‘Learning about physics changed my life’: author Hernan Diaz on his new novel Ply

Introduction to Ply

0:00Hi, Benjamin here. Welcome to episode 16 of Nature Hits the Books. In this episode, we're heading back into the world of fiction, and I'm joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hernan Diaz, whose third novel, Ply, has just been published. A quick word of warning here, we will be talking about specific plot points. Now, Ply takes place in a future that's in the middle distance, but it's a world very different from our own. Central to the novel is a futuristic

0:34particle accelerator, which, although fantastical, has its roots in current physics. We talk about all this, as well as Hernan's journey, learning about subatomic particles, and what he picked up during a visit to CERN in today's podcast.

0:57Hernan Diaz, thank you so much for being on Nature Hits the Books. Benjamin, what a pleasure to be in conversation with you. Thank you.

World-Building in a Future New York

1:04So, Ply is your third novel, then, and it's a novel that's very much split in two, almost right down the middle, I think. Now, the first half, there's a lot of world-building going on. We're in a US city, maybe a couple of hundred years in the future. I mean, it's New York in all but name, which I know is where you live now. But for whatever reason, society as we know it has essentially collapsed and your characters are living in a bartering economy, almost. Tell me a little bit about this world. I think that the title, Ply, has many implications and connotations. One of them is that the book

1:41takes place at a moment of what I like to think of as a historical fold. So, modernity, wherever you want to pinpoint its starting point. For some, it could be the Renaissance. For others, it could be the Enlightenment. For others, it could be the Industrial Revolution or World War I. It depends on how you think about modernity, right? But however you think about it, in Ply, this period in history has come to an end, and something new is being born. As you said, this entails

2:13new forms of currencies, new forms of societal organization, new forms of community. So, we have lost a lot of things that are very painful to lose, mainly the state and all the legal scaffoldings that it ensured, right? But we've also lost things that were absolutely worth losing in this world. Everyday life has been liberated, and it's less alienating. Art is thriving. And it's all in all,

2:44a very free and egalitarian society. And this is why I don't think of Ply as a dystopian novel at all. I think it's the novel about a beginning. I think it's a novel about a new society in the throes of birthing itself, which is, again, perhaps a little bit painful. But also, I think the book is full of promise in that regard. My aunt lived in Manhattan in the very early 80s, and she used to tell me stories about what it was like then. And I definitely get a similar vibe that I think you're invoking here. There's

3:14this real punk aspect to it in many senses. I mean, literally, I suppose, right? There are a bunch of bands playing illegal shows all over the city, for example. I mean, you must have had some fun coming up with the band names, first and foremost. It was fun, but it's hard. Band names are difficult, man. But yes, you are absolutely correct. And I, for a moment, flirted with the idea of having this novel take place actually in the late 70s in New York City, right? But there are enough people around who were participants and

3:46protagonists of those scenes in New York and lower Manhattan during those years. And I was barely born and didn't live in New York. And they feel very territorial about it, as they should. It was a very important moment in history. And I could just see the legions of quibblers gathering to correct all the facts that I would have gotten wrong. But if I like that moment, it's because the whole punk ethos is very, very important in the novel. I think of it as a punk novel. And also, New York in the late

4:1770s, early 80s, resembled very much the New York that appears in my book. And that is a reminder of how unstable, fragile and brittle the structures that we take for granted are, right? It only takes really kind of five minutes for everything to fall apart and for nature to reclaim urban spaces. I have amassed a vast collection of photographs and videos from New York at the time. And you can see that you can see sort of the vegetation coming back. But the second aspect of the answer is that I ended up

4:50leaning toward a future setting because the novel is so concerned with technology, among other things. And it seems to me that in fiction, the future is the natural habitat for technology. So what I did was I took this very gritty punk New York scene from the late 70s and kind of recreated it freely in the future. Sure. And energy and energy poverty plays a big part throughout this book. And obviously, we can see echoes of that across the world today. I mean, that's an important part of this story for you, right?

5:24I think so. I think, again, since modernity, energy has been in one way or another, our main currency, right? So yes, I was very interested in having sort of a general market that had been completely stripped down to essentially almost nothing. And all that remains as centralized in corporations is energy and water, right? But again, this is not like a big brothery kind of thing. There is really no central focus in the corporations as such. It was just a way for me also to find a way of having some

6:00vestigial kind of zombie form of centralized institutional power in a world where there is none. But also, it's crucial to the conceit of the novel, right? At the heart of the book, and I'm sure we'll come to this, there is this outrageous machine. And I thought it would be fun sort of to put the difficulties of powering this machine, of feeding this machine with electricity at the very heart of the book, right? I thought that was a cool conceit.

