, that's amazing that you say Wisconsin death trip, the author of that great book, Michael lessi was my teacher as an undergraduate and has been my close friend ever since. Um, and, uh, very much understood this book as, as, as a death trip, Wisconsin death trip and Michael ETT, we published originally in 1972, that's right. A book of photographs that he found in an archive and excerpts from newspapers and from the late 19th century photographs, uh, the they're terrifying photographs, many of them, people, their children, if your baby died, what did you do? You called him the portrait photographer. Yeah. And you had a photograph taken. And I learned so much from, from Michael and this book very much was sort of my attempt after years of writing a lot of books and a lot of journalism of what, what was the purpose of that kind of storytelling that I was, uh, uh, originally doing?
Speaker 5 00:44:16 You mentioned Bikowski too, you know, I'd never been a fan. I'd never read Bikowski the second time. The first time I finished this book, I had a heart attack. The second time I finished this book was, um, by my father's deathbed, he survived, his heart attack, lived on for, for several years, uh, died a year and a half ago, uh, of cancer. And I, I finished the, the, the book by his deathbed and then, uh, was going through his things at his, at his home. And he was not, um, he was not a Charles Bikowski kind of person. Maybe if anyone knows what Bakowski means, <laugh>
Speaker 6 00:44:52 Think someone
Speaker 5 00:44:53 Not like that. <laugh> and there though was a heavily annotated, big collected, uh, volume of Bukowski's poems. And it was such a startling kind of moment to sort of, and, and as you say, I started reading them because he had read them. And then after thinking for years, I don't like that guy. Um, I had to recognize that there was a certain kind of affinity between what I was trying to do and telling these late night stories of these people who were as lost as I was, and by telling their stories, trying to find my way somewhere.
Speaker 6 00:45:25 Well, I think your dad in, in liking Balki and, uh, you know, like probably a lot of us who, who live most of the time, at least, uh, after we've matured a bit live a, a cleaner sort of life than Charles Bakowski did. And, uh, <laugh>, I mean, a lot of very smart people and very conventional people love him because it, it gives one an entrance into that dark world that you're talking about. And I think your book does the same thing. It it's this brilliant darkness, and it's very well titled in that sense. And you do take us down into the streets and you take us to Africa and you take us to, uh, Dublin and you take us to, uh, to Russia and you have a gun pointed at you several times and not right in front of knives and all these kinds of things. It's very brave of you, what you've done. And of course you're a journalist and you are willing to do that, but it does take us to places, um, where great writing should. And then you also add a, a picture to it, which is, this is a certain kind of genre. I think that, you know, going back to, um, you know, Wisconsin death, death trip, and those kinds of day book collections, um, it's, it's its own genre really isn't it?
Speaker 5 00:46:44 It is, you know, and, and, uh, I, I, I mean, there's a, the genre of the, sort of a book of words and pictures, but then there's of course, another kind of, uh, story that would tell with words and pictures, and this is actually, uh, another place for where this began for me. I, I started, I, I told a lot of these stories originally on Instagram, and I always have to, whenever I talk about it, I thought like, I don't want to be a show for Instagram. It's a big, bad corporation, uh, cetera, et cetera. But what it provided me was this way to sec sequentially tell stories with words and pictures and a as a writer over the years when I was a kid, I love comic books, just, you know, superhero comic books. And I, I, I still, I like graphic novels and graphic writing and so on.
Speaker 5 00:47:29 It's not as much a part of my life, but when I'm stuck as a writer, I go to the comic bookstore and I just buy a bunch of comic books. It almost doesn't matter what they are. I'm interested in the motion between words and pictures, the way, um, the, uh, the reader sets into motion. Um, the image is together. So, you know, there's the white space that you see between panels and a comic book, comic book artist called this, the gutter, right. You know, and, and panel one, uh, wonder woman is swinging her magic lasso, right? And panel two, she's got the bad guy, all tied up. Your imagination provides some movement in between. So when I get stuck as a writer, I look at that and to help myself sort of restart. And I, and I was stuck as a writer early on in this book, and I bought some comics and I was reading them.
