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- Interview: Brian Greene discusses some concepts from his book, "The Fabric of the Cosmos" Review: New documentary "Inside Deep Throat"
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- DATE February 11, 2005 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A NETWORK NPR PROGRAM Fresh Air Interview: Brian Greene discusses some concepts from his book, "The Fabric of the Cosmos" DAVID BIANCULLI, host: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, TV critic for the New York Daily News, sitting in for Terry Gross. David Greene's new book begins with a number of provocative questions: Does time have a beginning? What does it mean for space to be empty? Can we manipulate space and time? What is reality? Greene is a physicist who has become well-known for his ability to clearly explain some of the most challenging concepts of physics. He's also famous within his field for his discoveries in superstring theory. His book about string theory, "The Elegant Universe," became a best-seller and was the basis of a thought-provoking, beautifully produce miniseries on the PBS science series, "Nova." His latest best-selling book, just released in paperback, is called "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality." It explains how modern science is revising our picture of reality and offering new theories about the world that exists beyond what we can perceive with our senses. Terry spoke with Brian Greene last year, when "The Fabric of the Cosmos" was published. TERRY GROSS, host: You start the first chapter of your book not by quoting Einstein or Newton but by quoting Camus. And you quote something he says at the beginning of the "The Myth of Sisyphus," which is, "There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide." Why did you start your book on space and time and string theory with that quote about suicide? Mr. BRIAN GREENE (Physicist/Author): Well, that particular quote I read when I was a teen-ager, and it really had a big influence on me because it very clearly in very stark language lays out what the most important question that we can ask ourselves is, and that's the question: Is life worth living? Should we carry on on this journey that we have been set upon? And in the years since reading that quote, it has really kind of framed the work that I've done, because I've always felt that you can't answer that question, that key question, if you don't know what the context within which life takes place actually is. That is, if you don't know what the universe is, you don't really know what life is and you don't know what is valuable in life. So I, for many years, have been trying to figure out, with many colleagues around the world, you know, how the universe came to be, how it takes the form that we witness on a dark, starry night, and that way, just trying to get as clear a picture of the framework within which life takes place. GROSS: Now what I love about your book, which I also find very unbalancing, is that your writing makes me disbelieve my senses because, as you say, the reality we observe may have little to do with the reality that's out there. So you're dealing with things that are way beyond our senses, in part, because they're so micro, micro, microscopically small. Mr. GREENE: Yeah. I mean, that's really what science has been doing for the last 50 or a hundred years. I mean, there was a time, if you go back to the time of Newton, when the key questions had to do with the things that you do see in everyday life. You know, Newton apocryphally was looking at, you know, apples falling from trees or the motion of the moon around the Earth, things that you could see with your eyes. But, basically, the success that we've had at describing everyday phenomena using the laws of physics has impelled us, driven us to go further. And when we have gone further to try to understand the microscopic structure of matter, molecules and atoms and subatomic particles, the shocking thing is physics has revealed that the familiar world operates according to principles that just don't apply in the microworld. The microworld is very bizarre. It's very strange and it kind of morphs into the familiar everyday world when things get larger. But if you or I were to live in the microworld, if we were to shrink our bodies by a factor of 100 million billion and walk around in the microworld, it would be more bizarre than any science fiction that you've ever seen. It is very odd and very strange by everyday standards. GROSS: Let's get back to the idea that the reality we observe may have little to do with the reality that's out there, and let's apply that to time. Now my reality is that my watch ticks away time second by second and that time, in my reality, is always moving forward. It never moves backward except in memory. And it moves forward in predictable ways, in 24-hour days, although some days seem longer and some days feel shorter, depending on how well the day is going. OK, but scientists have challenged this idea of the forward arrow of time. What is the theory that challenges that time just moves forward in a predictable way? Mr. GREENE: Well, scientists haven't completely challenged the idea that time has a forward arrow associated with it. What they have puzzled over, though, is something tightly related to that, which is why does it have a forward arrow associated with it? I mean, after all, for instance, space, you're able to move left or right; you can move back or forth. You seem to have complete freedom to navigate space. Why don't you have the same freedom to navigate time? Why does time seem to relentlessly point toward what we conventionally call the future? Now the strange