Jonas Enander is an astrophysicist whose book is entitled Facing Infinity: Black Holes and Our Place on Earth.
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Jonas Enander is an astrophysicist whose book is entitled Facing Infinity: Black Holes and Our Place on Earth.
Jonas Enander studied astronomy at university, “and very quickly I became passionate about it and also about mathematics. So I switched to theoretical physics. My training is in physics, but I always lean towards the astronomy and the cosmology side of it.”
I asked Jonas what an astrophysicist does. He explained that, “an astronomer is someone who looks at the skies, who knows all the techniques of how to use telescopes, how to observe very deep into space. An astrophysicist, on the other hand, also does physical modeling [of] all the phenomena that we see in space, how the stars work, how the galaxies rotate, all that stuff.”
The book Facing Infinity starts with a slightly scary description of what it would be like to be sucked into a black hole. “Like I write in the book, no author really wants to kill the reader on the first few pages. But black holes, we often think of them as very mysterious. So the sensible thing to do, to understand them, is to put a human next to them. What would they do with a human? What would they do with our bodies? It feels like a very natural way to start a book.”
If we’re familiar with black holes, it’s from science fiction novels or movies. I asked if the depiction of the black hole in the film Interstellar is realistic. Jonas said that the film “is based on the scientific theories of black holes. And then, of course, they added Hollywood speculations and, let’s say, Hollywood makeup to the black holes to make them look even more interesting. I think Interstellar does a very good job at displaying what a black hole would be like. But then when they go into it, you have a lot more speculation going on.”
Science fiction also suggests that black holes lead to wormholes and to a multiverse. I asked Jonas what he thinks about that. “I’m agnostic if wormholes could exist or not. I don’t know; potentially. Do we have multiverses? I don’t know; potentially. I used to be a researcher in general relativity and physics, but now I do full-time science writing. I treat it a bit more sociologically. These are the ideas that we as humans here on this little planet Earth have come up with, looking out into the cosmos, and scientists seriously entertain them. So for me, it’s more like seeing the scientists believing that these ideas could be true. That’s how I treat it.”
This is a way of looking at the scientists ethnographically and seeing what their belief systems are. “Science is a human endeavor. You see all the emotions, all the prestige fighting. I mean, who doesn’t want to win a Nobel Prize? That’s also something that informs a lot of scientific work, this kind of prestige. But it’s important to emphasize that even though all this human side to science is going on in the background, we still manage to produce objective knowledge about the universe.”
This is Jonas’s first book, and he said that, “I started writing a bit in Word in the beginning, but I felt like there’s so much text, there’s so [many] sources I’m using, this becomes a horrible mess. I needed something more structured, and I found Scrivener and started using it. What I primarily use it for is the Binder, where you can see all the different texts that you’re working with, and you can have subsections and folders. When you work with an entire book, 300 to 400 pages, and all the notes and everything, it becomes a lot of material. You need to have a structure. Very often, you write something and then you’re like, ‘Oh, but this should actually go in that chapter,’ or ‘I should change the order,’ or ‘The flow of the text isn’t quite working.’ It’s great in Scrivener that you can restructure your text so easily.”
Jonas often switched between Scrivener on his Mac and on his iPad. “I also have Scrivener on my iPad. When I’m at the final stage of a chapter, I sync it with my iPad. So when I’m sitting on the bus, I can fire up my iPad and the Scrivener document. I get the entire text, but without all the cluttering that you have when you’re working on a laptop. It’s very focused, and I can sit and read the document, and I can do more stylistic changes. And then it syncs back to my laptop, and I can do the final exporting and so on later.”
And he used Composition Mode a lot, where Scrivener just displays text on a background without the rest of the interface. “There’s a lot of discussion today about your attention and focus being the most valuable commodity that you have as a worker. So I use that a lot. You also have different ways of writing at different stages in your process. When you write at the beginning stages, you just need to dump everything that’s in your brain. It can be as badly written as you like. You need to turn off that internal critic and just get everything out there. I find Composition Mode very good for just writing, writing, writing.”
A science like astrophysics is a long game, and I asked Jonas how it feels to be researching something where you know that in your lifetime, you will not find the answer. He said, “It feels great. We live in the golden age of black hole astronomy. There’s so much new material, observations, and theoretical ideas coming out right now. There are so many people working on this. And we are learning a lot about black holes right now. So I’m feeling very lucky to be able to be a part of this and write about it and tell other people about it.”
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener. He also offers one-to-one Scrivener coaching.