Filming the Nova Series Musser: My Questions Fall Into a Few Categories

Filming the Nova Series Musser: My questions fall into a few categories. There’s future-of-string- theory questions, there’s sociological questions about popularization of science, and then I have a few questions about string theory. One thing that I wanted to ask you about—this is the sociological side of things—is that whenever we do an article in physics generally, certainly fundamental physics or cosmology, we run into an intimidation that readers have when they hear the word “string theory” or the word “cosmology,” and they throw up their hands and say: “I’ll never understand it.” Have you dealt with that kind of roadblock that people have in their mind? Greene: Well, I’ve definitely encountered a certain amount of intimidation at the outset when it comes to ideas like string theory or with the features of cosmology. But what I have found is that the basic interest is so widespread, and so deep in most people that I’ve spoken with, that there is a willingness to go a little bit further than you might with other subjects that are more easily taken in. And that fed right into The Elegant Universe. A decision I had to make was, How close to the science am I going to be? There are two kinds of books out there; both serve a great purpose. One is just very general, but gives you a flavor of the subject. The other tries to take you into the subject, again leaving out the math but really tries to give a pretty accurate portrayal of what’s really going on, and I decided to take the latter route, and I found that many people, through the questions that they’ve asked, appreciated that. Musser: I think people said the same thing of Steve Weinberg’s book. Greene: The First Three Minutes? Musser: Yes, The First Three Minutes—that it really took the latter approach. Greene: Oh definitely. Steve’s book is an absolute classic, and I think it’s really been a model for many of us. Musser: So what kind of particular decisions did that bring up for you as you were writing? Did you structure the book differently? Greene: Totally. I structured the book in a way where it was very much like a detective story, where you’re taking clues and ideas at every point on the way in the scientific journey and then subsequently using them for the next step of exploration. I tried to make it so that the diligent reader would have a self- contained account. Basically, every time I introduced a new idea, I would really think through, What does it require to understand this, and have I set up the appropriate scaffolding for that to happen? Whereas, by doing it more generally you know you can always say, “As it turns out” or “People have found,” and you throw it into that vague place. I really tried to do that as sparingly as possible. Musser: I noticed you did have the rough idea and the detailed idea at several points broken out. Greene: Exactly. I found that to be a useful way of going about it, especially in the harder parts. It gives a rough idea and gives the reader permission: If this is the level at which you want to take it in, that’s great, and feel free to skip this next stuff; and if not, go for it. Musser: How do you find things have changed in TV? Or have they? Greene: You mean in terms of trying to get these ideas across in a television context? Well, it is very different, in some ways, because a book can assume that the diligent reader will turn back a few pages to fill in something they may not have gotten the first time around when they recognize they need it later. But TV goes by once. So, there’s a real sense that it has to be something absorbable on the spot, on the fly. And that changes what you could do. It definitely means that the story you can tell is at a somewhat less detailed level, but at the same time it gives us the opportunity to be more entertaining. So, there’s a trade-off, and I think that was part of what the challenge of the whole series was—to find the appropriate balance between entertainment and science and a level at which science could be presented and so absorbed. Musser: Did your thinking on that evolve as the series took shape and as you talked with the producers? Greene: Yeah, definitely. I was fairly diligent all the way through; even small scientific bends of the facts, I examined really carefully to see whether I was going to stay with them. But I would say by the end of the program, or the end of the constructing of the script of the program, the balance was much more clear to me about what you could do on television. Part of it came from looking at small rough cuts and realizing, You know what, I just had too many words in that description and it’s too much. You just can’t take it in. And the shorter, punchier one, which I thought perhaps would be too quick, in television, it was actually more than enough to get the idea, because you are not just dealing with the words. You’re dealing with images, you’re dealing with sounds, you’re dealing with a continuous story that you’ve been watching and that does allow you to take in things more quickly. And I didn’t really realize that until getting my hands dirty with the process. Musser: So you would redo scenes? Greene: We would often do scenes a couple of different ways. The director would say, “Here’s what I think would work,” and I’d be like, “No, I think it needs a little more than that,” and we would do it both ways, and always he was right. Musser: That’s their job, I guess. I think at one point, in one of our discussions some months ago, you mentioned that TV is a lot different from being on stage or in front of a classroom. What are some of the differences in the way you had to present yourself? Greene: You know, when I give a lecture, part of the enjoyment and part of the energy comes from a kind of interaction with the audience. Not a direct one—I rarely do back-and-forth exchanges until question-and-answer period, but you just feel the audience’s reaction, the energy in the room. Whereas when you’re filming for television, there’s just you and the director and the camera. You’ve got to generate the energy from a different place. And I guess everybody has their way of doing that. After working on the program intensively for a few days, a couple of weeks, I began to find my own ways as well. But it was definitely a different experience to stare into the blank eye of a camera, as opposed to the life of an audience. Musser: Was that also something you had to iterate through? Greene: Yeah, I found that after we had done a bunch of shooting, the early stuff, in the first few days, I didn’t like. I had yet to find a rhythm, and so we redid it. And that’s something you can also do that you can’t do in a live situation. So in that way, it’s forgiving. I like to say things more than one way. Sometimes people have said that makes me wordier than them, but I feel that with a hard idea, you want to say it like this, and you want to say it like that, and you want to tell it like that, and after you hear it three different ways, the fourth way really solidifies it. That does not work on TV. On TV you’ve really just got to say it right the first time and just find the right way to do it, and that’s it. Seeing Things From Different Perspectives Musser: When you’re teaching, do you try to say it in various ways? Greene: Constantly. I just think that when it comes to abstract ideas, you just need many roads into them and if you stick with one road from the scientific point of view, I think you really compromise your ability to make breakthroughs. I think that’s really what breakthroughs are about. Everybody’s looking at it one way and you come from the back. You’re getting to the same idea, you’re just getting there differently, and that different way of getting there somehow reveals things that the other approach didn’t. Musser: What are some examples you’ve encountered of that take-a-back- door approach? Greene: Well, probably, the biggest ones are Ed Witten’s breakthroughs, and that’s his style. Just to tell you an example, in the second superstring revolution, the idea of branes was out there for a long time. A bunch of guys were pushing it, and nobody was listening. Ed came along and he put things together. He just walked up the mountain and looked down, and saw the connections that nobody else saw, and that way united the five string theories that previously were thought to be completely distinct. It was all out there; he just took a different perspective, and bang, it all came together.

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