thing is that when you study the laws of physics, there's no orientation when it comes to time that is fundamentally embedded in the laws of physics. In other words, the future and the past, according to the equations that Newton wrote down or the equations that Einstein wrote down or the equations of quantum theory, all of those equations treat past and future on completely equal footing, completely symmetrically, but yet, our experience is completely asymmetric. The past is behind us and gone; the future is yet to be. This is our intuition. Where does that experience come from if the laws of physics don't seem to have an arrow of time built into them? That's the question that we have studied, and we've made a lot of progress, I think, in trying to come to an answer. The surprising thing--we can go through the chain of reasoning, if you'd like--is that the reasoning leads us to the big bang itself. We believe that special conditions at the birth of the universe imprinted a direction on time, and we have been living through the unfolding of that arrow of time that was launched, if you will, by the big bang itself. GROSS: Well, do you think about things like time travel, like if we'll ever be able to move forward in time and see the future before the future happens or move backward in time and visit the past? Mr. GREENE: Well, time travel is a very provocative idea, and it really is very important to distinguish between two kinds of time travel--time travel to the future and time travel to the past. And the reason why you need to make that distinction is time travel to the future is not part of science fiction. It really emerges from insights that Einstein had in the early part of the 20th century. Time travel to the future is within the laws of physics as we understand it. If you want to see what, say, the Earth will be like a thousand years from now or 10,000 or even a million years from now, Einstein lays out a strategy for doing it. You build a spaceship, you travel out into space at very high speed, near the speed of light, you turn around and you come back. And if you've carried out that journey correctly, when you return to Earth, perhaps one year will have elapsed according to your biology and according to the clocks in your ship, but when you step out of your spaceship, 1,000 years or 10,000 or a million years will have gone by on Earth. You will have leaped into Earth's future through this particular journey. Now we can't actually build the ships that can go near the speed of light, so we can't actually carry out this kind of journey today or perhaps ever; I don't know. But in terms of the laws of physics, traveling to the future is absolutely within those laws. Now travel to the past... GROSS: Yeah, what about traveling to the past? Mr. GREENE: Well, that's, of course, the key thing. Let's say, you know, somebody gives you the opportunity and you do travel to the future, can you get back? And most of us believe that you can't. Most of us believe that time travel to the past is just on a very different par than travel to the future. You know, the reason is something that we're all very familiar with. There are all sorts of paradoxes that arise if you can travel to the past. You know, you can imagine traveling to the past and doing something that would prevent your own birth. Then how are you there to actually carry out that act if you were never born in the first place? There are paradoxes of this sort. Now these paradoxes--it turns out there are ways around them, some very cute and interesting ways around them, from quantum theory in particular. But our gut feeling is that when the laws of physics are fully understood, time travel to the past will not be possible. But I should say, you know, as of today, some very well-respected physicists have even suggested ways that you might build a time machine that would allow you to travel to the past. When you study the proposals in detail, they seem to all kind of brush right up against the limits of the currently known laws of physics. And most of us believe that when those laws are better understood, the proposals will actually pierce them and step outside the laws of physics and thereby be impossible. But as of today, no one's been able to prove that. And that's at least kind of compelling and provocative. BIANCULLI: Terry Gross speaking with physicist Brian Green. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR. (Soundbite of music) BIANCULLI: Let's get back to Terry's interview with physicist Brian Green. His best-seller "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality" has just been published in paperback. GROSS: Since your new book is about time and space, let's talk a little bit about space. We think of space--we lay people think of space as being empty, you know, just kind of like devoid of anything, maybe like there's air or there's not air or there's some particles floating around. But how do you think of space? Do you think of it as emptiness or something else? Mr. GREENE: Yeah, very different. This is one of the key ways in which, I think, common perception misleads us. And maybe as an aside, I should emphasize, I don't think it's surprising that common perception will mislead us, because our perceptions evolved through many centuries, through many millennia in order that we can survive in the jungle. And perceptions that are good at making us survive are not necessarily good at revealing the true nature of the world, the true nature of the universe. That's why we need to go further with our minds and experiments and our equations. And when we do that, especially with regard to space, we come to a very different picture of space than the intuitive one that you just