Skip to main content

Dan Levitt - Five Way Interview

Dan Levitt spent over 25 years writing, producing and directing award-winning documentaries for National Geographic, Discovery, Science, History, HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute).  He has filmed with Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Bernard Carr, and Sean B. Carroll among many others. His latest book is What's Gotten Into You?

Why science?

I’ve always been drawn to the beauty of science. It offers me a way to appreciate the natural world and the fantastic physical, chemical, and biological web we’re part of. I think my sense of that deepened when I lived for a few years near a game park in Kenya. There was a small rainforest close by and everywhere I walked I had a view of Mount Kilimanjaro. It gave me a visceral sense of how enmeshed we are in a much larger ecosystem. Of course, science also helps us understand things that would otherwise be inexplicable, like the question at the heart of this book—how did we end up here?

Why this book?

The inspiration came when I realized that I really didn’t know what my body was made of, much less where that stuff ultimately came from. Once I realized that every particle within me sprang out of the Big Bang, I was hooked. I began wondering what happened— how did particles that were zipping around 13.8 billion years ago end up creating us?

At the same time, I began wondering how we are able to peer back billions of years in time. How did we do that? Those were the questions that started me off and I just kept thinking about them until I decided I would write the book.

In researching this book, what did you find most surprising?

I had never realized that life itself profoundly influenced our planet’s geology. Once photosynthesizing cyanobacteria came along, they began releasing oxygen that transformed Earth and made it possible for more complex cells and creatures to evolve.

I didn’t know some scientists suspect that the first life on Earth might have been microbes that hitched a ride on meteorites from Mars.

Something else that surprised me was how often scientists were initially dismissive of theories that we now recognize were groundbreaking. After finishing the first draft of my book, I circled back to try to understand why and I saw that cognitive biases had cropped up again and again. I ended up giving them nicknames, like the 'Too Weird to be True' bias and the 'As an Expert, I’ve Lost Sight of How Much Is Still Unknown' bias. I hadn’t expected to be thinking about cognitive biases at all.

What’s next?

First a really good vacation. Then I’ll be writing another book about scientific discovery. I haven’t settled on the topic yet, but I had a great time writing What’s Gotten Into You. It led me to think about so many things that I hadn’t expected to, so I’m looking forward to the next one.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

I’ve been listening to War and Peace on audiobook and loving it. Tolstoy is a master at making you feel like you’re present in the scene. I’ve also been playing with ChatGPT a bit and trying to understand what it will be capable of. At this point I can tell you that it’s a long way off from writing like Tolstoy.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...
Post a Comment
Read more

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on...
Post a Comment
Read more