6:30It seems that there's a pivot in the middle of the book where one of your characters, Acevedo, gives a speech about how this world that you describe came to be the way it is, the rise of the renaissance of modern technology, then the decline to the way it appears in the book. Now, science fiction is often a writer's take on the real world present, right? A reflection on the here and now. Is that the case of what you've been working on here with this book? Oh, by showing us certain ideas of the future, these books are revealing the desires and anxieties

7:00of the present. I don't know where you want to pinpoint the birth of science fiction. It could perhaps be with Margaret Cavendish in 1666 and her blazing world. It might be Frankenstein, that's my personal favorite, 1813, Mary Shelley. Or it could be, I don't know, Edgar Allan Poe and Mr. Valdemar maybe, I don't know, but it's definitely pre-20th century. And in all of these cases, again, these books are very much about the present time in which they were written.

7:33I have a confession to make, and I will lose here, you know, 98.5% of my potential readership. I'm not a big fan of science fiction. I love the ideas. I find them mesmerizing and completely captivating. There are very few books that I adore for their prose or their form. It's my experience, and it probably only speaks to my limitations as a reader. But that was a very good thing for me. I think I would have been quite paralyzed if that had been my world,

8:08the world of science fiction. Ply is not a book of science fiction. It's a book about science in fiction, but it's not a book of science fiction. I didn't have to kowtow or be reverent or genuflect to the guidelines of this paradigm or the main luminaries and the canon at all, because it's not my canon. Something very similar happened when I wrote my first published book, In the Distance, which takes place in the West, but it's not a Western. And again, I'm not particularly interested

8:38in the Western as a genre. And that was amazing for me, because it gave me enormous latitude and the freedom to be as irreverent as I wished. So are you saying there then that this trope of science fiction being books about the future, but really about the present, isn't the case for you then? Have you not got a message about the way the world is right now, do you think? I am not a messenger. No, I don't have a message. Okay. All right. Fair enough. Yeah. That was my punk answer, by the way.

Quantum Physics and the Wakefield Accelerator

9:05And your book really is divided exactly in two. There's literally a part one and a part two, a side A and a side B. And things in side B change drastically, I have to say. We move from this first person account of someone living in this world and making their way through this world into this third person account. And a new character comes in who's quite central to this aspect. And this is your scientist, Polar. And she talks about the collapse of nation states and scientific collaboration, the change in science that she experiences as part of her story, but also the

9:36development of this thing called a Wakefield accelerator, which is a very small particle accelerator. And her sort of mission or her goal, I'm not quite sure what it is, her drive maybe, is to get to the very smallest division of the subatomic world, essentially to rearrange reality. Now, I'm not going to ask you to give me the ins and outs of the Wakefield accelerator, but these are real things, right? They're currently in early development, but they do exist. And what made you think, do you know what, this would be a great fit for the book that I'm working

10:06on? Let me go back to Frankenstein. I knew that I wanted to write about a paradigm shifting kind of invention. It had to be enormous. And in Frankenstein, obviously, this is creating life out of dead tissue, right? Which completely alters our very definition of life itself. And the philosophical and material implications are endless. But the premise is very simple. I just put it to you in a handful of words, creating life out of dead tissue. So ambitiously, and I'm sure arrogantly,

10:38I was hoping to find something hopefully as impactful and as clean as a premise. It couldn't be convoluted, baroque, and long winded, as I tend to be, as listeners may have gathered by now. So I started reading a lot about particle physics, which was completely new to my math is really bad. So it was really uphill for me. And then at one point, I started thinking, well, could space time itself be quantized? Are there sort of granules of space time? So my premise became, if you have a

11:15machine that can access these quanta of space time, you could reorganize them and therefore reorganize space time. That's the whole premise, in a handful of words. So of course, the smallest possible unit that our physics allows us to consider now, for a number of very solid reasons, is the Planck unit, either in energy or space, length or mass or time. This is completely unaccessible with any kind of

11:46engineering or material conditions that we have right now. This is a total chimera. So I thought, I need a machine that can do this. So I thought, well, whatever, I'll make something outrageous up. I don't care. I was not happy with that, because I wanted for this to be viable within its impossibility. And then I learned about Wakefield accelerators. And I started reading up on them. And there are several, of course, around the world. But I was interested in the work of this physicist at CERN. Her name is Eda Geschwentner. So I emailed her and I

12:22said, hi, I'm an idiot. I'm writing a novel that's centered around quantum mechanics. I'm building this very ambitious machine on the page. And I tried to sort of impress her with my very, very basic knowledge. But I was basically showing her that I tried to do my homework. And we started corresponding and she invited me over. And I spent over a week there, 150 meters underground with Eda and her team and her Wakefield accelerator, which is rather large, but tiny compared to, say, the Large Hadron Collider.

