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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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.’

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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.

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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.