ROBERTS I like to think that because you cover so many hundreds of years when you discuss geometry or probability that–and there’s so many interesting characters and they have to be so brilliant to make a lasting contribution to those fields–that you’re able to draw from a richer material than most writers. You have to be a very unusual person to make a lasting contribution to probability theory. [That came out wrong. You have to be a very unusual person to make a lasting contribution to any field.]

MLODINOW Right, well certainly mathematicians tend to be very unusual and colorful, odd sorts. That helps when you’re writing a book about them. The physicist are maybe not quite as odd. My book Feynman’s Rainbow was really about just one physicist and he was very colorful, so I got away with that. The work I do with Stephen Hawking is different in that sense–there’s not that much history in those books. In our new book that we’re doing, he doesn’t want us to much history at all, so we’re going to focus on the concepts.

ROBERTS . . . Let’s start with your writing career. You seem to have been a good writer by the time you got your PhD because as I understand it, you were able to actually get a writing job after leaving Cal Tech. You must have been at a very high level by that time; you wrote a spec script for, what, Star Trek? Or some other show?

MLODINOW Well, my rise in Hollywood is a long and involved story, but yes, I did rise pretty quickly. After Cal Tech I went to the Max Planck Institute in Munich and then I came to Hollywood to make my way and in six months I was working at my first TV job, which was a really crappy show on cable, which was pretty new then–cable, I mean. And from there I worked by way up to network shows–I did comedies such as Night Court, the original Gary Shandling show and I wrote for dramas as well including MacGuyver and as you said, Star Trek: The Next Generation. That was a crazy period of life.

ROBERTS I got the impression that you already knew how to write really well by then.

MLODINOW I think that in a way . . . I guess there’s two components to being able to write. One is your natural proclivity, I try not to say talent, but it’s your voice or the way you express yourself. And the other is the craft part of it that you learn by doing. I think I always had a good sense of humor and maybe a way to say things colorfully or think in terms of dramatic or powerful situations and I guess that’s the first part and served well. The other part is the things you learn as you go, such as what puts people to sleep or how to abandon what you think are good ideas but really aren’t. That’s a hard lesson to learn because it’s difficult to let go of things you might like and to realize that it just doesn’t belong or goes on too far or the idea that sometimes it’s hard to recognize things that may be good but just don’t belong there–that are tangents and they take away the dramatic thrust of where you’re going and they really have to be cut even though they’re good and you like them. You know, lessons like that, lessons about pacing–you learn by doing, by failing. You learn more about pacing, all sorts of technical aspects of writing, whether its fiction or nonfiction or TV or books; there are certain principles that you just learn by repeatedly doing and doing wrong and realizing, absorbing what went wrong and fixing it and you grow that way. In book writing you’re able to do that a lot with rough drafts so a lot of your mistakes don’t end up getting published–you know? TV writing can be so fast that often you don’t see the problems with the script until you actually watch it on the air and then you go, ’Next time I think I won’t have that guy climbing the stairs for four minutes in the middle of the scene; I think five seconds is enough to get the idea across.’

Interview directory.

ROBERTS What other nonfiction writers do you like to read?

MLODINOW That’s a good question. Strangely I’ve never thought about that. I can name novelists I repeatedly read, but most nonfiction writers that I like write to subjects of their own expertise, and I pick up nonfiction books based on what they are about more than on who wrote them.

ROBERTS Such as what? Which books?

MLODINOW For instance, Carl Sagan if you want to go back a little bit. I enjoyed several of his books; they tended to be, obviously, on astronomy or issues related. I also enjoyed Freakonomics, and I like Oliver Sacks’s books on neuroscience. And Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness; I don’t know if Gilbert will turn around now and write a book on geometry . . .

ROBERTS I don’t think so.

MLODINOW . . . these authors write about their own field. Oh, I do enjoy Simon Winchester’s books and he tends to branch out. I think he’s a good writer.

ROBERTS Was he a professor? He might have been a PhD in geology.