Speaker 5 00:48:18 I had recently signed on the Instagram for the same reason. Most people do friends and family, but I was looking at those squares and the space for the writing underneath. And I said, oh, look, I can't draw. But it's like, I could make a comic book of my own. I could tell a story with words and pictures. And that was, that was really essential. You know, all these books that you mentioned, Wisconsin death trip, the idea of a miscellaneous, the idea of a fragmented narrative. Uh, I think people come to that when they have a feeling that for them, at least the traditional ways of telling a story are no longer working. And that's certainly where I was. I, I was tired of writing magazine stories. I was tired of working the formula. Uh, I need to break the story down and, and find my Mo own way into it.
Speaker 6 00:49:05 Well, it certainly works. And, you know, it's, I found it very satisfying. I mean, I love to read a well-formed novel or, you know, a really good piece of memoir, you know, that's, that's literary based and the rest of it. But I also loved, you know, just the, the freedom of jumping through these very short pieces and being able to attach, uh, a real face to, you know, a young man who later on overdoses or a Cosack that, uh, you know, with this, you know, with his weapons all around him, who's who doesn't like gay people, you know, or yeah, somebody who doesn't like a Jew and you have to tell them you are a Jew. And it, it, I love being in those short little explosive moments with you, knowing that you, you actually did it and took some.
Speaker 5 00:49:54 Yeah. And, and it also, it, it was important to me too, because it GI, it gives these people a way to occupy some space in the story. I, I now, I, I hate that phrase that you sometimes hear, you know, oh, I give a voice for the voiceless. Yeah, no such thing. You're just someone with a book contract, right? These people have voices and tell them SOS. And I tell my story about them, but by including the photograph, these are photographs I'd asked to take with their permission. They are portraits sort of in the style of a photographer that I really love Milton Govan. And I don't mean compare myself to him, him as one of the great 20th century photographers, but who really said, you know, where the portrait wouldn't really be so much candid would just sort of say, how would you like me to photograph you?
Speaker 5 00:50:37 Hmm. Um, so that KA the KA who pointed a gun at me and forced me to write down his horrible sort of homophobic violence, nonetheless, he sort of stood there, said, you know, get me in my uniform with my whip and my knife and my gun. It allows it, it allows the sort of the subject and when the subject is not the classic, but someone like the other person you mentioned there, Jared Jared Miller, young man, I met him skid row while learning about Charlie Kooning's life and ended up making a series of portraits of him and his story and about, uh, the son that he would, he hoped to overcome his addiction so that he could return to. And, and the strangest thing I posted these on Instagram and all the women in his life ex-girlfriend ex-wife, uh mother-in-law and ultimately his mother found each other in the comments of this Instagram post.
Speaker 5 00:51:30 And they were all arguing about who had the best plan for rescuing Jared. And I, I ended up becoming acquainted with his mother and she sort of shared with me this story and the ups and downs and the story doesn't end well, Jared died. Not everyone makes it through this book. No, they don't. But it seemed very important to me that that Jared gets to look at the camera, gets to compose himself as he would like to be seen. And while I write the sentences and yes, I frame the photograph, uh, nonetheless, he is his own self, and I love that conversation back and forth. This, you know, the book is, um, there's a phrase from, uh, another writer, uh, friend of mine named Leslie Jameson, uh, a recent book of hers called the recovering and I, and she's writing about 12 step groups, alcoholics anonymous, mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, she, uh, is an alcoholic and, uh, you know, owes a great deal to those communities. And she has a great phrase. She says the saving alchemy of community, ah, of that phrase, the saving alchemy alchemy, it's a magic, it's a transformation of base materials into gold and of community. And this is what everybody in this book, even the scary characters all end up becoming part of this community. Mm. Uh, and which to a certain extent we try and save ourselves and save each other by telling stories together for a while,
Speaker 1 00:53:05 You are listening to right on radio at K 90.3 FM and streaming live on the
[email protected]. I'm Eric. I'd like to thank our special guest tonight, Sean Carroll and all our listeners, without your support and donations, K F AAI would not be possible. You can find more news and info about right on radio at K F i.org/right on radio. You can listen to all of your favorite write on radio episodes on Spotify, iTunes, Google podcast, apple podcasts, and so on.