described, because--for instance, according to quantum mechanics and this so-called Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which is a principle that says that there are always features of the microworld that are undetermined, that can fluctuate between various possibilities--and what that means when you apply it to space is that there is no such thing as truly empty space. Even in what you normally think of as the deep darkness of empty space, no planets, no stars, no galaxies, totally dark, quantum theory says that there's always, in the microscopic feature of that space, particles popping into existence and then annihilating, fields, like the electromagnetic field, fluctuating up and down. So in the microworld, there is this tumult, this chaos, this frenzied activity that even happens in the deep darkness of what we normally think of as completely empty space. So the very notion of nothingness is completely rewritten by the laws of quantum physics. GROSS: Well, you know, if the world is filled with dimensions that our senses don't allow us to perceive, you could argue that, you know, some or all of those dimensions are the world of microparticles. But I guess you could also argue just as easily that that world is a more spiritual one in which there exists spiritual forces that we are incapable of perceiving. Do you... Mr. GREENE: Yeah, I would dissuade people from heading in that direction. Let me tell you why. Indeed, string theory is the theory that I work on, one of the cutting-edge developments in an attempt to build what Einstein called a unified theory, a theory that might describe everything in the world using one basic master equation. And this approach called string theory does entail that the universe have more than three dimensions that we know about. So we all know about left, right, back, forth, up, down. This theory does say that there are other dimensions beyond those. And since we don't see them, many people might say, `Well, perhaps they are on par with some of the mystical ideas or theological ideas.' And the main difference and the key distinction to keep in mind is when we talk about these extra dimensions, we ultimately--we haven't been able to do it yet, but we ultimately imagine that we'll make predictions for how these dimensions behave and the implications that these dimensions have for observable phenomenon. And that's the key difference between the scientific incarnation of these strange ideas and the mystical incarnation. We only will believe these ideas when we can test them experimentally. There's no active faith that's going to be involved in our taking on the theories that we are studying. And I don't think that's true of either the theological or mystical approaches which always, as far as I have encountered so far, involve some element of faith and a key inability to make predictions that will be testable and allow us to determine whether those ideas are right or wrong. GROSS: What's wrong with faith? What's wrong with just believing something because you have faith, even though it isn't empirically provable or testable? Mr. GREENE: Nothing's wrong with it at all. In fact, my brother is a Hare Krishna. And for many years, the developments that we've come upon in physics and string theory--I always enjoy telling him about these developments. And a lot of times, he'll say to me, `Well, we already knew that. That's in Vedic text number 23 or something of that sort.' And, you know, it's an interesting exchange because when we've ever gone into more detail on it, it seems as though many of the ideas that we have come upon do have a kind of resonance with ideas that have been articulated in ancient text or even in more modern theological or mystical text. And I think that's very interesting. But from the point of view of what we really believe as true from the scientific perspective, we have laid down over the last few centuries a particular yardstick to determine what we believe and what we don't believe. And from the scientific point of view, that yardstick involves making a prediction, then an experimenter can go out and measure and determine whether your prediction is right or wrong. If your prediction is confirmed, your ideas are right; if your prediction is not borne out by the experiment, your ideas are plain wrong. And we have found this to be a very fruitful way to describe the universe. We have got very deep ideas which are now describing the world and able to make predictions. Now it's not to say that that yardstick is the right one outside of science. You know, when it comes to religion and mystical ideas, maybe faith is the right yardstick. But the key thing to bear in mind is you're not going to be able to really make a prediction. You're not going to be able to say how the universe truly works if you're not, at least as far as I've seen in any example, working in the scientific context where experiment is the yardstick. GROSS: Do you think that science necessarily conflicts with religion and vice versa? Mr. GREENE: Not at all. I mean, oftentimes people do talk about this conflict between science and religion. And, look, if you want to stop teaching evolution and start teaching creationism, then, yeah, there's a conflict. But I don't consider the over-arching realms of science and religion to be in conflict because, for instance, it could be that everything that I'm doing as a scientist and everything that every other scientist is doing is simply revealing the laws that were laid down by some divine being. This is absolutely possible. In fact, if you think about it, there's no way ever for science to disprove that possibility because the retort can always be, `Well, the divine being set it up so