Radiolab: "The Trouble with Everything"
Date: June 13, 2013
Hosts: Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich
Notable Guests: Jenny Hollowell, Brian Greene, Alan Lightman

Episode Overview

In "The Trouble with Everything," Radiolab delves into the cosmic and the personal, exploring the idea of whether it's possible to truly understand "everything." The episode is structured around two contrasting approaches: the narrative, emotional take provided by author Jenny Hollowell, and the scientific, theoretical perspective from physicist Brian Greene. The show probes foundational questions about the origins of the universe, the boundaries of human understanding, and the emotional ramifications of having — or losing — grand explanatory narratives.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. A Narrative of Everything: Jenny Hollowell's Story

• The episode opens with Radiolab hosts discussing the challenge of defining "everything," leading into Jenny Hollowell's short story, "A History of Everything, including you."
• Hollowell's reading rapidly telescopes from the beginning of time to the intimate details of a single relationship, blending cosmic creation with the emotional landscape of human life. (04:22–11:33)
  • Notable quote (Jenny Hollowell, reading):
    “We called it… Blinking. Above us shone a star that we called the sun. And we called the ground the Earth. So we named everything, including ourselves.” (around 05:40)
  • The story encompasses love, loss, routine, and mortality, suggesting that personal histories are as vast and complex as the universe itself.
• Behind the Writing:
  • Hollowell describes how the story poured out of her in a single day, an experience she admits is highly unusual for her (03:47).
  • She connects the impetus for the story to therapy and the frustration of tracing one’s origins to endlessly receding causes.
    Notable quote (Jenny Hollowell):
    “At some point, you're talking about some caveman's emotionally unavailable parents.” (12:30)
  • The loss of her religious faith and the struggle to create a narrative played a role:

    “I think that definitely is a part of, you know, the searching that I was going through at the time. Just that desire to grasp what might be the grand, you know, heart of it all.” (13:07)

  • Hollowell frames her story as an act of reconstructing a creation narrative after losing earlier certainties.

2. The Physicist's Quest: Brian Greene on Knowing Everything

• The second segment pivots to scientific inquiry with theoretical physicist Brian Greene (16:22).

• Greene explains the physicist's dream: to find a set of fundamental equations that can, in principle, explain everything about the universe.
  Notable quote (Brian Greene):
  “The hope and the goal is that the theories that we work out will apply everywhere and tell us about everything.” (17:03)

• The Multiverse Complication:

  • Robert Krulwich introduces an article by Alan Lightman questioning whether the idea of multiple universes undermines the whole project of “knowing everything” (18:46).
  • Greene explains that if multiple universes exist, each with different laws and properties, much that we thought was fundamental may simply be local to our universe:

    “When we study the equations... the other universes could have different features, different particle compositions, different masses of the particles, different forces.” (20:03)

  • Rather than a loss, Greene argues this is progress:
    “We’ve seen this before in the history of science.” (21:42)
    He cites Kepler’s shift from asking why the Earth is a certain distance from the Sun to understanding the general laws of gravity that organize all planetary orbits.

• Can We Ever Know Everything? Skeptics and Limits

  • Greene suggests new questions arise, such as, “What do all of these universes still have in common?” (24:02)
  • But he acknowledges observational limits:
    “We don't know very much observationally. Sure, we can't see them.” (24:42)
  • Greene holds a “deep faith” in coherence of reality, relying on mathematical logic, not dogma:

    “I do have a deep faith that the universe is coherent… The only tool that I know how to encapsulate that coherence are mathematical equations.” (30:08)

  • Krulwich pushes on the distinction between scientific logic and faith—a key philosophical tension.

3. Philosophical Challenge: Alan Lightman's Perspective

• Krulwich brings in Alan Lightman, whose article sparked the discussion (31:40).
  • Lightman is more epistemologically pessimistic:

    “We don’t even know whether the outer universes exist in the same space and time that we do… We will never be able to have any physical evidence of their existence. And that possibility is what I find disturbing.” (32:25)

  • He suggests:
    “We may have pushed the human mind as far as it can possibly go.” (33:12)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [03:12] Jad Abumrad (on choosing Hollowell’s story):

  “It got kind of ugly internally… But the one story that we all agreed on instantly and we never really looked back… was a story from Jenny Hollowell called A History of Everything, including you.”

• [13:32] Robert Krulwich (on personal narratives):

  “The logic of that is, having lost a given-to-you narrative of how things began, you were thinking, okay, so let me see if I can work my own narrative from the ground up.”

• [17:03] Brian Greene:

  “The hope and the goal is that the theories that we work out will apply everywhere and tell us about everything.”

• [21:36] Robert Krulwich (summarizing Greene’s view):

  “If you’re focused on one thing, you’re going to think that one thing is the key to everything. When your one turns to many, then you think, ah, well, the one thing really wasn’t so special. But the way Brian sees it, that is progress.”

• [32:25] Alan Lightman (skeptical about multiverses):

  “We don't even know whether the outer universes exist in the same space and time that we do… that possibility is what I find disturbing.”

• [33:12] Alan Lightman:

  “We may have pushed the human mind as far as it can possibly go.”

Timestamps for Important Segments

• Intro & setup: 01:16–02:34
• Jenny Hollowell's reading: 04:22–11:33
• Discussion with Hollowell: 11:39–14:44
• Brian Greene on knowing everything: 16:22–29:00
• Debate on logic, faith, and mathematical laws: 27:20–31:25
• Alan Lightman’s philosophical response: 31:40–33:36
• Conclusion: 33:41–34:09

Tone & Style Notes

• Warm, engaging, and occasionally self-deprecating, with friendly bickering between Krulwich and Greene.
• The episode’s mood shifts from narrative and introspective with Hollowell to cerebral and speculative with Greene and Lightman, but always foregrounds curiosity and wonder.

For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

"The Trouble with Everything" glides between the cosmic and the personal, asking whether the human search for "everything," in science or in story, always ends in mystery. The episode balances the comfort and necessity of narrative (Hollowell) with the restless ambition and limitations of scientific reasoning (Greene and Lightman). While science revises what "everything" means, personal histories and cosmology both evoke awe—and humility—before the unknown.

Want more?

• Read Jenny Hollowell’s story: Linked on radiolab.org
• Read Alan Lightman’s essay: Coming in his book "The Accidental Universe."