Janna Levin’s creative cosmos: navigating multiple dimensions in science and art
- Colin Hunter
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Even Janna Levin, once dubbed the “chillest astrophysicist alive,” is abuzz with energy about “magical” collaborations, both scientific and artistic.
Janna Levin lives in the overlap—the parts of the Venn diagram where astrophysics meets art, where meticulous math meets creative chaos.
On any given day, she could be sleuthing out a theoretical physics puzzle at Columbia University, hosting a science-meets-art soirée in Brooklyn, podcasting about black holes with Neil deGrasse Tyson—or doing all of the above.
"My best state is creative frenzy," she says on a video call from Pioneer Works, the experience right in front of her. Her knack for taming multidisciplinary collectives is on full display in Brooklyn, where she is scientific director.
And yet amid the frenzy, Levin exudes a kind of grounded presence. She remains perpetually in the moment, fully and happily immersed in whatever puzzle or conversation, equation or new chaos captures her interest. This calm amid chaos led to her being described by Wired, in 2016, as the “chillest astrophysicist alive.” For the record, she prefers a headline Wired considered but didn’t go with: “Janna Levin’s Theory of Doing Everything.”
Pioneer Works: An urban temple of art and science
On this particular spring afternoon, she is in her woody, sunlit office at Pioneer Works, juggling astrophysics research, public talks, media interviews and an urgent email to her daughter—just before catching a flight to Texas.
As she starts talking about her recent research into extra dimensions, her office door swings open and Gabriel Florenz, artistic director at Pioneer Works, hands her a tray of take-out sushi for lunch.
“We’re a real warm family here,” she says.
More than a dozen years have passed since Levin first wandered into the then-unfinished building in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, looking for a quiet place to work on what would become her 2016 book Black Hole Blues and Other Songs From Outer Space. Somewhat organically, by virtue of hanging out and befriending the founders, Levin became director of scientific programming at Pioneer Works.
Black Hole Blues drew widespread acclaim – and so did Levin; the New York Times lauded the way she “harmonizes science and life with remarkable virtuosity.”
Building community through science and culture
At Pioneer Works she continues to harmonize science and life in different ways—through salons, discussions and debates, all free to attend for similarly curious minds.
"I came here just to escape my office at Columbia," she recalls. "Next thing I knew, I was hosting science nights with folding chairs and malfunctioning mics, and 400 people were showing up."
She wasn't shocked that people were hungry for science. She was surprised by how hungry they were when it was offered in the right setting—stripped of pretense, interwoven with music and art, and open to the kind of questions that don't have tidy answers.
"We built the world we wanted to live in," she says. It's a world where you can stumble upon a genetics experiment while waiting in line for a drink, or ask a physicist about gravitational waves while sitting by a fire pit. It's free, cozy and weird.
During public events at Pioneer Works, Levin has hosted live conversations with big thinkers including Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Sir Roger Penrose, David Byne and Brian Greene.
Greene is also a close scientific collaborator of Levin’s, and the two are working with Massimo Porrati and Dan Kabat to develop what she says is a “surprisingly cool” approach to studying extra dimensions.
Exploring extra dimensions and dark energy (in the dark)
The collaboration has been chasing a bold idea: that extra spatial dimensions—hidden, curled-up layers of space hypothesized in string theory and other approaches—might be more than mathematical curiosities. Extra dimensions might be there, around us.
Levin’s latest research suggests that some extra dimensions could trap energy—and, in doing so, explain the mysterious force known as dark energy.
“So I’m very interested in things like, can the extra dimensions trap energy, thereby being the source of dark energy? Are we measuring the energy of extra dimensions by measuring dark energy?”
For months, she’s been calculating obsessively, sometimes in the middle of the night, driven by the belief that the core idea has teeth. Progress is neither linear nor guaranteed, she says. “Most of our theories die on the page—we kill them ourselves.” But she’s excited about the theories that are battle-tested and holding strong.
Levin is reluctant to say too much before the team’s work is finalized and their paper published. She’s excited to see how it resonates in the physics community. Until then, she has more than enough creative work to keep her mind occupied. She and her Pioneer Works co-founders recently decided, for example, to build a domed rooftop observatory.
When Levin describes the creative collision of art and science that fuels her—about the calculations and the conversations, the late nights and live events—she chooses a word not often attributed to astrophysicists: “Magical.”
Colin Hunter is a science communicator, filmmaker, and contributor to FirstPrinciples. He previously led the communications teams at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo.