that you'd describe things and make that argument to try to disprove what the divine being set in place.' So it's completely unfalsifiable that what we're doing might be revealing God's design. And to tell you the truth, if that's what we're doing, I think it's pretty cool. I'd be very excited to spend my life trying to work out the laws that the divine being set down. Now I should say, I see no evidence for a divine being. I see no evidence for anything but the laws of physics. And, again, if there is no divine being and what we're doing is revealing laws that have described how the universe began and how it's going to evolve for 100 billion years into the future, I think that's pretty cool, too, and I'm excited to try to work out those laws unto themselves. GROSS: What's your reaction to the people who believe that evolution should not be taught in the schools but creationism should or that creationism should be taught alongside evolution or that something called intelligent design should be taught? And if I comprehend intelligent design correctly, that is the theory that the universe is so complicated that there had to be some kind of master intelligence behind it. And the implication at least is that that master intelligence is God. So what's your reaction to that whole conflict? Mr. GREENE: Yeah. Well, I find it highly unfortunate and very dangerous when one tries to substitute religious ideas for scientific breakthrough and scientific developments. Again, you know, I think if one is taking a course on religion and theology, then I think it's very interesting to study what the ancient religions have said about the universe and how it came into being and so forth. But my own feeling is--and I think this is shared by many people; at least I hope it is--that science has given us such new deep insight into the workings of the world. I mean, we can understand, by and large, how it is that the universe is expanding. We can understand, by and large, how it is that galaxies form, how stars form. We understand the nuclear processes that allow our sun to shine and bathe the Earth in radiation and heat and light. And to try to substitute something for the powerful science that we've developed to understand these things is a travesty. Again, you know, I feel that it's not the point of science to rule out that perhaps everything we do fits inside some religious context, but no way should we allow older religious ideas to somehow displace the fantastic developments that science has achieved over many years. You know, in fact, let me just say it this way. There's a way of thinking about religion where, when you can't address something in the natural world, you try to bring in God or some religious explanation because you haven't yet figured it out. And that is often called God of the gaps. We use God to fill in the gaps in our understanding. And from that point of view, the more we understand, the more God is necessarily going to get pushed out. The more we understand how the world came to be and how life evolved and formed, we're not going to need the theological explanations. And I think there are some people who feel that religion is diminished by being pushed out from that explanatory role. But what we as scientists will never do is give an answer to why there is a universe and the meaning of the universe and the meaning of life. And I think that many people--not me, but many people do find religion is very, very effective at answering those `why' questions. So my feeling is we should use science in the realm that science works well to answer the `how' questions, and we should perhaps, if it's one particular taste, use religion to answer the `why' questions. BIANCULLI: Brian Greene is the author of the new best-seller "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality" now out in paperback. He'll be back in the second half of the show. I'm David Bianculli and this is FRESH AIR. This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli. We're back with physicist Brian Greene, author of the best-seller "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality." It discusses the latest scientific theories about the nature of space, time and the reality beyond that which we can perceive with out senses. GROSS: You've co-discovered a couple of big things in the world of physics. Would you tell us about one of them, maybe the one that's simpler to explain? Mr. GREENE: Sure. I've worked for many years on the spatial dimensions that string theory requires. And I came upon something a couple of years ago which is very interesting, very exciting. So in Einstein's general relativity, as we've sort of discussed already, the theory says that space can expand. In fact, it says other things. It says space can stretch, it can twist, it can warp, it can undergo all sorts of changes in shape over time. But the one thing that general relativity says cannot happen, it says that space can't rip. Now if you take any familiar piece of material, you stretch it enough, it will tear. General relativity says that's a failure of the analogy; that when it comes to space, you can keep on stretching and it will never rip. Now we studied this question in string theory, which is a theory that goes beyond Einstein's general theory of relativity by also incorporating quantum mechanics. And we reasked that question: Can space rip? And in the framework of string theory, we found that, indeed, space can tear. Space can literally rip apart without there being any catastrophe, without there being any explosion or anything like that. Space can rip and repair itself. So, in essence, what we learned is that space can evolve through a sequence of changes that are much more exotic than the