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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ROBERTS I liked your line in The Drunkard’s Walk about lotteries: “What would you think of a system where one person wins a million dollars; for hundreds of thousands of people nothing happens; and one person dies a violent death.”

MLODINOW Would you participate?

ROBERTS Yes, would you participate? That was great.

MLODINOW Most people would, it turns out. But you can’t quite phrase it that way.

ROBERTS I thought, ’Well, you’re not going to read that line in many descriptions of lotteries.’ That’s just not the way the average professor of statistics would describe a lottery. But it’s so much more interesting than the average way a lottery is described. I thought, ’This is brilliant science writing. This person isn’t just copying or popularizing.’

MLODINOW That’s a creativity that comes into writing as well as science. Science research takes a lot of creativity and the ability to look at things from a different angle and I think writing does, too. I think one of the things that sets this book apart from other books on probability is that sort of thing; I looked at a lottery and didn’t just say ’Here are your chances of winning and look how small they are,’ but I think I looked at it from a unique, somewhat amusing, surprising angle. That’s where the work comes in writing the book, is to find those angles rather than just explaining things.

ROBERTS I think the average science writer would grasp that if you’re going to write about the lottery, you’re going to have to find some interesting stories, but I don’t think they’re going to be bold enough or creative enough to think of the way that I just said–the part I quoted. That’s kind of a writer who’s more sure of himself. You should be sure of yourself–you have all these credentials–you did all this stuff in science but I don’t think the average writer is that confident. You know, Malcolm Gladwell tries to do this sort of thing. He does these slightly counter-intuitive ideas but it’s less successful, I think.

MLODINOW An idea like that would have been hard for someone who isn’t trained in the field; someone who is trained in the field I think would have confidence, if they thought of that idea, to use it. Also, that’s the two areas of confidence you need. You need confidence in the field, and you also need confidence as a writer. You build the latter by writing. Sometimes I’ll write sections of the book or I’ll go on for a while in a somewhat absurd–I’m thinking–direction and I know enough now to know that it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t work. I think I know enough now to tell the difference.

When I was first writing, I was being a bit more hesitant about getting a wild idea and going there, thinking it was going to be silly and I’m going to embarrass myself. Then I learned, well, it’s good to just do that and don’t worry if you waste a day or two in that direction; you can just cut it and keep going but it’s a good investment because sometimes it works and you get something really interesting. I also learned with time that I can tell the difference. If it really is silly and not working, I won’t embarrass myself by leaving it in the manuscript; I will notice it and cut it and not fret over the lost day or two and I’ll go on and write something else to take its place. Those are all lessons that you have to learn but it is interesting that you brought up the notion of confidence because I think that’s something that you do learn as you write. It’s really a dual lesson of confidence–that it’s okay to go ahead and take chances with the writing–and the letting go of the possible wasted time you’re going to have. So the confidence to know that you won’t embarrass yourself because if it’s really stupid, in the end you’ll cut it and also that you’re not going to fret over the wasted time are two lessons that I think you might not know your first time you’re writing a book. In letting go, you have to be naked and just let yourself go and not worry about what you’re saying and how it comes off.

ROBERTS And you know that you understand the subject. You know that there’s not going to be some other person out there who’s going to say, ’This is all wrong.’ That’s just not going to happen.

MLODINOW Right. You can make mistakes in details–everybody makes misstatements sometimes. There’s so much in a book that it’s hard not to have anything come about wrong. Even Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, the original, gave the wrong relation at one point between wave length and energy for photons. He knows the difference, but unless you’re a computer you do make errors, so another lesson you have to learn is not be too embarrassed if something does come out that is a detail that you get wrong. Obviously not an important concept you get wrong.

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ROBERTS You learned stuff from writing TV scripts that transferred into book writing?

MLODINOW Yes, I think you do. It’s odd because there’s in many ways very little similarity. Pacing, for instance, is very different on a TV show and when you’re reading something but you do get a feeling for it and its importance. All those years of comedy writing certainly I think translate to having a real sense of humor, so there are certain things that do translate.

ROBERTS I think there’s one remarkable thing that makes your books different from other books. Your books give the impression that they want to be entertaining–the author, you, is trying to meet the reader halfway. When you’re writing a TV show, it’s got to be entertaining because otherwise people won’t want to watch it. They’re not required to watch it to get a job or to get a good grade in their class; they’re watching it because they enjoy it. So you’ve got to make it enjoyable. Whereas a lot of books written by professors seem to be saying, “Well, I’m so important and you’re going to read my book because this is an important book to read, so I’m not going to even try to make it interesting; I’m just going to do whatever I want.” Your books are more reader-friendly in that sense.

MLODINOW I think that’s true. A lot of people who are very serious about their topic have a hard time seeing why you need to make it interesting or knowing how to make it interesting for people who aren’t automatically interested in that topic. To me that’s one of the joys of writing. One of the satisfactions is when I go, ’Wow, I made that really funny’ or ’I made that really interesting,’ and then I get excited by that.

ROBERTS That talent–it really helped you to have written for TV because it’s kind of a fresh voice.

MLODINOW I think it helped to develop my voice, too, especially the comedy part, you know? And what my credits show is obviously a small part of what I write. For example at one point I was thinking that maybe I wanted to get on Leno or one of those late night comedy shows and we never really went that far with it, but I did spend some days writing stand up lines and pure joke writing to try to get some material together for my agent to show around. Probably very few other science writers have gone through an exercise such as that. That all, I think, contributes to being able to write with a sense of humor. Of course, you have to have a personality that gravitates in that direction in the first place.

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