SOF with Krista Tippett: Interview with Janna Levy

American Public Media's, Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett, produced a show last week entitled Mathematics, Truth, and Purpose. In this show, Tippett interviewed Janna Levin, a theoretical physicist and assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College in New York City. In addition to her academic career, Levin is also a novelist. The interview concentrates on Levin's most recent book entitled: A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. Here is an excerpt from the show's transcript that explains the subject of Levin's book:

Her 2006 novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, explores great existential questions by probing the lives and ideas of two pivotal 20th-century mathematicians, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. Turing is known as the father of modern computing, and his insights were made possible in part by Gödel's discoveries. In 1931, Gödel shook the worlds of mathematics, philosophy, and logic with his incompleteness theorems. He showed that some mathematical truths can never be proven or, as he says in Janna Levin's novel, that mathematics is perfect, but it is not complete.

To see some truths, you must stand outside and look in. This notion also held deeply unsettling human implications. It posited hard limits to what any of us can ever logically, definitively know. Janna Levin's novel imaginatively evokes the force of this idea in the classrooms and coffeehouses of Gödel and Turing's day, and in her own life as a 21st-century urban scientist. When we spoke in 2007, she told me she began her undergraduate studies with little active interest in science, convinced instead that philosophy was asking all the big questions.

If you missed this edition of SOF, then I highly recommend you go to their website and download either the podcast or the unedited version of the broadcast. It deals with unsettling but pertinent questions such as truth and the essence of free will. There are simply some things that lie outside of the observable region of empirical science. Levin's novel explores this idea, its implications, and how these questions were lived out in the lives and thinking of two great scientist whose lives are chronicled in the novel.