ones that Einstein would have thought possible in the 20th century. GROSS: So if space rips, what does that mean exactly? Like, if a fabric rips, you can stick your finger through it. Mr. GREENE: Yeah. GROSS: If space rips, what gets through the space? What's on one side of the tear, and what's on the other side of the tear? Mr. GREENE: Yeah, it's a very good question because you might say, `Well, if it rips, is the space in between the two pieces--is that part of the universe, or is that outside of the universe?' And the answer is that there isn't any `in between' the two pieces because, again, we're talking about the entire universe, we're talking about all of space. And what we're simply learning is that the changes in the shape of space are more exotic than what we've thought before. So were you at the edge of the rip, so the speak, it's not as though you could fall out into some abyss. No, it just means that that piece of space would be connected to a different part at the end of this process than it would have been connected to at the start of this process. GROSS: Can I ask you to give us a layperson's explanation of what string theory is? Mr. GREENE: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So string theory--well, first, let me just say what it attempts to do, and then I'll say what the theory actually is. String theory attempts to realize the dream that Albert Einstein himself articulated in 1930s, 1940s, of finding this unified theory, what he called it, the single theory, to describe everything. And at that time Einstein was, really, kind of, oh, somewhat of an outcast among scientists because no one else really believed that this was a worthy goal or it was a goal that was attainable. Now we think that string theory, this new approach, may well be the theory that Einstein was looking for, a theory that does unify everything together. Now how does it do that? Well, the basic question that string theory seeks to address is: What is the smallest constituent making up matter in the world around us? So just to be concrete, imagine you took a piece of wood and you sliced it in half; slice that piece in half again, keep on cutting into ever-smaller pieces. And the natural question is: Where does it stop, or does it stop? Is there a finest ingredient that you get to in this cutting process? Now we've learned in our age that sooner or later in this cutting process you get way down to the scale of molecules and atoms. But we also have learned that atoms are not the end of the story because they can be cut, they can be split, into little electrons that orbit around the nucleus, which has neutrons and protons. And even those particles can be split up because they have finer constituents that are known as quarks. Now that is where conventional theory and experiment stops. Electrons and these little particles called quarks and a few other exotic species are the fundamental entities making up everything: you, me, tables, everything in the world that we can literally see. String theory comes along and says no. It suggests that the story continues. It suggests that there's at least one more level of structure. So it says that if you were to look inside an electron or look inside a quark, you would see something else, and the something else is a little filament, little filament of vibrating energy. It kind of looks like a string; that's where the name string theory comes from. And the wonderful idea is that just as the string on a violin can vibrate in different patterns that your ear will hear, different musical notes, these little strings in string theory also can vibrate in different patterns. The vibrations don't produce music. Instead, they produce the different particle species. So an electron is a string vibrating, say, like a middle C, and a quark is a string vibrating like an A. So everything in the world, according to string theory, comes from one fundamental idea: the vibrations of these little strings, these little filaments of energy. That's the basic idea. GROSS: And somehow the discovery or the posing of this string theory leads to the possibility that there are other dimensions beyond the dimensions that we are capable of perceiving. Mr. GREENE: Yes. GROSS: How does string theory lead to the possibility of other dimensions? Mr. GREENE: Very tough question to answer it without mathematics, so let me just say it briefly, and then I'll maybe just fill it in with more of a technical statement. But the underlying mathematics of string theory says that the math breaks down, it doesn't make sense, unless these strings can vibrate in a certain number of patterns. Now imagine you have a little string on your tabletop. It can vibrate in, say, the left, right and back-forth dimensions on the tabletop, but that's it if you constrain it to vibrate only on the surface of the table. Now allow the string to also vibrate in the up-down direction. Clearly there'll be more vibrational patterns that can be executed: the ones that you had before, plus these new ones that might go in the up-down direction. Now the thing is when we count up the number of vibrational patterns in the universe with three dimensions, there aren't enough to satisfy the equation of string theory. When we look in a universe that, say, has four dimensions, indeed, now we have more vibrational patterns. It's hard to picture, but the more dimensions there are, the more vibrational patterns there are allowable. There aren't enough in four dimensions to meet the equations of string theory. We keep on going. And, finally, when we hit the 10-dimensional universe, the number of vibrational patterns of a string does match the requirement that comes out of the math of string theory. And