Janna Levin

@janna-levin · 24 positions · On ppll ↗

Theoretical cosmologist, professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University, and chief science officer of Pioneer Works.

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What Janna Levin says most about

physics 16

Gravitational waves should be mapped as sound rather than pictured: they ring spacetime in the range a human ear could hear.
A black hole is featureless in the way a fundamental particle is: charge, mass and spin are the whole of it, and no two differ in anything else.

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energy 2

The hardest step on the road from chemistry to us was multicellularity, and it was strictly a problem of energetics.
Calling dark matter and dark energy invented names for physicists' ignorance gets it exactly backwards: only extraordinary precision let us see that they are missing.

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innovation 2

A self-respecting theoretical physicist kills most of their own ideas rather than waiting for somebody else to do it.
A discovery you can see your way through to is impossible to abandon, even out of a real fear that it will be misused.

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quantum mechanics 2

Information is not lost in a black hole; the paradox is a crisis handing us clues, not a sign that quantum mechanics fails.
The thing to give up in the information paradox is locality: keep the empty event horizon, and let things be connected non-locally by wormholes.

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