Seth's Blog

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.

1. part 1
2. part 2
3. part 3
4. part 4
5. part 5
6. part 6
7. part 7
8. part 8
9. part 9
10. part 10
11. part 11
12. part 12
13. part 13
14. part 14
15. part 15

Whole interview.

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.

ROBERTS  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.

The Inuit Paradox is that the Inuit eat lots of fat and hardly any vegetables or fruit yet are much healthier than groups who follow conventional dietary guidelines. In particular,

In the Nunavik villages in northern Quebec, adults over 40 get almost half their calories from native foods, says Dewailly, and they don’t die of heart attacks at nearly the same rates as other Canadians or Americans. Their cardiac death rate is about half of ours, he says.

Likewise, the fact that Greenland Eskimos had very low rates of heart disease led to the discovery of the importance of omega-3 fatty acids. If you read anything on this subject you will come across the concept of “healthy fats”. Sure, some fats are good for you, no doubt about it. Weston Price was the first of many to make this point. But is it the whole story? Attempts to reduce heart disease by giving people fish oil have had disappointing results. Perhaps they got the dose wrong. Or perhaps they missed something crucial. Here is what the Inuit eat:

Our meat was seal and walrus, marine mammals that live in cold water and have lots of fat. We used seal oil for our cooking and as a dipping sauce for food. We had moose, caribou, and reindeer. We hunted ducks, geese, and little land birds like quail, called ptarmigan. We caught crab and lots of fish—salmon, whitefish, tomcod, pike, and char. Our fish were cooked, dried, smoked, or frozen. We ate frozen raw whitefish, sliced thin. The elders liked stinkfish, fish buried in seal bags or cans in the tundra and left to ferment. And fermented seal flipper, they liked that too.” [emphasis added]

In the rest of the article and in all discussions of the subject I have seen you won’t find a word about fermented food. Yet I believe that was crucial. The fermented food had lots of harmless bacteria that caused the immune system to stay awake; heart disease is caused by infection too slowly fought off. Why do the French have low rates of heart disease? It’s not only the wine, it’s also the stinky cheese they eat. Why do the Japanese have low rates of heart disease? It’s not only the fish, it’s also the miso and natto. I’ll be blogging more about this — stay tuned.

A surprising effect of yogurt.

• Or great packaging. Agua de Piedra, a brand of mineral water, uses only the bottles that would otherwise be wasted when a glass-bottle manufacturer changes production from one color to another. Not only is this a great idea but it gives their bottles an attractive variation in color. I really liked the water, too.
• The Pacari line of chocolates includes “raw” chocolate, that is, chocolate that is “minimally processed and unroasted to maintain the antioxidants and complex flavor profile of the cacao.”
• I was surprised that there is a drink based on tumeric: Sajen Jamu.
• One of the most interesting features of the show was the vast increase in the amount of cheese (all artisanal cheese) compared to all previous shows I attended, such as the show 2 years ago. Perhaps the best cheese I had was from Quickes Traditional, a farm in the south of England. They make many kinds of cheddars.