that's where we get this strange prediction that the universe doesn't have three dimensions, but it has more. It comes from the internal mathematical consistency of the equations of the theory itself. GROSS: What are the tools that you use to pose questions about another dimension? Mr. GREENE: Well, we do thought experiments. We can't, at the moment, build technology that would actually allow us to probe these extra dimensions, again, assuming the theory is correct, so we pose thought experiments. We ask ourselves, `Imagine that the extra dimensions have a particular shape. Think of it as a ball or a doughnut or any particular shape that the equations allow.' And we ask ourselves, for instance, `What would happen if the shape of the extra dimensions were to slowly change? Would there be something that we could observe in the world around us that would change in a corresponding manner?' And, indeed, we have found, for instance, that the massive particle, like the electron, would slowly shift if the extra dimensions change their shapes slowly, or the strength of the electromagnetic force or the strength of gravity might slowly shift if these extra dimensions changed. And we spent many years trying to make a very precise dictionary between the shapes of these extra dimensions and the physics of the particles that we would observe. If you like, I can spell that out a touch more concretely. GROSS: Sure. Mr. GREENE: When a string vibrates, its vibrational pattern, as I was saying, determines the properties of particles. So, for instance, the string vibrates really fast, it has a lot of energy. And from Einstein's E=MC2, that means the corresponding particle would have a lot of mass. If a string vibrates very gently, the energy will be less, so the particle will have less mass and so forth. Now when a string vibrates, it doesn't just vibrate into the three dimensions around us. A string is so tiny that it also vibrates into the extra dimensions. And just as the air that goes through a French horn goes into vibrational patterns that are influenced by the twists and turns in the French horn, the vibrational patterns of a string are influenced by the twists and turns in the geometry of these extra dimensions. And that means that properties in the world around us, like the mass of the electron or the strength of the forces of nature, may well be determined by the shape of the extra dimensions. So it's not a matter of hiding away the extra dimensions, making them very small because we can't see them. They may have a very direct impact on the world around us. BIANCULLI: Terry Gross speaking with physicist Brian Greene. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR. (Soundbite of music) BIANCULLI: Let's get back to Terry's interview with physicist Brian Greene. His best-seller, "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality," has just been published in paperback. GROSS: What did you fall in love with first? A search for, like, meaning in the world or just a passion for numbers and the beauty of numbers themselves? Mr. GREENE: It was definitely numbers. You know, when I was a little kid, I was amazed by the fact that--you know, my dad taught me the elementary operations: addition, you know, division, multiplication and so forth. And I was amazed by the fact that with these few rules, you could then start to do stuff. You could do calculations, maybe a calculation that nobody had done before. And I think that's, really, what's very compelling about numbers and about mathematics. I mean, you see it--we are aware of there being, you know, mathematical prodigies, but do you ever have a prodigy in history or psychology or English literature? No, because those subjects you require maturity, you require experience to excel. But in mathematics, you teach a kid a few operations, and he or she can go off and running and do stuff. And that's what I did as a kid. You know, I started to do these calculations that my dad would set me maybe to keep me out of his hair or something. And I would spend days and days doing these huge multiplications and calculations, often for no real purpose beyond the wonder of the numbers themselves. GROSS: Now your father was or is a former vaudevillian? Do I have that right? Mr. GREENE: Yeah. Yeah. My dad was a... GROSS: What was his act? Mr. GREENE: Well, he used to be part of a harmonica act when he was much younger. He was also a... GROSS: Not the Harmonicats? Mr. GREENE: No, no. It was a much less-well-known group. And he was also a stand-up comedian. He was also a voice teacher. He was Harry Belafonte's vocal coach actually. So Harry Belafonte would often come to our apartment in Manhattan when I was growing up to take lessons. So it was a very musical environment when I was growing up. But it was also a difficult one because, I mean, as you know, as many people know, the music industry is very hard to succeed. And my dad, who spent much of his time composing--and he wrote a lot of music that never saw the light of day. And it was hard to see this very talented, creative person, whose work basically just would gather dust. So it was very hard in many ways. GROSS: Are you interested in the physics of music? You know, the vibrations of notes and instruments and all that? Mr. GREENE: Well, I love the fact that--the analogies that physicists have used for many years, which are often musical. GROSS: Right. Mr. GREENE: You talk about the music of the spheres. You talk about, you know, vibrations and so forth. The fact that these metaphors are--they find their most natural home in string theory, you know, the theory that I work on, because the strings in string theory--the equations really are very similar to the equations of a violin