Janna Levin

Physicist, cosmologist, and author. Professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College, Columbia University. Works on black holes, gravitational waves, the shape and topology of the universe, and chaos in the cosmos. Author of A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (novel) and Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space (account of LIGO’s detection of gravitational waves). Known for both rigorous theoretical work and exceptional public communication of deep physics.

Background

Works at the intersection of theoretical cosmology and the philosophy of physics. Contributed to understanding the topology of the universe and the sound of black holes. Her book Black Hole Blues documented the decades-long project that led to LIGO’s first detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes in 2015. A recurring interlocutor on questions about the nature of space, time, and information.

Known for: the “black holes are no thing” framing (event horizon as place, not object); clear exposition of the information paradox and ER=EPR; humanising the history of physics (Oppenheimer, Schwarzschild, Wheeler).

Appearances in this wiki

Key positions

• The black hole IS the event horizon — a region of empty spacetime, not a dense object
• Inside a black hole, space and time swap: the singularity is a future moment, not a location in space
• Hawking radiation is thermal and carries no information — the information paradox is real and unresolved
• Unitarity will be preserved: quantum information is not lost (sides with Susskind over Hawking)
• AdS/CFT (Maldacena) strongly implies information must be conserved even in gravity theories
• ER=EPR is “probably” the resolution: entanglement between Hawking radiation and interior is mediated by tiny wormholes
• Science is agnostic — the same knowledge that explains why stars shine enables the atomic bomb