MLODINOW I don’t know. But I do believe he had a number of unsuccessful books before–I forget which was his first successful book . . .

ROBERTS The Professor and the Madman, I think.

MLODINOW The Professor and the Madman, right. His wife, I think, pushed him to write that. If I remember the story correctly, he wasn’t initially going to write it. I think I am unusual in that I’m a science writer who writes in a variety of topics. I am finishing a new book with Stephen Hawking right now, called The Grand Design, on the origin of the universe, and of the apparent laws of nature. Then my next book is going to be on the unconscious mind.

ROBERTS A friend just asked me about a book on consciousness. She said, ’Well, what about this book by _____?’ (I don’t want to say his name), and I said ’No, I don’t like that.’ And she said, ’Well, what would you recommend?’ And I said, ’I don’t think there are any good books on consciousness except the one my friend is writing.’

MLODINOW Well thank you; I hope to live up to that. I’ve found that there is a niche available in that field. There have been a lot of books but a lot of them have been case studies or people’s individual pet theories about what consciousness is and I think that for someone like me from the outside, who yet has a scientific understanding, there is room for a good book there. And there probably is room every five or ten years for another one because it is a very fast moving field.

Interview directory.

Leonard Mlodinow’s most recent book is The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The first book of his that I read was Feynman’s Rainbow. It was so good I wrote him a fan letter. He came to talk at Berkeley in connection with A Briefer History of Time (which he co-wrote with Stephen Hawking). After his talk I told him how much I had liked Feynman’s Rainbow. Because I was a psychology professor he asked my opinion of the parts of The Drunkard’s Walk that involved psychology. That’s how we met.

ROBERTSÂ You’re a scientist but you also are a good writer and you appreciate the science–no one’s telling you, “this is good and this is bad,” you can figure it out for yourself. Is that fair? Is that accurate?

MLODINOW I hope so. As a scientist I like to think I have good taste in judging what is good science, at least. It’s not always so easy to judge which directions are the ones that are going to be fruitful, obviously, but certainly in judging what’s good science, or more importantly I think, in judging what science is crucial for the public to understand and how to make it exciting for them. That’s one thing that I think a lot of scientists don’t know how to do, which is how to look at from the point of view of a person who isn’t a scientist and explain it in an interesting and amusing, entertaining and most of all exciting way. One of my pet peeves is that, among the general public, people think that science is dry and boring and done by nerds who wear accountant-type thick glasses and white coats. Really it’s done by people who experience huge ups and downs and have as much passion for their subject as other professions that are considered more romantic, like artists.

ROBERTS Unlike other people who write about science, I think you’re writing intellectual history. I mean, you’re not saying, “Oh, this is a popular topic; this came up in the last ten years as a new popular topic I’m going to write a book about.” You’re writing about things like geometry and probability, which are ancient topics. That’s really unusual. Am I right?

MLODINOW When I write about something, it’s because that excites me and I see a relevance to our world today. When I wrote Euclid’s Window about geometry, it was really about the idea of curved space and curved space is so important in modern physics and even in technology. If you look at, say, global positioning systems, you have to use Einstein’s Theory of Gravitation which is based on curved space and I thought that no one really sat down before and explained, taking their time, what is curved space and what is un-curved space and how do we get that idea and where did it come from and looking at fascinating stories, so that’s where Euclid’s Window came from. In The Drunkard’s Walk it was similar in the sense that there had been other books about probability or other books about statistics and other books about randomness, but I don’t think there had been any book on all three of them, but what propelled me was the idea that not just to write about these concepts but the realization that they’re very important in everyday life, and really the focus on everyday life and how these concepts can help us see it differently.

ROBERTS And it’s better written than the other books, I have to say.

MLODINOW Thank you.

ROBERTS That’s really important, I mean, what good is it to write a book if it’s hard to read?

MLODINOW I think that’s what I bring to this field, is both knowing the science and being able to write well, and with a sense of humor. There are plenty of people who know the science and plenty of people out there who write well, but there are few who can do both.