string. I mean, there are sort of key differences, but roughly speaking they're in the same genre of equations. And the fact, therefore, that the analogy of music really brushes up so closely to the physics I discuss and work on is very satisfying. It sort of brings it all in a full circle for me. GROSS: Well, I'd like to end on a note about string theory, getting back to the idea that string theory allows for the possibility--in fact, suggests the possibility--that there are other dimensions beyond our perception. Could you just, like, leave us with some idea of what one of those dimensions might be or how these extra dimensions might affect us, if at all, once we discover them? Mr. GREENE: Yeah. Well, if the extra dimensions are of the sort that we think about, I think that they may give an answer to what many people think is the deepest question that a scientist can ask, which is this: Why is the universe as it is? So experimenters for a hundred years have gone out and measured the numbers that I mentioned before, like the mass of the electron or the strength of gravity, the strength of the electromagnetic force. And there are about 20 numbers of that sort that very, very talented experimenters have measured. We have the numbers, and we can write them down. The thing is nobody knows why the particular numbers have the values that they do. We don't know why the electron weighs what it does. Now you might say, `Who cares? You know, if it weighed a little more, it weighed a little less, so be it. That's just how the world would be.' But you really should care because it turns out that if you change any of those numbers by even a little bit, the universe as we know it would disappear. The universe has stars which rely upon nuclear processes that demand delicate relationships between those numbers. You fiddle with those numbers, you change the nuclear processes, they don't happen, stars don't light up, the universe as we know it blacks out. It completely disappears. So the deep question is: Why do the 20 numbers have just the right values to allow stars to shine, planets to form and people to exist on at least one planet? Now no theory has answered this question; string theory hasn't. But it has proposed a framework, and the framework relies upon the extra dimensions because, as I mentioned before, string vibrations, we believe, are the answer to why those numbers have the values they do. The strings vibrate into the extra dimensions. So if we knew exactly what the extra dimensions looked like--we don't know them yet, but if we did, we might be able to calculate how the strings would vibrate and that way calculate the 20 numbers. And if the answer that we got for those 20 numbers agreed with the numbers that experimenters have found over the last century, that really would be the first fundamental explanation for why the universe is as it is and it would rely upon the extra dimensions. So that really is what we're shooting for: trying to explain how it is that the world around us takes the form that it does. And it may very well invoke those extra dimensions in string theory. GROSS: Well, Brian Greene, thank you (laughs). Very interesting (laughs). Thanks for talking with us. Mr. GREENE: Thank you. I enjoyed it. BIANCULLI: Brian Greene speaking with Terry Gross last year in this dimension. He's the author of the best-seller "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality," which has just been published in paperback. A little later we remember the playwright Arthur Miller who died yesterday at the age of 89. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Review: New documentary "Inside Deep Throat" DAVID BIANCULLI, host: But, first, film critic David Edelstein has a review of the new documentary "Inside Deep Throat," about the infamous 1972 porn film "Deep Throat." The documentary mixes footage of the movie and the sensation it caused with contemporary interviews of participants and cultural commentators. A note to parents: This review contains a brief description of the sexual acts in the film. DAVID EDELSTEIN reporting: Oh, joy, I'm having a '70s flashback. It's `Deep Throat' week in America. First we had the opening of the Woodward-Bernstein Watergate archives, along with more speculation about that most famous of anonymous leakers. Now we have this playful but serious documentary, "Inside Deep Throat," a tale of sex, violence and censorship that revolves around the boffo 1972 hard-core porn flick that inspired that Watergate pseudonym. There's a deeper connection between the two throats, and I'll get to that. But for those who don't know, "Deep Throat" was the first heterosexual hard-core porn picture to focus on fellatio. Ex-hairdresser Gerard Damiano cooked up the premise when he first saw his future star Linda Boreman perform the act prodigiously in a less ambitious porn film he was shooting in his living room. He christened here Linda Lovelace and then concocted a screenplay about a woman who gets no sexual pleasure from copulation. A doctor, played by Harry Reems, discovers that her clitoris is in her throat and, being a good Samaritan, helps her locate it. His climax was the first so-called money shot that many Americans would see. In the documentary directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, Norman Mailer says that Americans will sell their souls for a giggle, and "Deep Throat" was a giggle, but it was also a fount of controversy. Feminists complained that the conceit of a woman being sexually satisfied only by servicing a man is, at best, self-serving and, at worst, misogynistic. But there's another dimension expressed in the documentary by Berkeley Professor Linda Williams, that "Deep Throat" was the first