12:57And she was immensely helpful in sort of building this machine again on the page. And that was an intellectual adventure that really changed my life, honestly.

Inside CERN and Scientific Collaboration

13:08Well, tell me about your experiences of CERN coming in. Obviously, you have your background as an academic, but very much in language and writing. What did you expect versus what you actually found? What I found when I got there is a city. It's a city of scientists, really. It has a little hotel, it has a bank. And just think that the Large Collider, it's the largest machine ever built by humans. And that in itself is profoundly humbling. And I had meetings back to back. In addition to touring

13:40the facilities, I had meetings with theoretical and experimental physicists all day long. What I found is that the division of intellectual labor is so radical and intense at a place like that, that there is a complete disconnect from, say, the person, just to give a random example, the sensors in the collider, a person I spoke with a lot, and sort of the head of the theoretical physics department, or someone who does lasers, and they don't even know about one another's existence. Because I would

14:14cross-reference them. And it was, oh, that's interesting. Who told you that? Well, so-and-so in such-and-such department. And they had no idea. Because, of course, the work is so rigorous and so specialized that it's very, very hard to have a full picture of what's going on. I was speaking with one of the physicists on the experimental side. And he said, at some point, something that I found really touching. He said that he had heard of a colleague who had told him that she wanted to

14:46write a book one day called Fuck the Universe, because she was so tired about the sort of writers who write books about physics for the general population, which, to be clear, are the books that I mostly read myself, because that's fully my level until I learned a little bit more. There is always this physicist's point that there is this kind of grandiosity sometimes, and this kind of pompous drive, you know, about we're going to elucidate the true nature of space

15:17and time and the origin of all matter, and the end of it all, you know, which are fascinating questions. I'm not at all dismissing them. But I think the point there was humility, and that the day-to-day work, again, is so minute, and the contributions are so tiny, and it advances so millimetrically, you know. This is, I think, the point that this person was trying to make.

15:48I mean, having been a scientist, you may have this grand view, but as you say there, a lot of people are working nine to five, essentially, to try and get a step closer to that. I mean, you may have spoken to disparate folk, but their aim ultimately is the same, right? To develop new knowledge and to answer these big questions, whether it's one step forward or a hundred steps forward, right? Yeah. And again, I want to be abundantly and emphatically clear here. I am not dismissing those questions. I love those questions. They make me tick. And I wrote the book

16:18because I love those questions, the big questions, right? But you asked me what I learned at CERN, and I think this is at the core of what I learned there, this very, very patient, repetitive, borderline anonymous, and highly collaborative work that takes place that leads us to those big questions that, again, emphatically, are fundamental, very human, and very valid. And what do you think they may have picked up from you? Because you're the complete opposite in that

16:48sense. You are one person working on a project, right? Do you think there was something that went the other way? Everyone was very giddy when I told them about the experiment. And I hope I'm not being presumptuous, but this was my perception. And maybe it's self-flattering in a ridiculous, narcissistic way. But what I saw was a sense of freedom and liberation, because here was this person, me, who was just using, in a very elementary way compared to, of course, the extremely high level at

17:20which they are working, was using their concepts, tools, and their world to imagine something very freely, you know. And they work under great, great constraints. Theoretical, material, economic, you name it. It's hard pressure and very precise. And I think they found my freedom with their world somewhat exhilarating. I like to believe so. And I think they welcomed my curiosity, because I was so blown away by just the facilities and the work itself. And I had so many questions.

17:53And having spent time with them and spoken to them about their work and what was and wasn't possible, even if you may have bent those rules a little bit for the sake of your narrative, I mean, actually writing the book itself, how did you find writing about really complex physics? Because breaking down stuff into a way that's understandable is something that we do on the podcast every week. How important was it to you, do you think, that your readers understood what the physicist in your book wanted to do? Because, I don't know, she gives quite a few lectures. And so I wondered if you'd kept the science compartmentalised to allow folk to say,

18:28all right, there's that bit. Let's get back to the kind of narrative. She doesn't give quite a few. She gives like two and a half. And they're not long. The longest one is 12 pages. And I think it's a fair demand of readers to have them read 12 pages of beautiful ideas, actually, that gives us such a sense of scale, you know, of who we are and how profoundly and bizarrely counterintuitive the behaviour of matter at that level is and how dissonant with our perception of the macro world it is. I think those ideas are vertiginous and exhilarating. And God,

