Interview with Leonard Mlodinow (part 6)

ROBERTS Did you write in high school or in college?

MLODINOW I started writing in third grade for my school librarian. All I remember about that was they were short stories about dinosaurs and she claimed to love them and that gave me lots of encouragement. I used to love writing little stories; I didn’t do that in college very much, I do believe I did in high school. In college I was just too busy– I had three majors and also got my master’s degree, and I was only there three and a half years.

ROBERTS I didn’t know that. Where did you go to college?

MLODINOW To Brandeis University.

ROBERTS What were your three majors and master’s degrees?

MLODINOW Chemistry, physics and math.

ROBERTS What was the master’s degree?

MLODINOW In physics.

ROBERTS In three and a half years you got a master’s degree?

MLODINOW Yes. I took about double the normal course load. I had to get special permission for that. In the end I was one course short; I had to choose between the master’s and the chemistry. I think I made the wrong choice, I chose the master’s, so I ended up with a double major but I did every chemistry course for a major except one.

ROBERTS Why did you do this?

MLODINOW I didn’t do this to try and break records; I was tremendously interested in things and if I saw a course I liked I wanted to take it. I was like the cliché of a kid in a candy store stuffing his face. I was stuffing my face with knowledge.

ROBERTS Why didn’t you stay longer? Why three and a half years? Why not four and a half years?

MLODINOW Normal is four years and I took a semester off to live in to Israel during the Yom Kippur war, so that made it three and a half. I didn’t think about staying an extra year. I went on to graduate school next so I didn’t leave school. And I’m still doing that–that’s what I do by writing books is just learn things and then write about them.

ROBERTS Yes, I know what you mean. Why did you choose physics rather than math or chemistry?

MLODINOW Chemistry was my love; chemistry and math since I was little and I had the clichéd chemistry set in the basement–blew up myself, burned myself, burned down the house (well, caught the house on fire) and all sorts of things and I thought ’I will be a chemist’ from the age of, I don’t know, ten. When I got to college what happened was more and more I realized there wasn’t enough math in the chemistry for me so I started out with a math and a chemistry major and I thought the math was so Mickey Mouse in chemistry that I added . . . I learned about physics while I was in Israel in the kibbutz–I talked about that experience in Feynman’s Rainbow–and came back and added the physics and ended up in physics. I’ve always loved math but was not excited by pure math where you’re just exploring mathematics or its own sake. I always liked the applications. When I started learning about curved space it was not because the idea that Euclidian geometry isn’t the only one that excited me. It was the idea that physical space might not satisfy Euclidean axioms that really excited me. That was my proclivity in that direction.

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