time the very idea of a woman's sexual fulfillment was an issue on screen. In the court case that led to shutting down the theater where "Deep Throat" was playing, the New York City prosecutor argued that, quote, "The movie says it's perfectly normal to have a clitoral orgasm, and that is wrong." The most successful movie ever in its ratio of cost-to-box office grosses, "Deep Throat" had even the upper middle class and intelligentsia lining up. Interviewees from Camille Paglia to former porn star Georgina Spelvin argued that this was a hopeful sign that sexual exploration seemed on the verge of making it into mainstream Hollywood movies. But then the film became a target of moral crusaders and the Nixon administration. This scene features Charles Keating, later convicted of fraud in the savings and loan scandal; then an anti-porn lawyer; then attorney Alan Dershowitz; then a little old lady in line. (Soundbite of "Inside Deep Throat") Mr. CHARLES KEATING: It's a flood tide of filth that's engulfed the minds and hearts and souls of America like nothing else ever has. Unidentified Man: We have smut all over the face of this country now because we are letting those immoral people have their way in our country. Mr. ALAN DERSHOWITZ (Attorney): "Deep Throat" succeeded commercially, at least in part, because the government went after it. The government became the driving force behind the public relations. Unidentified Woman: I just saw it, and I liked it. I liked it. I wanted to see a dirty picture, and that's what I saw. But I want the right to see that picture. I don't want somebody telling me that I can't see a dirty picture. EDELSTEIN: Oh, I wish she'd been my grandmother. "Inside Deep Throat" ultimately goes in two directions: the government crusade and the sad histories of the participants, none of whom saw any back-end money. The Mafia co-producers grabbed it all. The documentary shows the trial and conviction of star Harry Reems, who became a cause celebre among Hollywood lefties but ended up panhandling on Hollywood Boulevard, although he's now a born again realtor in Park City, Utah. The story of Linda Lovelace remains the most notorious and disturbing. She would join anti-porn feminists and claim she'd been forced into performing in porn films by her ex-husband. What I didn't know was at the end of her life, before she was killed in a car accident in 2002, she needed money and went back to posing in porn magazines. "Inside Deep Throat" isn't as campy and unhinged as the delightful Bailey and Barbato Tammy Faye Bakker documentary, but it's very entertaining. It even excerpts that infamous money shot. It also made me nostalgic, in this era of video porn, for the old grind house days. Sure, they were grim places, but the idea of a public culture for adults only remains appealing. That dream was snuffed out by people like Nixon crony Roy Cohen, who actually debated Reems on camera. Cohen says, `You talk as though the Bill of Rights was created just for you.' `Well, um, yeah, it was,' which had something to do with that other Deep Throat. BIANCULLI: David Edelstein is film critic for the online magazine Slate.
- Description
- HALF: Brian Greene (R) TEN: David (Inside Deep Throat) Arthur Miller Obit. (R)
- Description
- Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues, is one of public radio's most popular programs. Each week, nearly 4.5 million people listen to the show's intimate conversations broadcast on more than 450 National Public Radio (NPR) stations across the country, as well as in Europe on the World Radio Network. Though Fresh Air has been categorized as a "talk show," it hardly fits the mold. Its 1994 Peabody Award citation credits Fresh Air with "probing questions, revelatory interviews and unusual insights." And a variety of top publications count Gross among the country's leading interviewers. The show gives interviews as much time as needed, and complements them with comments from well-known critics and commentators. Fresh Air is produced at WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and broadcast nationally by NPR.
- Description
- (1.) Physicist BRIAN GREENE. With his book The Elegant Universe he developed a reputation for explaining complex scientific theories with insight and clarity. The book was the basis of a PBS series. His new book is, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (Vintage Book, paperback). GREENE is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard and his doctorate from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. (THIS INTERVIEW CONTINUES THRU THE SECOND HALF OF THE SHOW.ORIGINAL AIRDATE: 3/16/04). (2.) Film critic DAVID EDELSTEIN reviews Inside Deep Throat, a new documentary that explores the 1972 adult film considered the most profitable of all time. (3.) We remember playwright ARTHUR MILLER. He died last night at the age of 89 at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. Miller was the author of many plays, including the legendary Death of a Salesman, for which he won a Pulitzer. He was married briefly to Marilyn Monroe. (Original airdate: 1/12/99)
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Distributor: NPR
Producing Organization: WHYY Public Media
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- Citations
- Chicago: “Fresh Air,” American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed August 2, 2025, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-215-42n5thzt.
- MLA: “Fresh Air.” American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. August 2, 2025. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-215-42n5thzt>.
- APA: Fresh Air. Boston, MA: American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-215-42n5thzt