19:07what a missed opportunity just to leave that out, you know. So, of course, I care immensely about the reader. And I hope they will follow those few moments. If they don't, that's okay, because there is a chance that we're dealing with a mad scientist. So if this all sounds like gibberish, that kind of works beautifully too, you know. And I think that how I did it, which was your question, I had a few tricks up my sleeve. The first one is, I am my reader. I come to this world from a place of profound

19:43endurance. So I know what it feels like not to be acquainted with a concept. So I'm thinking actually of my own experience. The second trick is that it's mostly seen through the eyes of the protagonist, who is this young kind of punkish woman who has no formal training at all. So everything is kind of filtered through her as well. So that's the second trick. If you have someone who is not thoroughly acquainted with this world, then chances are that the reader may relate more to their perception of it.

20:16And I think the third one, and last, is all of it is always anchored, and I took great care in doing this, in imagery. Most of these physics passages always are tethered or anchored in comparisons. You use the human hair. Certainly, that's one that stuck out to me. The human hair, an almond, Achilles and the tortoise, the sand in the hourglass. There are many. There are many such comparisons. And I always go back to very tactile, very visual things,

20:50or culturally very well-established things as the parable of Achilles, and so on and so forth. And I think, again, if you're a little bit curious, these are the things you can hold on to.

Challenging the Mad Scientist Trope

21:03One thing you said there, you mentioned the phrase mad scientist, which is an interesting one, because the reader doesn't know really if Polar is on the level, right? There's a variety of ways she might not be without giving too much away. But the mad scientist trope, I mean, I guess people are leaving it behind. But I guess it must be beguiling to have this kind of scatty, somewhat unbalanced individual. So it's a tricky one not to use, but yet it could be used pejoratively to describe scientists, many of whom you've met now, for example. Completely. I'm profoundly interested in the idea of mad scientists. Going back to my academic past,

21:38I used to teach a doctoral seminar on mad scientists. And I think my interest in this trope derives from the fact that it conjugates or it amalgamates two polar opposites. On the one hand, the absence of reason, which is how we irresponsibly tend to think of as madness. And on the other hand, the apex of reason, which is science. It's the ultimate manifestation of reason. So this dissonant cohabitation of these two terms is very, very, very interesting to me.

22:12And I think mad scientists always have to do a little bit with the transgression of some sort of law. It could be the laws of biology, or as in the case of Frankenstein, the laws of nature in general. It could also have to do with the transgression of criminal laws. How many mad scientists in popular culture are interested in sort of world domination and such? I mean, there are so, so many examples. You very kindly laid out there that this trope exists throughout history, and certainly literature as well. I mean, is it time to leave it behind, though? Because surely it doesn't shine with your

22:47experiences of working with researchers and what have you. Oh, completely. It is absolutely time to leave it behind for the very same reasons why it was born in the first place. First, I think we need to decriminalize the idea of madness and get rid of the stigmas attached to it. And on the other hand, I think it would be healthy for everyone, beginning with the scientific community, to take science off its pedestal, to stop thinking of science as a secular

23:17religion, to cease believing that it, science, will lead to some kind of essential, ultimate, stable, and unquestionable truth, to stop thinking in terms of unquestionable objectivity. I think all of these are very, very harmful notions. And I think actually the paradigm of quantum mechanics has single-handedly done more than any other, I would dare say, to precisely get rid of this idea of an

23:51unchallenged objectivity, because everything in quantum mechanics is relational. A story that I heard recently, Ernan, and I wondered if this chined with you, was about the Artemis 2 astronauts. And when they were flying around the moon this year, ahead of time, they said they spent a lot of time working with poets, in terms of working out ways to describe what they saw. Because potentially, like many scientists, they're quite analytical, and maybe didn't have the background in this kind of freer form of writing. And you've been on both sides of it now. You've worked with

24:22the scientists in CERN, and obviously, you've been writing your book. What do you think the kind of through line is between the two? What can one learn from the other, do you think? I actually didn't know that these astronauts had received sort of this tutorial in poetry. I think that's so lovely. It's really beautiful. I think there's a lot that artists can learn about science. I won't assign this to anyone else. I just speak about myself. I was appalled to see how poor my scientific schooling was. And I think, as I said a few questions ago, I think just learning

24:54about how counterintuitive the behavior of matter and forces at an elementary level is, really changes your outlook on reality itself, on the nature of your perception of it, and at the end of the day, of your own consciousness. I mean, if you're made of these particles that behave in this way, surely this must say something about your own constitution as a human subject, right? And how could this not impact your view of the world and your practice, your writing,

