Janna Levin - Life on a Möbius Strip

 

Einstein famously said, “Only two things are infinite. The universe and human stupidity.” And then, he added, "And I'm not so sure about the universe." [audience chuckles] And it's true that there's a realistic possibility that the entire universe is finite. It's mathematically and physically possible. 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 were also weirder possibilities, that the Earth was reconnected like a Möbius strip, that if you took a left-handed glove on that same trip, it would come back right-handed.

 

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. I felt myself 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 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. 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're the astrophysicist," which I knew. [audience laughter] 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. 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 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. [audience laughter] So, naturally, I'm completely smitten. [audience laughter] 

 

He is mesmerizing. He has all this intensity, energy, and opinions. He's full of opinions. He was going to start his own music station called Shut the Folk Up. [audience laughter] 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 a brogue. He would 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.

 

So, Warren and I start seeing each other. He never asks me about my work, which is really quite a relief from my own sort of mental world. It's like, we're both in exile. Warren's in exile from his actual country, and I was in a mental exile. He would obsess all day about music and melody, and I would obsess all day about mathematics and numbers. It was like we were pulling so hard in such opposite directions that the tension kept both of us from floating away. 

 

After a few weeks of seeing each other, Warren decides we should live together. He's going to convince me that I should let him move in. 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. [audience laughter] He's carrying his guitar and whatever he can carry on his back, because he has this philosophy, If you can't carry it, you can't own it,” right? 

 

So, he moves in with me. My parents are thrilled. [audience laughter] So, their recently PhD-conferred daughter, I have a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT, is living with an illegal immigrant who can't spell words like non-viable, [audience laughter] unfeasible. 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 You are melody and numbers You are shapes and you are rhythms.

 

Warren and I hear this, and we're pretty sure it's about us. [audience laughter] I'm filled with doubt, too. I mean, this is a crazy situation. It's totally improbable. And my fellowship's coming to an end. And the only other offers, I have, are in England. 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, I'll follow you anywhere, even to England," as though I'm bringing him to the acid marshes of hell. [audience chuckles] But he makes himself feel better by convincing me, “We have to sell all our stuff,” because 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. 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?" [audience laughter] And I say, "Well, no, I'm more of like an astronomer." [audience laughter] They ask me, "But how is it possible that the universe is finite?" I explain 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.

 

Warren and I make this leap, his left hand and my right hand, and we board a plane to the UK. And it does suck. It does suck. [audience chuckles] 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. If you run out of pound coins, your electricity goes off and the lights go out. We often ran out of pound coins. Towards the end, we're so despondent, we would just sit in the dark. [audience chuckles] I could hear, though, not see, Warren say things like, "At least I don't have to look at the wood-chip wallpaper," which for some reason really depressed him, this very English quality of the wood-chip wallpaper.

 

But eventually, we get to Cambridge. My work takes this beautiful turn. I start working on black holes, these super-massive 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. [chuckles] So, I'm excited about the direction my work's turning in. I'm in Hawking's 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 ceremony of dinner at this old, beautiful college from the privileged perch of high table. 

 

And meanwhile, Warren's down the road at another college, washing the dishes, because it was the only job he could get. As things go on, we both start to retreat into our mental worlds. 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. It rains forever. Woody Allen said, "Forever is a very long time, especially the bit towards the end." [audience laughter] A rainy winter in Cambridge is a very long time. Warren picks up mandolin. He starts playing these Americana bluegrass tunes over and over again, Na na na na na na na. 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. All we see is how improbable we are. We see that we're non-viable and unfeasible, which, by the way, Warren can spell those words by then. We both leave. We both decide, “We're leaving.” 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. I'm waiting for Warren to convince me, because he can always convince me that we can do the impossible. But it's like, the light's gone out in his eyes. 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." [chuckles] I know scientists are odd, but I agreed. [chuckles] It was like, "Yeah, I know what you mean." It's difficult for me to recount how dark those nights were. Even in my worst moments, I knew that my despair was just not interesting. I needed to get back to mathematics and the universe and this connection, because in its sheer magnitude, it would diminish the importance of my personal trials. So, I searched all over London until I found a perfect warehouse to move into, because I wanted to connect with a more earthbound reality while I was doing my research. 

 

I found the perfect place. It had broken windows, and shutters, and nothing. It was dead empty. No bathroom, nothing, it was empty. I had the windows replaced and I had a bathroom installed. My unit became the soul or heart of this artists’ community building on the East End of London along the canals, and not least because I had the sense to install a shower and a bathroom. So, I had a great community around me. I started a new life there. I started to write a book. I got a book deal. It was a book about whether or not the universe was finite. And it was a diary. 

 

It was as much about the terror, as a scientist, of working on that really frightening divide between discovery and total oblivion. It became a parallel story about Warren, about the unraveling of an obsessive-compulsive mind. I think, if I'm honest, it was also a way of still hanging on to him. This book came out of me fully formed. It took one year, and 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. 

 

I go back to California, and I take these beautiful walks in the city. San Francisco is so beautiful. I find myself, despite myself, because I tell myself not to do it, walking past my old neighborhood. I end up going past my old coffee shop. I'm going like three miles an hour. There’s, what, 5,000 feet in a mile, and there's 3,600 seconds in an hour. So, I'm going about four and a half feet, I figure, [chuckles] per second. It takes me about two 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, [chuckles] 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 unrooted, but the light was back on in his eyes. As he started turning around to deliver a coffee, he lifts his head to see me, in those two seconds, walk past the frame of the window, and he shouts, "It's self-service!" So, he stumbles out of the coffee shop. [audience laughter] 

 

People are grabbing muffins and coffees. They're like, "Warren, what's up?" 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 laughter] All of a sudden, announced by the banging on the door, it swings open and deposits Warren in front of me. [chuckles] You often think like, what am I going to say when I bump into my ex? But it's just 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 [chuckles] on this very spot in San Francisco. And I just try to give him the essential data.

 

I'm living in London Fields. He tells me I have moved onto the block he lived on when he was 19 and squatting in London, out of the whole city of London. He recognizes the names of all the locals I can rattle off. By the end of the conversation he's saying, "I'm coming with you back to London, aren't I?" [chuckles] 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 laughter] 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. We're laughing at how improbable this kid is and how unlikely he's going to be. We have no [chuckles] idea. When this kid is born, he is so beautiful. After he's born, a young resident comes charging into my hospital room. He's beaming, he's so excited, and I'm thinking, he sees how beautiful this boy is. [chuckles] 

 

But he's carrying an X-ray, which he slaps on the window 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." He tells me he's so excited, because he never thought he'd ever see anything like this. To his knowledge, nobody in the hospital has seen it in real life. 

 

He's describing studies for me that are made up of 12 cases, because the numbers are so rare. 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 eight-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 coat on a Möbius strip around the universe and brought back this right-handed boy. And that boy, as intense and spirited as his father, [chuckles] is like a living testament to the incredibly improbable trip that we're on. Thank you.