How the Universe Got Its Spots

I first picked up Janna Levin’s How the Universe Got Its Spots in 2003 at the NASA museum in Florida, coming home from taking our three-year-old son to see family and visiting Disney.  It was an impulsive purchase.  While I loved watching Carl Sagan’s Nova as a kid and enjoyed my physics classes in high school, I did not have any thoughts about astrophysics, cosmology, black holes, or space in general.  In 2003, I was a literature and film geek, a budding videographer, and a stay-at-home dad.

Levin’s book scratched an itch I didn’t even know I had, stretched a muscle I didn’t know had cramped up, and opened a door in my mind that had been entirely forgotten behind the clutter that had accumulated over the years.

In the 15 years between 2003 and 2018, I had thought of this book often, the science, the story of Levin’s life in 1999 and 2000, and her beautiful prose.  I had recommended it to many others, leant it to friends, and eventually loaned it to someone who never returned it.  But still it lingered for me.  I finally ordered another copy for myself for Christmas this last year and reread it in its entirety.

The book is every bit as amazing as I remember it being.

It’s structured as a series of letters-slash-diary-entries that Levin addresses to her mother.  In them, she fills her mother in on the movement of her life as a young theoretical astrophysicist in academia and gives her a basic overview of the science and work that she is focused on.  Her current work (in the book) seeks to determine the shape of our universe or discover the ways that its shape can be discerned.  To get there, she walks through the work of the giants on whose shoulders she stands.  In the end, the reader gets a quick but substantial summary of the foundational elements and theories of astrophysics.  Levin does all of this concisely, clearly, and entertainingly.

According to the blurbs on the book’s cover, Levin is a talented scientist.  I have to take their word on that.  What I can witness for myself is that she is a talented writer.  How the Universe Got Its Spots is beautifully written.  Whether she’s talking about her personal life or scientific theories, she is warm and insightful, elegant and evocative.  There is wonder and excitement in her tone, and a genuine love for her subject, even against the backdrop of the sorrows and strains of her personal life.  There were many passages I lingered over and reread for the sheer pleasure of her language and cleverness.

The book covers concepts of infinity, theories of gravity, special relativity, general relativity, quantum theory, the big bang, black holes, dimensional theories, topology, and even touches upon string and chaos theories.  As an introduction to these topics, this book could not be more ideal, and I would (and have) recommend it to everyone with even a passing interest or idle curiosity.

One of the things that makes physics so fascinating is that nearly all their theories feel like metaphors for life, things like every action has an opposite and equal reaction.  Levin takes full advantage of this feature by mixing biography and science, moving back and forth between her lived life and the subject of the moment.  The two naturally fit together so that the story of these two years in her life coexist comfortably with the 400-year history of modern physics.

One of my favorite aspects of the book, as a literary geek, is the way the truth and fiction hold hands like good friends and sometime lovers.  Levin makes it clear at several points in the book that the diary entries and letters are being written in hindsight, even though they are written in the present tense.  For example, at one point, she is at a conference in Moscow, which she placed in February of 2000.  She includes a footnote observing that the conference was actually in October of 1999.  She says in that footnote, “Honestly, I’ve gotten the date wrong.”  Honestly, I’m lying.  But of course it’s the truth too, which is how art works, right?  Sometimes you have to tell a fiction to better capture the truth of the experience.  This is of course at odds with the demands of science to be rigorously factual and honest.  So Levin gets her lies and her honesty, her fiction and her truth to all elevate each other so that science and art become one.  And she makes it look effortless the whole while.