25:25your art? And I think what scientists could hopefully learn from artists is to embrace a sense of instability and opacity and welcome it and understand that reality, wherever that might end up being, is at heart ambiguous, right? And that we don't need necessarily to dispel this ambiguity when we're asking the big scientific questions. We probably want to dispel that ambiguity as we're

25:57performing brain surgery, right? Or building a bridge. But when we're thinking about our larger epistemological framework, I think that opacity, slight obscurity, even the noise, you know, that is part of our experience. And again, I'm doubling down, that ambiguity are extremely important. And I think that both art and science have the duty to recognize that truth might be, at the end of the day,

26:30unattainable. But that doesn't mean that we're giving up. We're not becoming nihilists or cynics, right? Just as we wouldn't want to become fundamentalists and say we have reached the ultimate truth. I think the correct standpoint is to acknowledge that our relation to truth is asymptotic, that all we can hope for is to get ever closer every single time and be completely ready to fail and to be debunked and move forward toward that axis of truth again and again and again. This

27:03is the history of human thought. This is the history of science. This is the history of art. If we bring it back to your book then, I mean, it coalesces in the second half around an event, and it's an event that kind of may or may not have happened. I went back and read it a few times, and I'm not entirely sure where I fall on it. But things do get strange, right? We have this move in the middle of the book from the first person to the third person. But at this point, when this event happens or doesn't, tenses then frequently get mixed up, switching between the first and third

27:36person. And I couldn't help but think of quantum entanglement here. Obviously, your book is about quantum physics, but also about that sense of self as well. And even the book's name, Ply, is things stuck together. And I couldn't help think of it like that. Now, I know you spent some time at a neuroscience research centre as well in sort of a previous life, I suppose. I wondered how that influenced your thoughts on the brain and the sense of self and how it all comes together in the ending.

Selfhood, Subjectivity, and Reality

28:04I spent a year and a half as the artist in residence at the Zuckerman Institute for Brain-Mind Behaviour at Columbia University, which is a very, very, very impressive place, and interacted with that community of scientists for a really long time. And it changed my mind, really. It rewired me in very important ways. What I thought initially was a book about technology, the future of the United States, science, science, and a punk scene, all of the things we've been discussing. I think if I had

28:36to pick now one kind of constellation of issues that I think the book ended up being about, it's a book profoundly about selfhood and what I means, and how this I may relate to you, and what is in between me and you? What is that space? And now that word space here should be pregnant with meaning after a conversation, right? It's not just empty space that I'm talking about. What is this space between

29:07you and me? And can we ever hope to reach out to each other and know each other? I think these are the questions that moved me in the end. And you're totally correct in saying that ply applies, sorry about the rhyme there, to the subjectivity of the characters. You mentioned entanglement. I give you back superposition, right? Before you interact with an elementary particle, these particles are in a sort of statistical haze. They are everywhere simultaneously, and they coexist in different possible states, right? And

29:43then they collapse into one of those states. And I thought of these characters superimposed or plied in this very way. And your book is out now, and people are picking it up, and I'm sure they'll be racing through it. What are you hoping that they get from it when they get to the end? Well, I'm a little reticent to sort of boil down a book into a couple of sentences. That would mean that the novel was really a wasteful kind of enterprise, wouldn't it? But I would hope that people would share my sense of

30:15awe for the nature of reality. I would also hope that they would see a glimmer of light, you know, at the end of the painful political historical process that we're entering now. We can see it globally, right? But I'm an optimist. I think that we can and will do better. And I think that is in the book as well. I'm getting the sense here that you're really into physics now. And I don't know if this is what you thought you might be when you started writing this however many years ago. Will you be

30:48sad to leave it behind? Or is this something now that you're going to keep an eye on and maybe will make an appearance in a future work? I don't know. We live in an era of semantic inflation. So it's hard to say things and have them mean what they mean. So I mean it when I say learning about physics changed my life. You know, I have a pretty deep background in philosophy and theory, and I have a PhD in comparative literature. And it has made me revise decades worth of reading and what it means to be a human,

31:20how we can hope to interact with our surroundings, what our senses are, and at the end of the day, what our very idea of self is. So yeah, I really do think that physics is here to stay for me, really. Well, that seems like a fine place to leave it. Hernan Diaz, thank you so much for being on Nature Hits the Books. Thank you, Ben. This has been such a pleasure. Can we do it again?

31:47Hernan Diaz there. His book Ply is out now. And that's it for episode 16 of Nature Hits the Books. If you have any feedback on the show, why not ping us an email to podcast.nature.com with the subject Nature Hits the Books. Otherwise, look out for the next episode soon. The music used in this episode was called Cloud Jumping by SPD, via Getty Images and Triple Scoop Music. I'm Benjamin Thompson. Thanks for listening.